Governing property, making the modern state - PSI424

Part three | 9
the location of a landholding might vary from one year to the next as its plots
were reallotted. Cadastral settlements of the British Mandate, however, fixed the
borders of each plot by reference to a map. Landholdings consisted of a certain
number of fixed plots, mostly held in severalty rather than jointly with others.
The layout of fields in 1933 was intended to be permanent, for property now
did mean individual freedom to do what an owner wanted with the permanently
delineated plots owned. Hawwara’s cadastral settlement of 1933 was the first to
be done under the new regime. The authorities are said to have wanted landholdings
to be consolidated into three blocks but the cultivators objected, preferring
their existing form of allotment. 62 The 1933 field map is therefore particularly
important for it provides a concrete illustration of the way landholdings were
allotted in the years before the cadastre. We do not know how long the particular
allotment of 1895 into 31 fields lasted, by which landholders were divided into
two halves in different ways but with each landholding having a plot in all 31
fields. It may have been changed around the time of the regularization of title
in 1921. In any case, the allotment of plots in the Gharaiba half of the village
in 1895, as illustrated in Figure 9.5, is schematic, not taking into account the
different areas or locations of the fields. Some reversal of order between fields
may have been the result of reducing a two-dimensional layout to a sequence of
numbers in one dimension.
The allotment of fields at the 1933 cadastre was different from both forms
of allotment in 1895. Instead of each half having plots in every field, there was
now a division of fields between the two halves as well as their subdivisions. The
Gharaiba half had the northern set of fields, the Shatnawi half the southern.
Each half was subdivided, the Gharaiba into two quarters (one of which was
further subdivided), the Shatnawi into three sixths (of which two were further
subdivided). The total number of shares was now officially 48, although under the
new system a measure of shares was converted into a measure of area, qualified
by a rating of value on a scale from one-tenth to three depending on the field.
The area of a plot multiplied by the value of the field in which it lay, summed
for all plots in a holding, gave that holding’s share in relation to other holdings.
This was much as the Ottoman administration had done in 1895; but the object
of title and taxation, a set of plots, was now frozen on the ground, not to be
periodically redistributed. Whether farmers now thought in terms of superficial
area rather than the ploughing capability of a pair of bullocks (half a rub‘a) is
a different matter. Many of the 1933 field names are the same in 1895 but there
was a finer subdivision into 65 fields (haud) instead of 31 and some of the old
names disappeared while new names were introduced. An exact correspondence
cannot therefore be made. Block-38 is the village site and its surrounds.
The composition of groups is also slightly different. The Gharaibas had
continued to expand until they, their agnates (branching from Na’il Gharaiba’s
father’s putative brothers ‘Abid-Rabbuh, Sabbah and Shahada) and associates
(Khlaif, Ghazlan, Shar‘, Rawashida, Abu Nasir) controlled a full half of the
village. Members of the eight-share sub-group (C) of the Gharaiba half in 1895,
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