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The History and Politics
of the Bedouin

This book examines contending visions on nomadism in modern Palestine, with

a special focus on the British Mandate period. Extending from the late Ottoman
period to the founding of the State of Israel, it highlights both ruptures and
continuities with the Ottoman past and the Israeli present, to prove that nomadism
was not invented by the British or the Zionists, but is the shared legacy of Ottoman,
British, Zionist, Palestinian and, most recently, Israeli attitudes to the Bedouin of
Palestine.
Drawing on primary sources in Arabic and Hebrew, the book shows how native
conceptions of nomadism have been reconstructed by colonial and national elites
into new legal taxonomies rooted in modern European theories and praxis. By
undertaking a comparative approach, it maintains that the introduction of these
taxonomies transformed not only native Palestinian perceptions of nomadism, but
perceptions that characterized early Zionist literature. The book breaks away from
the Arab/Jewish duality by offering a comparative and relational study of the main
forces operating under the Mandate: British colonialism, Labor Zionism, and
Arab nationalism. Special attention is paid to the British side, which covers the
first three chapters. Each chapter represents a formative stage of British colonial
enterprise in Palestine, extending from the late Ottoman down to the postwar and
the Mandate periods. A major theme is the nexus of race and ethnography reshaping
British perceptions of the Bedouin of Palestine before and during the early phases
of the Mandate and the ways these perceptions guided the administrative division
of the country along newly demarcated racial boundaries.
Using an interdisciplinary approach that combines new findings in the fields of
history, ethnic studies, postcolonial theory, and environmental studies, this book
contributes to understandings of the Israel/Palestine conflict and current trends of
displacement in the Middle East.

Seraj Assi holds a PhD in Arabic and Islamic Studies from Georgetown University.
His research interests are in the area of comparative history of the Middle East,
with a special focus on Israel/Palestine. He teaches at Georgetown University and
American University.
Routledge Studies On the Arab–Israeli Conflict
Series Editor: Mick Dumper
University of Exeter

The Arab-Israeli conflict continues to be the center of academic and popular

attention. This series brings together the best of the cutting edge work now being
undertaken by predominantly new and young scholars. Although largely falling
within the field of political science the series also includes interdisciplinary and
multidisciplinary contributions.

Political Conflict and Exclusion in Jerusalem

The Provision of Education and Social Services
Rawan Asali Nuseibeh

Israel’s Colonial Project in Palestine

Brutal Pursuit
Elia Zureik

Palestinians in Jerusalem and Jaffa, 1948

A Tale of Two Cities
Itamar Radai

Palestinian Political Discourse

Between Exile and Occupation
Emile Badarin

Islamic Development in Palestine

A Comparative Study
Stephen Royle

The History and Politics of the Bedouin

Reimagining Nomadism in Modern Palestine
Seraj Assi

For a full list of titles in the series: www.routledge.com/middleeaststudies/series/

SEAIC
The History and Politics
of the Bedouin
Reimagining Nomadism
in Modern Palestine

Seraj Assi
First published 2018
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa
business
© 2018 Seraj Assi
The right of Seraj Assi to be identified as author of this work has been
asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or
utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now
known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in
any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing
from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or
registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation
without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record for this book has been requested
ISBN: 978-0-8153-6722-2 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-351-25788-6 (ebk)
Typeset in Times New Roman
by Apex CoVantage, LLC
Contents ContentsContents

List of figurevi
Prefacevii

Introduction 1

1 The original Arabs: British perceptions of the Bedouin

before the Mandate 19

2 The British in Palestine: the rediscovery of the ‘Arab race’ 45

3 Nomadism as a racial domain: the legacy of desert

administrators in Palestine 70

4 Reimaging the Arab nation: the tribal legacy of Aref al-Aref 101

5 The erasure of the Hebrew Bedouin: Zionist perceptions

of nomadism 136

Conclusion 184

Bibliography192
Index207
Figure List of FiguresList of Figures

1.1 Palestine Exploration Fund Society’s Map of Western Palestine:

Sheet I – XXVI. Surveyed and drawn under the direction of
Lieut. C. R Conder & H. H Kitchener, 1871–1877. 29
Preface PrefacePreface

