The Ottoman Empire: Transjordan's Absentee Landlord

     The Ottoman Empire's first involvement in Transjordan began in 1516, but it was not until the 19th century that this region - theoretically part of the Ottoman Empire - came under administrative control of the government in Turkey. The Ottomans made several attempts at controlling the region, and Transjordan was taxed when possible, but the Tanzimat Reforms of the mid-19th century marked the first real political incursion into Transjordanian territory. Before this period, and even during it, the independent nature of the Bedouins tribes in Transjordan made centralized government control very difficult.
     In the first half of the 19th century, the Ottoman Empire began to expend more energy on controlling the region of Transjordan. Due to the loss of former Ottoman territories in the Balkans, and because of the importance of the Haj (pilgrimage to Mecca) and a desire for strategic expansion into Arabia, Ottoman Turkey built up a stronger government and infrastructure in Transjordan. In the 1840s, Transjordan was split into administrative districts, with a representative of the Ottomans in charge of each district. The archaeological site and modern town of Tell Hesban fell into the Balqa' district, which came under the control of an Ottoman administrator in 1867, twenty years after administrators first came to Transjordan.
     This push to put Transjordan under the administration of the Ottoman central government came during the period of the Tanzimat Reforms (1838-1876). Reforms undertaken during the Tanzimat Reformation included a new military conscript system, a standardized system of taxation, newadministrative representatives (as mentioned earlier), and the introduction of a secular school system. These reforms were a "response to the slow decline of the empire, (Castillo)" a decline which ended with the defeat of the Ottoman Empire in World War I (1918) and the British Mandate Period in Transjordan (1922-1946).

                                            Social Order

     The Ottoman Empire's social order has been characterized as "Adaptable authoritarianism based on religious legitimacy. (Castillo)" That is, an
empire with a central government and a single, authoritarian head of the government, but which could adapt its policies to the diverse peoples under its rule. The central government was seen as legitimate ruler of all of its diverse subject peoples due to its association with Islam and its religio-political state system. Ottoman expansion was justified by a religious mandate from Islamic religious elites. The Ottomans considered themselves "Muhammad's Deputy," and used their association with Islam to legitimize their imperial projects.

                                        Ottoman Hesban

     Little permanent development went on the acropolis at Tell Hesban. It seems that in the early Ottoman Period the tribes of the Hesban region were predominantly semi-nomadic or nomadic, and when they did live in the Hesban area, they probably camped in tents or lived in caves. During the 16th and 17th centuries, Hesban was taxed as a farm, though this farming was probably done by "seminomads living in tents" (Russell, 30). In the 19th century, much of the property surrounding Hesban was bought from the Adwan and Ajarmeh tribes by a Palestinian cultivator named Nabulsi. Nabulsi farmed the land and built a large farmstead, called the Qasr of Hesban, in the center of the village.
     During World War I, directly before the Ottoman Empire disintegrated, T.E. Lawrence, "Lawrence of Arabia" visited Hesban. He did not record anything about Hesban itself, only that he visited the town, however there have been references to his trip being a spy mission into OttomanTerritory.

 


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Works Consulted and Cited

Jennifer L. Castillo "A Hardy People: Seven Survival Secrets of Hesban" Central StatesAnthropological Society Annual Meeting, April 13 2007

T.E. Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom, (Hertforshire, England: Wordsworth Editions Limited, 1997)

Eugene L. Rogan, Frontiers of State in the Late Ottoman Empire, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999)

Malcolm B. Russell "Hesban During the Arab Period: A.D. 645 to the Present," Hesban 3: Historical Foundations, Eds. Lawrence T. Geraty and Leona G. Running,
     (Berrien Springs, MI: Andrews University Press, 1989)