ABSTRACT
Laws, maps and surveys are the ideological and ostensibly non-violent tools of imperial ascendancy in Palestine through land control. Land developments in Palestine can be traced through court cases, ordinances, regulations and other pronouncements emanating from the Mandate government and excavated from the colonial archive. This chapter suggests that the Mandatory came to Palestine with sticky fingers, and that the native system of landholding and agriculture became endangered by the mere fact of British occupation. The landscape is delineated according to British interpretation and understanding of it. Edney goes as far as saying that it is the British elite cultural perception of native space which is turned into any given map, and that an imagined empirical space is projected and transposed onto the real, the actual one, the native’s.