It is perhaps a bittersweet irony that I have completed this manuscript on the

eve of the centennial anniversary of the Balfour Declaration, issued in Novem-
ber 1917. Yet the powerful symbolism behind this concurrence suggests that there
is perhaps more to it than mere coincidence. Indeed, it had only vaguely occurred
to me that what I describe in this book as nomadism can, in fact, explain much
of the imperial logic behind the mythical document credited with the founding of
Israel and the loss of Palestine. Perhaps more than ever, I now realize that the Bal-
four Declaration, which promised a British support for the establishment in Pales-
tine of a national home for the Jewish people, was more a negation of Arab rights,
than an affirmation of Jewish rights, to Palestine. Its haunting legacy, no wonder,
still casts a dark shadow and plagues the hearts and minds of millions of Palestin-
ians today, a weighty historical burden of which the native Bedouin population of
Palestine bear their fair share. Being a Palestinian Arab who was born and raised
in Israel, and who has inherited this double shock of loss and foundation, victory
and defeat, power and resistance, this book shows a fair portion of myself.
My interest in the Bedouin of Palestine began in the summer of 2010, during
my frequent visits to the Arab Bedouin village of Araqeeb, located in the heart
of the Negev desert, north of Beersheba. The village has been demolished by the
Israeli authorities over a hundred times since. These repeated demolitions have
sparked an ongoing debate over the fate of the so-called unrecognized villages
in Israel, which feeds into the broader debate over land rights and ownership in
the country. This raised a host of persistent questions: Why does Israel, which
prides itself on its democratic character, continue to dismiss Bedouin land rights
as ‘tribal invasions’ into state lands? Why does a significant portion of its Bedouin
citizenry continue to live ‘off the map’? How does the existence of ‘unrecognized
villages’ – which include Araqeeb, and where half of Israel’s Bedouin citizens
(nearly 100,000) continue to live under the daily threat of forced displacement –
fit into larger narratives of national identity and citizenship in Israel today? And
how to explain the paradoxical status of the Arab Bedouin in Israel as both citizens
(though invisible) and unrecognized residents? Indeed, why Bedouin in Israel are
treated as the enemy of the state?
Embarking on my research, I realized that Israel’s official policy and rhetoric
against the Bedouin are rooted in the territorialist outlook on nomadism described
viii Preface
throughout this book: a form of territorialist discourse that views tribal forma-
tions as the antipode of land and national rights, thus justifying the exteriority
of nomadism to the state apparatus. Not that the Negev Bedouin are inherently
nomadic, but it has served the interest of successive governments in Palestine to
treat them as such, and in the case of Araqeeb, make them such, nomads against
their will, thanks to Israel’s constant displacement of its Bedouin population.
My research rests on the assumption that the study of the history and politics of
nomadism in pre-state Palestine allows for a better understanding of land prac-
tices and tribal policies in Israel today.
And, so, the unspoken story of nomadism unfolding in this book reads like an
epitome of the larger conflict over Palestine. It is a curious tale of fascination and
disenchantment, assimilation and exclusion, conflict and reconciliation, memory
and erasure, a story whose founding drama was set in Mandate Palestine. To con-
fess, this book is obsessed with power. For despite my original intention to write
a people’s history of the Bedouin in Palestine, or a history from below, I find my
story, at its core, largely elitist, a grand tale woven of master narratives and found-
ing fathers, an empire-wide discourse in which the Bedouin voice is only vaguely
heard. But that, I hope, rings quite perfectly with my core definition of nomadism
as a discourse of power that embodies the ongoing conflict over dominance and
hegemony in modern Palestine, a conflict with its own victims and violent legacy,
a conflict with no ready villains to blame fully, or epic-like heroes to cheer for.
I hope the reader shares my conviction that the story of nomadism in modern
Palestine is one that still begs for justice, anywhere, at any time, and now perhaps
more than before.
This book has been five years in the making, and it owes its existence to the
valued support, advice, and interest of my mentors, peers, friends, and family.
I am especially indebted to Judith Tucker for her sound guidance and mentorship
along the way. I am equally thankful to Salim Tamari for his rigorous insights and
keen interest and involvement in this project. Special thanks also go to Osama
Abi-Mershed and Emma Gannage for their valuable reading and critical com-
ments on the manuscript. I would also like to thank Israel Gershoni, and Zachary
Lockman for reading parts of the manuscript and providing their critical and
perceptive insights.
I am also grateful for the generous institutional support provided by Georgetown
University’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, Department of Arabic and
Islamic Studies, Center for Contemporary Arab Studies (CCAS), and Center for
Muslim-Christian Understanding (ACMCU), and the assistance I have received
from Yvonne Haddad, Jonathan Brown, Felicitas Opwis, Elliott Colla, Rochelle
Davis, and Christine Kidwell. I extend my gratitude to Laurie Brand and Nathan-
iel Greenberg for their support. Other friends at Georgetown who showed interest
in the project from its early days include Enass Khansa, Lawrence McMahon, and
Patrick Dixon. I also thank the Social Science Research Council (SSRC) for pro-
viding an early stage support for my research through its prestigious Dissertation
Proposal Development Fellowship (DPDF) and for granting me the opportunity
to work with esteemed scholars like Peter Geschiere and Vincent Pecora, along
with the amazing group of young scholars and peers at SSRC. I would also like to
 Preface ix
thank Michael Dumper, Joe Whiting, and Emma Tyce for their remarkable edito-
rial guidance and assistance, and the anonymous Routledge reviewer who read
and commented on my manuscript.
I wish to extend my sincere gratitude and appreciation to my family in Palestine
for bearing with my prolonged absence throughout the project. My parents have
taught me resolve and dedication, and this book shows a fair portion of them as
well. I reserve my warmest admiration for Abeer Shibli for her unfailing sup-
port and encouragement along the way. This book is dedicated to her and to our
beloved daughter, Sophia, who was born during the final stages of its production.
Introduction IntroductionIntroduction

