| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.4

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Middle East and Northern Africa

Amos Nadan. The Palestinian Peasant Economy under the Mandate: A Story of Colonial Bungling. (Harvard Middle Eastern Monographs, number 32.) Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. 2006. Pp. xi, 370. $19.95. Assaf Likhovski. Law and Identity in Mandate Palestine. (Studies in Legal History.) Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 2006. Pp. xi, 312. $49.95.
For years, historians writing about the mandate period in the Middle East concentrated on diplomatic and political issues, particularly the division of the former Asiatic provinces of the Ottoman Empire into proto-states and the emergence of anticolonial and nationalist movements dominated by political elites. In the 1990s, historians began to shift their focus to the social and cultural effects of mandatory control. Over the past decade and a half, historians have produced a number of studies on issues as varied as the introduction of the welfare-oriented state into the region, the manner by which French and British policies fostered sectarianism and social stratification, the role played by new legal systems and urban reconstruction in reconstituting public and private domains, and the widening of the civic order to include feminist, labor, and Islamist movements. The two books under review fit comfortably into recent trends.	1
Amos Nadan's book is by far the better of the two under review and, indeed, makes a substantial contribution to our understanding of both economic and social life in rural Palestine during the mandate period. Nadan makes three arguments in his book. First, he disputes the widely held notion that the Palestinian peasant economy expanded during the 1930s. Unlike many earlier historians of rural Palestine, Nadan is a trained historical economist. By culling and carefully analyzing every source he can get his hands on—from oral histories to documents held in British and Israeli archives and in collections at Oxford University and Barclay's Bank—he has produced a radically revisionist account of a rural economy that contracted during the first two decades of the mandate.	2
Nadan's second argument concerns the problematic foundation for British policy in rural Palestine. According to Nadan, the intercommunal disturbances in 1929 served as a wake-up call for the British, who hit on the idea that alleviating rural poverty would calm their unruly mandate. The British premised their efforts, however, on two faulty assumptions. First, they believed that peasant irrationality rendered the indigenous inhabitants of rural Palestine incapable of making proper market-oriented decisions. Second, the British applied what Nadan unfortunately calls "Marxist"-style assumptions about development. Like latter-day modernization theorists, the British believed that all that was needed to lift the peasantry out of poverty was the elimination of "traditional" structures that inhibited development—exploitative credit mechanisms, communal ownership of land—and their replacement by more rational structures. The British thus introduced schemes to accelerate land registration, restructure and rationalize credit mechanisms, and modernize agricultural infrastructure. With the exception of tax relief, British policies misfired. The rural economy of Palestine continued to decline until the 1940s, a period Palestinians still call "the prosperity." According to Nadan, this reversal had nothing to do with the efficacy of British programs; instead, it came about as a result of British military deployments to Palestine that began during the 1936–1939 Great Revolt and continued through World War II. The deployments expanded the market for locally produced goods and expanded job opportunities for urban migrants (and, it might be added, created inflationary pressures that diminished peasant debt).	. . .

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