ABSTRACT

Much of the population of the Ottoman Arab lands lived in the countryside, and Chapter 8 attempts to uncover the realities of rural life. Land tenure and village administration are fairly easy to reconstruct from taxation registers, which reveal that the free-hold peasant farm was the basic unit of the rural economy. Going beyond statistics and institutions to peasant life is far more difficult, yet a few eccentric narrative sources provide a glimpse of rural–urban rivalry and even antagonism during the seventeenth century, a period of massive peasant migration to the cities. Bedouin, Turcoman, and Kurdish tribes inhabited the rural hinterlands of the Arab provinces. In the late seventeenth century, major tribal migrations occurred in southern Syria, western Iraq, and the Arabian peninsula, leading up to the Wahhabi/Saudi eruption at the end of the eighteenth century.