Defining nomadism
In 1957, forty years after the Balfour Declaration, John Bagot Glubb, aka Glubb
Pasha, set out to write his memoir, an unorthodox autobiographical account he
flamboyantly titled A Soldier with the Arabs. Writing from his quiet retirement
in Mayfield, Sussex, the legendary Commander of the Arab Legion had a rare
confession to make, a belated realization of sorts:

A further illusion prevailed, arising from indiscriminate use of the word

‘Arab’, that the non-Jewish inhabitants of Palestine were nomads from the
desert. “Why cannot the Arabs return to their desert”? was a question which
used frequently to be asked.1

It is quite surprising to hear such a statement from the founder of the Desert
Patrol, the man who presided over the Arab Legion for nearly two decades, and
for whom such “illusion” had been the winning formula of colonial rule. Yet what
Glubb dubs an “illusion” forms the core of what I describe here as nomadism:
a formative discourse by which successive governments in modern Palestine
attempted to manage its Bedouin population over a century of tribal administra-
tion. To translate Glubb’s observation into broader terms, by ‘nomadism’ I refer
to the discursive representation of the Arabs of Palestine as inherently nomadic.
This involves what Glubb himself would otherwise call nomadizing Arabs, that
is, the systematic identification of the Arabs of Palestine with nomadism and the
desert. In its British version, nomadizing Arabs meant that Palestine, where the
Bedouin and nomadic population constituted but a tiny minority, was “a predomi-
nantly non-Arab country,” as one official Mandatory document put it, and hence
belonged not to the Arabs, but rather, as the Belfour Declaration would have it,
to the Jews. During the Mandate, this view would ultimately culminate in the one
of the most outstanding and enduring myths on nomadism in modern Palestine,
namely, the widespread perception of the Bedouin as the ‘original Arabs.’
Yet the British were hardly alone. As we shall see, the perception of the Bedouin
as the ‘original Arabs’ would dominate the ethnographic discourse in Palestine
into the Mandate period. It is around this perception that the ethnographic views
2 Introduction
of Arab nationalists, Zionist pioneers, and British administrators would ultimately
converge: the Arabs because they sought to integrate the Bedouin into the fabric
of the Arab nation; the Zionists because it suited their scheme to identity the Arabs
with nomadism and conquest, along with its obvious demographic implications;
and the British because it fit into their divide-and-conquer policy, but also their
attempts to redraw the boundaries of Palestine along newly demarcated racial
lines, to explain away the prospect of Arab nationhood in Palestine, as opposed to
Jewish nationhood, and, ultimately, to justify the allocation of the country to the
Jews. Hence the Balfour Declaration.
Yet nomadization is but one aspect of my definition of nomadism. That is
because by nomadism I mean something broader than nomadizing Arabs, or
the Bedouinization of Palestine. To put it in extravagantly conceptual terms, by
nomadism I refer to a form of territorialist discourse, one which views tribal for-
mations as the antipode of national and land rights, thus justifying the exteriority
of nomadism to the state apparatus.
Guided by this overarching definition, this book examines contending visions
and narratives on nomadism in tribal Palestine, with special focus on the Man-
date period. It is a comparative work that covers nearly a century of colonial and
nationalist perceptions and attitudes to the Bedouin of Palestine. Drawing on pri-
mary sources in Arabic and Hebrew, along with English, I show how native con-
ceptions of nomadism have been reconstructed by an emerging class of colonial
and national elites into new legal taxonomies rooted in modern European theories
and praxis. By undertaking a comparative approach, I maintain that the introduc-
tion of these taxonomies transformed not only native Palestinian perceptions of
nomadism, but also perceptions that characterized early Zionist literature. The
purpose of my research is not to provide a legal framework for nomadism on the
basis of these taxonomies. Quite the contrary, it is to show how nomadism, as a set
of official narratives on the Bedouin of Palestine, failed to imagine nationhood, let
alone statehood, beyond the single apparatus of settlement.

