ABSTRACT
This chapter examines British perceptions of nomadism on the eve of the Mandate. Drawing on British official literature, it seeks to show how British ethnographic discourse on the Bedouin of Palestine was woven into the imperial visions of the immediate postwar reality. A major theme of this chapter is the nexus of knowledge and power reshaping British visions on nomadism, and how these visions were constituted within the broader matrix of its colonial narratives on nationhood and statehood in postwar Palestine. The chapter draws on the burgeoning ethnographic literature of country handbooks that flourished in the early decades of the twentieth century. Sponsored by the British Naval Intelligence Division, this literature sheds critical light on British official discourse on the Bedouin in a period of mounting Arab nationalism. It shows how the presumed interracial divisions among native Arab population were vested in Britain’s attempts to come to terms with the embryonic Arab movement in Palestine, how it was employed by colonial officials to explain the ‘limits’ of Arab nationalism, as opposed to Jewish nationalism and, ultimately, how it guided the mandatory division of Palestine along newly demarcated racial boundaries.
