DOI
10.35552/0247.38.12.2294
Abstract
The cultivation, manufacture, and trade of cotton formed an economic environment incubating the expansion of the influence of a class of local leaders, where the political overlapped with the agricultural, commercial, and industrial, in a social development that formed an intertwined middle. Objective: This research aims to explain the nature of this interaction between the prosperity of cotton cultivation and the rise in the power of local leadership under flexible Ottoman authority, as the local economy and its openness at the regional and global levels played a decisive role in this interaction, which created a space for the political economy in the eighteenth century. Methodology: In its clarification of this political economic overlap, the research harmonizes the historical analysis approach with the historical descriptive approach. Results and Conclusions: helped achieve the hypothesis of the Golden Age in Palestine, as a result of the effective management of the cotton monopoly in the Galilee, for a period of seventy years, in the face of the penetration of French merchants, with the competitive, local and regional cotton production in Nablus Mountain. As a result, this led to strengthening the role of traditional families; but it also contributed to the emergence of marginalized families such as Al-Jayousi family in the Bani Saab area of Shaarawiyah, and organized local forces such as the merchant class. Recommendations: This research remains open to further scrutiny, especially in the records of the Sharia Court, to reveal the details of the influence of cotton cultivation and its extensive activities throughout two continuous centuries of the Ottoman history of Palestine, especially about the success of Zahir al-Umar (1775 AD) in caring for the farmers, and his ability to balance the French ambitions of trade with the Galilee cotton and the internal Ottoman entitlements.
Recommended Citation
Jaradat, Mohammad S.
(2024)
"The Political Economy of Cotton in Palestine in the Eighteenth Century,"
An-Najah University Journal for Research - B (Humanities): Vol. 38:
Iss.
12, Article 3.
DOI: 10.35552/0247.38.12.2294
Available at:
https://digitalcommons.aaru.edu.jo/anujr_b/vol38/iss12/3