Historiography and periodization

Three major, intertwined questions run through this study. First, how British,
Arab, and Jewish perceptions of nomadism have been shaped within the matrix
of power relations in Mandate Palestine, one which involved British colonialism,
Palestinian nationalism, and Labor Zionism. Second, how perceptions of nomad-
ism have been constituted within a web of discursive strands, such as race, nation-
hood, statehood, autochthony, modernity, settlement, and land rights. Third, how
nomadism as a discourse on the Bedouin of Palestine has emerged across fields
as diverse as raciology (or scientific racism), ethnography, anthropology, political
economy, legal theory, and climatic (declensionist) narratives on tribal invasions.
What I am asking, in short, is: Can we treat nomadism as a field of historical
inquiry, a formative discourse by which British officials, Zionist pioneers, and
Arab nationalists imagined, managed, and governed the Bedouin of Palestine?
 Introduction 3
In answering these questions, my research seeks to depart from three prevalent
tendencies in the current scholarship on Palestine. The first concerns its increas-
ing focus on the question of periodization. In a broad spectrum of opinions span-
ning over a century, scholars have traced the emergence of a Palestinian identity
to events that extended from the early nineteenth through late twentieth century,
ranging from the peasant revolt of 1834,2 to the establishment of the PLO during
the 1960s.3 Most historians, however, tend to agree that a particular and regional
form of Palestinian national identity emerged in the early decades of the twentieth
century and crystallized during the Mandate period in the wake of the 1936–1939
Arab Revolt in Palestine.4 Referring to the period of 1914–1923 as the “critical
years,” Rashid Khalidi has apparently built a consensus around the dating of Pal-
estinian national consciousness.5
Despite its appeal, this consensus is seemingly predicated on a geographical
bias, enabled in large part by the exclusive focus in Palestinian historiography on
the urban centers of Mandate Palestine, where the national conflict was most acute.
It says little about the Bedouin population of southern Palestine – did they, too,
imagine themselves as Palestinians during those “critical years”? This brings me
to the second problematic in this historiography, namely, its prevailing tendency
to focus on urban centers, such as Jerusalem, Haifa, Jaffa, and Nablus.6 Nowhere
is this urban bias more clearly felt than in the neglect of the desert regions of
southern Palestine, where the Bedouin communities have historically lived. This
neglect can be attributed to various factors, such as the dearth of primary sources
available in rural and tribal areas, and the relative novelty of the scholarship on
subaltern groups in Palestine, and in former colonial settings in general. Not that
the neglect of such groups, such as nomads and tribesmen, is unique to southern
Palestine. Indeed, one major question raised by historians and scholars of subal-
tern studies was, and remains, how to write the histories of marginalized groups,
especially those who have scarcely kept a record of their own histories?7
The third shortcoming in the historical scholarship on Palestine is its greater
focus on the Zionist and the Palestinian sides of the conflict, which meant pay-
ing little scholarly attention to British rule, despite the fact that the bulk of this
scholarship has been set in the British Mandate period. What follows is that the
British administration in Palestine has not undergone the sort of critical reap-
praisal applied to the history of Zionist settler colonialism and Palestinian nation-
alism.8 This thematic omission has resulted in missed methodological, theoretical
and, most importantly, comparative opportunities. For one thing, British rule in
Palestine provides a fertile ground for postcolonial and subaltern theories that
have been applied to Indian history. For another, Mandate Palestine is ripe for
comparative history of empire and nationalism in the broader context of British
and French mandates.9
My research seeks to resist these three tendencies. First, although it seemingly
fits into the scholarly consensus on the emergence of Palestinian nationhood, the
history of nomadism defies linear classification. Tribal loyalty is a complex issue.
Defined as it was by the unsteady alteration between assimilation and resistance to
4 Introduction
national and state formations, it poses a challenge to the notion that there emerged
under the Mandate a unified and stable form of national identity, traceable to a
specific, ‘big bang’ historical event. Moreover, the complex history of nomadism,
as both discourse and praxis, in modern Palestine defies the existence of historical
