Smallholders, Settlements, and the Reimagined State: How New Grammars of Modernity Impacted Land and Labor in the Late Ottoman Empire

Summary

Archaeological studies of the modern world often focus on the effects of the “global” on the “local.” Understanding smallholder experiences in the modern period requires us to examine – to varying degrees – the economic and social consequences that global capitalism, colonialism and nationalism had on people at the local level, as well as how the construction of new grammars of modernity affected daily lived experiences. In this paper, I focus on the impacts of these new grammars on smallholders in the modern Middle East who lived under the Ottoman Empire. In the late 19th century, many smallholders living in the shadow of the Ottoman state found themselves impacted by shifting land tenure policies that affected their access to land, and new definitions of civil society and individual rights. While some became laborers for privately held large farms, others faced dispossession as a result of large-scale population movements of the late 19th and early 20th centuries (both voluntary and involuntary). In this paper, I will compare variations in settlement patterns in Anatolia and Transjordan as a way to examine how these new grammars and realities affected different types of smallholders.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 81st Annual Meeting, Orlando, FL (2016)   •
• Big Roles for Smallholders in Complex Societies

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