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FARID Al-SALIM, Palestine and the Decline of the Ottoman Empire: Modernization and the Path to Palestinian Statehood. (London; New York: I.B. Taurus, 2015). Pp.320. £62.00 cloth.
Farid al-Salim's first monograph is an impressive survey of the social and economic history of the qada', or district, of Tulkarm during the late Ottoman period. A case study of the overarching patterns of change during reform and centralization, it is a contribution to a rapidly growing body of new research on the late Ottoman period and also an important part of the literature on Palestinian social and economic history. The book's unique approach, empirical basis, and broad range of primary sources make for an original and persuasive contribution to scholarship covering a range of issues dealing with Palestine's modern history and the decline of the Ottoman Empire.
With a revisionist approach toward late Ottoman historiography, the book ambitiously challenges a number of orthodoxies, arguing among other things that the Tanzimat reforms (1839-1876) were largely successful in their aims. Al-Salim addresses the various imperial interactions between local people, their economy and society, and high policy in order to add a missing element of Palestine's modern history-its provincial history. At its heart, an economic and social history of the region, this book examines not only how the state's attempts to reform law, land, finance, education, health, agriculture and trade during Tanzimat affected Palestinian society, but also how the practical implementation of reform shaped high policy through feedback. To show the practical results of transformation during reform, this story examines the daily lives of people, their communications, means, and political lives, and unlike a typical state-centric narrative, it meanders between the village, district, province, and high policy. It is focused mainly on how high policy varyingly failed and succeeded in its aims at local levels, and how it responded to developments at those levels. In al-Salim's words, "This book further suggests that a trajectory-specific approach can provide new prospects for understanding the modern history of the Middle East in general and Palestine in particular, especially from a...