Abstract

In December 1917, at a key turning point in the first world war, British troops conquered Palestine from the Ottomans. Fresh from their victory, British officials in Palestine seized the local branches of the Ottoman Agricultural Bank (an Ottoman credit institution) and, using British wartime “enemy property” laws as justification, liquidated the bank and declared its assets as enemy property. These liquidated “enemy” assets constituted the savings of thousands of impoverished Palestinian peasants. The British promised to release these once the war was over and the Palestine Mandate had been established. But, working from fragmentary and depleted archival sources, I find, in my new research project on the financial aftermath of the first world war in the Middle East, that the British never did so. Instead, contrary to their public declarations; to the requirements of enemy property laws agreed by the allied powers; and to their own professed faith in the sanctity of private property, the British kept these liquidated assets on their books for decades. Eventually, the assets of the Ottoman Agricultural Bank were turned over by the British, after the Mandate was terminated, to the newly-created State of Israel in 1951. Israel, in turn, declaring these assets as enemy property, re-confiscated them using enemy property laws modeled on those used by the British in 1917. Palestinian private property thus entered into a state of permanent temporary confiscation, and the Palestinian account holders of the Ottoman Agricultural Bank never received their money. Placing the lost property of the bank’s Palestinian peasant customers at the center of its investigation, this talk illustrates the detrimental impact of colonialism and war on the property rights of the colonized. It highlights how the structures of colonialism enable such expropriations while rendering them invisible to all but the victims. It exposes the legitimation and obfuscation conferred by financial rules and norms. Finally, as a methodological intervention, this talk suggests a new way of writing financial history: by treating financial data and accounting ledgers as key primary sources, more relevant and truthful than official correspondence and proclamations (which are more traditionally the preserve of historians). Financial data, thus, it argues, can and should be used by historians to counter, and rectify, a distorted archival record.

Reference

Sreemati Mitter (Institute for Advanced Study in Toulouse), “Liquidated: War, colonialism and financial property expropriation in Palestine during the British Mandate, 1917-1951”, IAST Lunch Seminar, Toulouse: IAST, April 7, 2023, 12:45–13:45, room Auditorium 4.