or discursive ruptures in official perceptions and attitudes to the local Bedouin
population. My research shows that the British Mandate marked anything but a
radical break in the history of imperial policies and state attitudes to nomadism.
Extending from the late Ottoman period to the founding of the State of Israel,
it seeks to highlight both ruptures and continuities with the Ottoman past and
the Israeli present, a broad periodization that bodes well for my argument that
nomadism – again, as both discourse and praxis – was not invented by the British
or the Zionists, but is the shared legacy of Ottoman, British, Zionist, Palestinian
and, most recently, Israeli attitudes to the Bedouin of Palestine. This division also
suggests that the British Mandate, though it offers an ideal context for nation- and
state-building efforts, marked anything but a radical break in the history of impe-
rial and state policies on nomadism.
Second, my research rests on the conviction that Bedouin voices in southern
Palestine can be partly recovered, if not from original Bedouin sources, which
are virtually nonexistent, then by a careful analysis of the vast primary literature
available on the Bedouin, left by British desert administrators, Zionist urban plan-
ners, and Arab mandatory officials in southern Palestine. I do not pretend, how-
ever, to have provided convincing and satisfactory answers to the question of how
the Bedouin have perceived themselves or demarcated their identity, for the same
methodological reasons described earlier, namely, the lack of sufficient historical
evidence to draw a fair picture of identity formations among the Bedouin tribes,
let alone an academic consensus about the emergence of a collective Palestinian
identity amid this population. Still, by shifting the historical focus to southern
Palestine and its Bedouin population, my study seeks to extend to provinces and
non-elite groups questions of national identity and state formations, without los-
ing sight of its methodological limitations.
Third, my research seeks to break away from the Arab/Jewish duality by offer-
ing a comparative and relational study of the main forces operating under the
Mandate: British colonialism, Labor Zionism, and Arab nationalism. A special
attention is paid to the British side, which covers the first three chapters, begin-
ning with the ethnographic legacy of the British-sponsored Palestine Exploration
Fund Society, to the Palestine-oriented geographical publications of the British
Naval Intelligence Division, up to the tribal legacy of British desert administrators
in southern Palestine. Each chapter represents a formative stage of British colo-
nial enterprise in Palestine, extending from the late Ottoman down to the postwar
and the Mandate periods. A major theme running through these chapters is the
nexus of race and ethnography reshaping British perceptions of the Bedouin of
Palestine before and during the early phases of the Mandate, and the ways these
perceptions guided the administrative division of the country along newly demar-
cated racial boundaries.
 Introduction 5
Finally, by undertaking this relational approach, my study aims to show how
colonial and national narratives converge, rather than diverge, on the question
of nomadism, thereby breaking away from the dichotomous worldview paint-
ing colonial and national narratives as binary opposites. This approach is by no
means an innovation. A similar course of study has been pursued by scholars
of colonial India and North Africa.10 These scholars have challenged prevailing
notions that nationalism emancipated native histories, thus portraying national-
ism as yet a new form of domination and hegemony by which native histories are
reconstructed, even invented, before being integrated into the broader structure of
national history.
Mandate Palestine, as a contested site of domination involving the three major
forces of British imperialism, Zionist settler colonialism, and Arab national-
ism, provides a breeding ground for exploring the ways in which nationalism
and colonialism are equally involved in the dual process of denial and inven-
tion, erasure and redemption, association and assimilation shaping colonial
and national perceptions and attitudes to nomadism. Still, my research departs
from previous studies by showing more nuisances and divergences in the per-
ceptions of nomadism, not only between national and colonial narratives, but
also within each narrative and, in many cases, each individual. In this regard,
I depict nomadism as the shared legacy of colonial and national narratives not
in the sense that it sums up the similarities binding together these narratives,
or the binary lines dividing them, but as the inventory, indeed culmination, of
the conflicts and struggles, victories and defeats, enchantments and disillusions,
shaping this legacy.

