Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-tf8b9 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-23T20:55:53.111Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Informal rural credit markets and interlinked transactions in the district of late Ottoman Haifa, 1890–1915

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 March 2014

Stefania Ecchia
Stefania Ecchia*
Affiliation:
Università di Salerno
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

By examining the acts of the Public Notary of Haifa (1890–1915), this article shows that it was the traditional informal market of credit, run by local notables, which financially supported the development of the small-landholding-based agricultural sector of the Haifa district in late Ottoman Palestine. In seeking to ascertain what led to the success of the informal rural credit market as compared with the formal credit market, the article finds that the local notables, who acted as financial intermediaries for small landholders, enjoyed an information advantage over the banks stemming from the establishment of interlinked credit market transactions connected to the stipulation of bay' wafā, salam and muzara‘ah contracts. In a context of land privatisation and growing commercialisation of agriculture, these contracts became the instruments used by notables to invest in peasants' landholdings and to manage a sales network for agricultural products on a local and international scale, hence representing an efficient financial institution to support the ‘agricultural export-led growth’ of late Ottoman Palestine.

Keywords

Ottoman Palestineinformal rural credit marketOttoman agricultural sector

JEL classification

Q15: Land Ownership and Tenure • Land Reform • Land Use • Irrigation • Agriculture and Environment N2: Financial Markets and Institutions Q14: Agricultural Finance G2: Financial Institutions and Services N20: General, International, or Comparative
Type
Articles
Information
Financial History Review , Volume 21 , Issue 1 , April 2014 , pp. 5 - 24
Copyright
Copyright © European Association for Banking and Financial History e.V. 2014 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Primary sources

Israel State Archives, Public Notary of Haifa, registries:

1890–1891/1306–1307, 7565-2456/33.1

1895–1896/1311-1307, 7565-2456/33.1

1896–1898/1312–1314, 7565-2456/33.1

1904–1906/1320–1322, 7566-2456/33.1

1906–1908/1322–1324, 7566-2456, 33.1

1908–1910/1324–1326, 7567-2457/33.1

1910/1326, 7567-2457/33.1

1910–1911/1326–1327, 7567-2457/33.1

1911–1912/1327–1328, 7568-2457/33.1

1912–1913/1328–1329, 7568-245/33.1

1913–1914/1329–1330, 7568-2457/33.1

1914–1915/1330–1331, 7569-2458/33.1

References

Aytekin, A. E. (2008). Cultivators, creditors and the state: rural indebtedness in the nineteenth century Ottoman Empire. Journal of Peasant Studies, 35, pp. 292–313.Google Scholar
Aytekin, A. E. (2009). Agrarian relations, property and law: an analysis of the Land Code of 1858 in the Ottoman Empire. Middle Eastern Studies, 6, pp. 935–51.Google Scholar
Blaisdell, D. C. (1966). European Financial Control in the Ottoman Empire. New York: AMS Press.Google Scholar
Çizakça, M. (2008). Evolution of domestic borrowing in the Ottoman Empire. In Cottrell, P. L. (ed.), East Meets West: Banking, Commerce and Investment in the Ottoman Empire. Aldershot: Ashgate.Google Scholar
Clay, C. (1994). The origin of modern banking in the Levant: the branch network of the Imperial Ottoman Bank, 1890–1914. International Journal of Middle East Studies, 26, pp. 589–614.Google Scholar
Clay, C. (2000). Gold for the Sultan: Western Bankers and Ottoman Finance, 1856–1881: A Contribution to Ottoman and to International Financial History. London and New York: I. B. Tauris.Google Scholar
Clay, C. (2008). State borrowing and the Imperial Ottoman Bank in the bankruptcy era (1863–1877). In Cottrell, P. L. (ed.), East Meets West: Banking, Commerce and Investment in the Ottoman Empire. Aldershot: Ashgate.Google Scholar
Coşgel, M. and Miceli, T. (2005). Risk, transaction costs and government finance: the distribution of tax revenue in the Ottoman Empire, Journal of Economic History, 65, pp. 806–21.Google Scholar
Cuno, K. M. (1980). The origins of private ownership of land in Egypt: a reappraisal. International Journal of Middle East Studies, 12, pp. 245–75.Google Scholar
Doumani, B. (1995). Rediscovering Palestine: Merchants and Peasants in Jabal Nablus, 1700–1900. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Ecchia, S. (2008). Sviluppo economico e innovazioni istituzionali nel distretto di Haifa sul finire dell'Impero Ottomano, 1890–1915. Naples: Edizioni Scientifiche Italiane.Google Scholar
Eldem, E. (1999). The (Imperial) Ottoman Bank, Istanbul. Financial History Review, 6, pp. 85–95.Google Scholar
Eldem, E. (2005). Ottoman financial integration with Europe: foreign loans, the Ottoman Bank and the Ottoman public debt. European Review, 13, pp. 431–45.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Firestone, Y. (1975). Crop-sharing economics in mandatory Palestine. Middle Eastern Studies, 11 (part I) pp. 3–23 and (part II) pp. 175–94.Google Scholar
Gerber, H. (1985). Ottoman Rule in Jerusalem, 1890–1914. Berlin: Klaus Schwarz Verlag.Google Scholar
Gilbar, G. (1986). The growing economic involvement of Palestine with the West, 1865–1914. In Kushner, D. (ed.), Palestine in the Late Ottoman Period. Jerusalem: Yad Yzhak Ben-Zvi.Google Scholar
Greenwald, B. and Stiglitz, J. E. (1986). Externalities in economies with imperfect information and incomplete markets, Quarterly Journal of Economics, 101, pp. 229–64.Google Scholar
Hoff, K., Braverman, A. and Stiglitz, J. E. (1993). The Economics of Rural Organization. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Issawi, C. (1988). The Fertile Crescent, 1800–1914: A Documentary Economic History. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Kark, R. and Gerber, H. (1984). Land registry maps in Palestine during the Ottoman period. Cartographic Journal, 21, pp. 30–2.Google Scholar
Karpat, K. H. (1968). Land regime, social structure and modernization in the Ottoman Empire. In Polk, R. W. and Chambers, R. L. (eds.), Beginnings of Modernization in the Middle East. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Kuran, T. (2005). The logic of financial westernization in the Middle East. Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, 56, pp. 593–615.Google Scholar
Kuran, T. (2011). The Long Divergence. Princeton: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
McCloskey, D. (1976). English open fields as behaviour towards risk. Research in Economic History, 1, pp. 124–70.Google Scholar
Nadan, A. (2005). The competitive advantage of moneylenders over banks in rural Palestine. Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, 48, pp. 1–39.Google Scholar
Ongley, F. (1892). The Ottoman Land Code. London: Clowes.Google Scholar
Pamuk, Ş. (1987). The Ottoman Empire and the European Capitalism, 1820–1913: Trade, Investment and Production. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Pamuk, Ş. (2006). Estimating economic growth in the Middle East since 1820. Journal of Economic History, 3, pp. 809–28.Google Scholar
Pamuk, Ş. (2008). Agriculture and economic development in Turkey, 1870–2000. In Lains, P. and Pinilla, V. (eds.), Agriculture and Economic Development in Europe since 1870. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Pamuk, Ş. (2010). Economic growth and institutional change in Turkey before 1980. In Çetin, T. and Yilmaz, F. (eds.), Understanding the Process of Economic Change in Turkey. Hauppauge, NY: Nova Science Publishers.Google Scholar
Quataert, D. (1975). Dilemma of development: the Agricultural Bank and agricultural reform in Ottoman Turkey, 1888–1908. International Journal of Middle East Studies, 6, pp. 210–27.Google Scholar
Quataert, D. (1994). The age of reforms. In İnalcık, H. and Quataert, D. (eds.), An Economic and Social History of the Ottoman Empire. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Ray, D. (1998). Development Economics. Princeton: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Rogan, E. (1992). Moneylending and capital flows from Nablus, Damascus and Jerusalem to the Qada' of al-Salt in the last decades of the Ottoman rule. In Philipp, T. (ed.), The Syrian Land in the 18th and 19th Century. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag.Google Scholar
Santillana, D. (1938). Istituzioni di Diritto musulmano, vol. II. Rome: Istituto per l'Oriente.Google Scholar
Schilcher, L. (1991). The grain economy of late Ottoman Syria and the issue of large-scale commercialization. In Keyder, Ç. and Tabak, F. (eds.), Landholding and Commercial Agriculture in the Middle East. Albany: State University of New York Press.Google Scholar
Schölch, A. (1982). European penetration and economic development of Palestine, 1856–1882. In Owen, R. (ed.), Studies in the Economic and Social History of Palestine in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries. Oxford: Macmillan.Google Scholar
Schölch, A. (1993). Palestine in Transformation, 1856–1882: Studies in Social, Economic, and Political Development. Washington, DC: Institute for Palestine Studies.Google Scholar
Shaw, S. J. (1975). The nineteenth-century Ottoman tax reforms and revenue system. International Journal of Middle East Studies, 6, pp. 421–59.Google Scholar
Yazbak, M. (1998). Haifa in the Late Ottoman Period 1864–1914. Leiden: Brill.Google Scholar