Governing property, making the modern state - PSI424

had often moved once or twice coming into the region, acquiring a base in more
than one village. For instance, members of the Rumi family from Malka came
to farm and own land in Hawwara and later several returned to Malka; the
Abu Kirsanna and Shar‘ families farmed and owned land in both Hawwara and
Ramtha; the several families known as Gharaiba lived in Jumha, Hawwara and
Mughaiyir and some also owned land in Kufr Jayiz and Tuqbul. If those who came
to own land often had a link to more than one village, landless ploughmen (and
their families) were even more mobile. Bound up with movement to agricultural
opportunities were wide-flung marriage exchanges between families and villages.
Movement into the area slowed only around the First World War. Population
had grown during the long nineteenth century; land was no longer plentiful;
village membership became more fixed; and the work of a ploughman was less
well remunerated. 47 From the 1920s people began to move not into but out of
the region for work – for seasonal work to the ports and fields of Palestine and
then, slowly, to the growing towns of Transjordan for study or work in the army
and trade.
In the middle and later nineteenth century landowning families built large
compounds about a complex division of labour among both men and women. By
the First World War these great compounds, often with four or more adult men,
gave way to smaller households where two brothers, a man and his brother-in-law,
or a man and a hired ploughman worked together. In line with a stabilization of
interests in the village, following the division across sons of larger exploitations,
and with a decrease in landholding per man, by the 1920s families began to marry
more inside the village, often with close relatives. Following land registration in
1933, much of the leapfrogging of rights resulting from this history was finally
eliminated. Thus in 1933 at the time of the Mandate cadastre several members
of the Gharaiba family exchanged with members of the Muhafiza family of Kufr
Jayiz 12q in Tuqbul and 9q in Kufr Jayiz against 12q held by various members
of the Muhafiza family in Hawwara. 48
But if these appear as common trends families had divergent histories: a few
such as the Haddad scarcely bought or sold land, and when they did so, such
exchanges appeared part of a family strategy of conservation; 49 others such as
the Tannash and the Shar‘ bought land early and generally retained their land;
others, notably the Abu Kirsanna, were to gift their land for wives and to sell
other parts, leaving sections of the family landless by the Mandate cadastre; and
yet others, such as the Ghanaim, first bought and then sold all, some leaving the
village and others staying. These histories in which we see the importance of
transfers of land rights over the years speak of the role of money, credit, debt
and land sale in this commercial village economy.
The last history we shall examine for Hawwara concerns a family, sections
of which engaged deeply and successfully with the commercial networks
built around the government centre of Irbid. The Gharaiba embrace a larger
constellation of families than the cases examined above. The account draws on
interviews with members of two wings of the Gharaiba family as well as on a
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Hawwara