Late Ottoman Palestinians: Social and Cultural Dynamics in an Eastern Mediterranean Society during the Age of Empire, 1880-1920

Project Information

LOOP

Grant agreement ID: 101044105

DOI

10.3030/101044105

EC signature date 13 June 2022

Start date 1 September 2022

End date 31 August 2027

Funded under

• European Research Council (ERC)

Total cost

€ 1 996 496,00

EU contribution

€ 1 996 496,00

Coordinated by

RUHR-UNIVERSITAET BOCHUM
Germany

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - LOOP (Late Ottoman Palestinians: Social and Cultural Dynamics in an Eastern Mediterranean Society during the Age of Empire, 1880-1920)

Reporting period: 2022-09-01 to 2025-02-28

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

In the Eastern Mediterranean, the four decades between 1880 and 1920 were a time of imperialism, globalisation and Ottoman state building, but also of profound social differentiation, fuelled by an unprecedented degree of human mobility and migration. Therefore, in this period we find the roots of many social formations that have remained relevant until the present. My focus is on the individual and collective practices for coping with various challenges and on census-taking as a social process. It will open up new perspectives on social and cultural dynamics in late Ottoman Palestine, in a historical context defined by European imperialism, Ottoman state building and globalisation. The main research question is: which social strategies did late Ottoman Palestinians employ, across ethnic, religious and class divides, to confront challenges on the individual and collective levels? These include fostering social advancement of one’s household or coping with economic stress. My hypothesis is that an accumulation of individual actions led to the constant emergence and re-emergence of social formations. Using the census process and its data I will establish yardsticks that will make it possible to compare social practices across the region and beyond, and thus contribute to ongoing efforts to write a global social and cultural history and it will develop a theoretical framework and methodological standards that will be useful for similar research projects. Specifically, the project aims to set new standards for how to realise the vision of an HGIS for the entire Ottoman Empire. Enabling comparison with other sources it may also offer intriguing new perspectives for the study of colonialism, notably under the British Mandate.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

The two major achievements in the first two years in LOOP were (1) to develop our methodological toolkit for the analysis of specific social formations and strategies based on Ottoman population registers and (2) to build capacities in the field of Digital Humanities. In this way, we have developed the ability to process and visualize data regarding demographic and social-historical developments on a scale that is unprecedented for Ottoman Palestine and unusual for Eastern Mediterranean and Middle Eastern societies.

A second major innovation is our methodological “loop”. This approach enables us to analyze our data in two ways: quantitatively (e.g. life expectancy, death ages, death reasons) and qualitatively (e.g. reasoning on individual household constellations). Both paths inspire each other in this loop. Abstractions and agglomerations made in the analysis can be traced back to their data basis at any time.

On the IT side of the project, we have dealt mainly with data extraction and curation, dataset construction and data analysis. We also started to make use of geographic information systems (GIS) applications and created bespoke tools for historical analysis in the field of historical GIS and geospatial humanities.

For data extraction and analysis, we have developed our own expertise and capacity to build a customized data infrastructure for the project, including:
• Unified standards for data-entry in a multi-linguistic context (Arabic and Ottoman Turkish transcribed in Latin script, accompanied by transcription in Arabic script for select categories, common place names in English).
• Procurement and secure storage of high-definition scans of the Ottoman population records.
• Training of student assistants in data entry, including bespoke online classes in Ottoman Turkish grammar and paleography.
• Developing a pipeline for Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) to enable partially automated data entry.

The methodological approach of combining qualitative and quantitative analyses, places special demands on the database design. Details and nuances must be retained in the data collection and at the same time be statistically aggregated. In addition, the historical sources always harbor unforeseen demands on the database design, which must be dynamically adapted to these new requirements that arise during the recording process.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

(1) Demography, life cycles and the reach of the state

In a first work package, we examined the census data for 16 rural communities with a total of c. 10.000 individuals. The results enable new insights into, among other things:
• The effects of wars and epidemics.
• Age-heaping patterns, allowing hypotheses regarding levels of numeracy and general education.
• Life expectancy and life cycles of the male and female population.
• Migration.
• Marriage and divorce, including spousal age gaps and mahr (dower) payments.
• Military recruitment.

(2) Reconstructing the social and cultural dynamics of an under-researched location

Certain features of the census records enable us to reconstruct key data from individual biographies, which can be contextualized and supplemented with additional sources. We have used this approach to write the first academic account of the history of late Ottoman Jericho. Major insights include:
• The Bedouin background of a large part of Jericho’s population and closure of society towards Bedouin in-migration.
• Ottoman state investments, market forces, nomad sedentarization, pilgrimage, tourism and migration as interlocking factors that explain Jericho's rise to a regional hub.
• The origins of Jericho’s African (zenci) community.

(3) Historicizing the Ottoman census and its categories

We apply conceptual history and discourse analysis approaches to the Ottoman population registers and related sources. For example, we traced a shift in the Ottoman state’s censuses by focusing on how at the end of the 19th century families became the object of the state’s interest and how this was linked to a wider trans-imperial bio-political discourse about the family as a site of the reproduction of the population and the preservation of religious identity.

(4) A digital corpus of late Ottoman census registers

We have published an overview of the available Ottoman population registers from late Ottoman Palestine. In addition, we have laid the groundwork for analysis and publication of the data by:
• Building controlled vocabularies for person and locations names, etc.
• Compiling a gazetteer of locations.
• Matching occupations to the PST classification.

(5) Knowledge transfer
Key findings of the project have been made accessible through our project blog (https://ercloop.hypotheses.org).

Sample page from an Ottoman Basic Census Book (esas defteri)