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Bunton: Colonial Land Policies in Palestine, 1917-1936
Reviewed by Michael R. Fischbach
Journal of Palestine Studies, Vol 38, no. 9 (Winter 2009), p. 96
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Colonial Land Policies in Palestine, 1917-1936, by Martin Bunton. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Oxford Historical Monographs. x + 204 pages. Select Bibliography to p. 214. Index to p. 217. $110.00 cloth.

With the exception of Israeli policies in the occupied territories after 1967, little has been written over the decades about the dynamics of land ownership and government land policy in Palestine in modern times. Given the centrality of the land to the socioeconomic history of any agricultural society-and the political prominence of land in the specific Zionist-Arab struggle in Palestine-this constitutes a major and surprising lacuna in the otherwise massive literature on Palestine and the Palestinians. Martin Bunton's Colonial Land Policies in Palestine, 1917-1936 goes far toward addressing this problem. No scholar is more capable of writing the history of British land policies in mandatory Palestine than Bunton, a University of Victoria history professor who has dedicated many years of study to British land policy in Palestine, and the work under review here, while short, no doubt will become the standard reference on the subject.

Bunton writes from the perspective of imperial history, and so his book is neither about the history of land tenure in mandatory Palestine nor about how the question of Zionism affected land (the usual launching point for recent studies of land in Palestine). As Bunton notes, he does not intend to deprive "the overall subject of rural property during the mandate of its own history. . . . Disproportionate emphasis on Zionism

wrongly underestimates the significance of other factors essential to an overall frame of reference" (pp. 3-4). He instead focuses on the nature of British land policies in Palestine, and how the population's reaction to these policies and involvement in their implementation affected overall British fiscal and development goals in the country.

Throughout, Bunton is guided by two themes. The first is the process by which British officials and land experts imported ideas about land and land policy from elsewhere and sought to employ them in Palestine. Here, he is careful to note that the interaction between mandatory authorities and Palestinian land owners was a contested sphere; land policies therefore were in constant flux, subject as they were to the nature of these negotiated state-society interactions. Bunton's second theme is the degree to which British policies were forced to deal with the legacy of the Ottoman land policies upon which they were grafted.

Bunton divides the book into five chapters, each of which deals with one particular aspect of British land policy in Palestine: policy toward "state lands"; attempts to create a free market in land transfers; agricultural credit; land taxation; and rural development. The author's periodization (1917-36) deserves comment, and he provides one in his introduction. Bunton begins his study with 1917, the year that General Edmund Allenby entered Jerusalem, although he points out that British land policies by necessity were based on pre-1917 Ottoman policies. Bunton carries his analysis only through 1936, twelve years before the end of the mandate, because he believes that the subsequent outbreak of the Arab Revolt, the Second World War, and the international search for a solution to the Zionist-Arab conflict in Palestine either halted or seriously altered British land policies. It is worth noting that the book does not deal with urban property or waqf (endowment) property.

Bunton's study of mandatory land policies offers several useful conclusions. One is that one cannot speak of a "monolithic and consistent [British] policy toward landed property" (p. 193). One reason for the lack of a unified approach stemmed from the fact that the ultimate implementation of British ideas always was shaped by the dynamics of mandatory officials' contested relationships and interactions with Palestinian landowners. An example is how initial British free market notions about land transfers collided with officials' growing concerns about the politics of Palestinian landlessness. Indeed, Bunton notes his belief that "the shifts in the way British officials viewed private property in Palestine . . . [showed] how private property came to be regarded as just as much a problem as itwas a solution" (p. 204). In fact, he boldly declares, "Despite the [British] rhetoric, private property would probably have fared better had the Ottomans still ruled" (p. 204). Another important conclusion he draws is that for whatever else they may have done, British land policies did not fundamentally alter the nature of property relations in Palestine.

Grounding his work in a thorough examination of mandatory documents in London and Jerusalem, British officials' private papers in Oxford, and secondary sources, Bunton has produced a superb study that offers much beyond merely an examination of land policies in mandatory Palestine, as useful and necessary as that is. He has enriched our understanding of state-societal relations during that period of time, as well as of how the imaginings of European colonial powers were forced both to reckon with the need to reach accommodation with their subjects and constrain their desire to transform the conquered by reckoning with the precolonial administrative patterns they inherited.