The state of the field

Despite thematic and methodological developments in the field of Palestine stud-
ies, secondary literature on the history and politics of nomadism in modern Pal-
estine is relatively scant. The bulk of this literature is devoted to anthropological
research on the structures of tribal and nomadic societies, socioeconomic research
on politics of sedentarization and urbanization, and political research on legal
rights and land disputes in contemporary contexts.11 The study of nomadism as a
cultural discourse and a particular form of representation remains largely absent
from this literature. Equally absent is the role of nomadism in shaping national
narratives and identity formations in modern Palestine. There is no comparative
research on the perceptions of nomadism in Zionist and Palestinian historiog-
raphies, and the ways Arab and Jewish historians attempted to incorporate the
history of nomadism into the broader framework of national history. Moreover,
scholarship on the question of nomadism in modern Palestine is largely focused
on the context of contemporary Israel, in which nomadism continues to be viewed
from the single prism of conflict between the state and its Bedouin minority.
The genealogy of this conflict, meanwhile, is pushed to the margin of academic
inquiry. By resituating the question of nomadism in the context of post-Ottoman
6 Introduction
Palestine, I seek to avoid the tendency to reduce it to state/frontier conflicts, thus
focusing on its role in the early stages of nation- and state-building.
Among scholars of the Middle East, there has been greater attention to Brit-
ish tribal discourse and policy in the context of Transjordan. Joseph Massad’s
Colonial Effects offers a pioneering inquiry into the role of tribal law and military
institutions in the construction of modern Jordanian identity, whereas Yoav Alon
explores the ways in which British desert administrators sought to integrate the
disparate tribes and clans of Transjordan into the fabric of the nascent Jordanian
state. Drawing on oral Bedouin sources, Andrew Shryock examines the emer-
gence of a unique form of “genealogical nationalism” in tribal Jordan.12 A recent
study by Robert Fletcher examines the development of the ‘Tribal Question’ into
an empire-wide discourse that helped reshape British frontier policies and atti-
tudes to nomadism.13 There is, however, little discussion in these works of the
implications of such policies and attitudes for Palestine and its people. As we
shall see, Mandate Palestine in particular offers a curious case study of tribal
administration because, unlike Transjordan, British (and Zionist) tribal policies in
southern Palestine, thanks in large part to the ethnic character of the conflict, have
largely culminated in the exclusion, rather than inclusion, of the Bedouin from
state and national formations.
Other scholars, notably Karen Barkey and Resat Kasaba, have devoted more
attention to Ottoman perceptions of nomadism, casting critical light on tribal and
frontier policies under Ottoman rule, and the ways these policies, paradoxically,
had diverged from what the authors describe as the formative role of nomadism in
shaping Ottoman imperial statecraft, governance apparatus, and nation-state insti-
tutions.14 Yet only a few scholars have ventured into the study of tribal policies
in the context of Ottoman Palestine, including Ottoman policies and attitudes to
the Bedouin tribes of the Negev,15 and the impact of the Ottoman Tanizmat on the
Bedouin of southern Palestine and the building of the town of Beersheba.16 Still,
these studies have largely focused on state tribal policies and practices, rather than
the question of discursive formations, which is the primary focus of this study.
More recently, scholars have taken an interest in tribal discourse and praxis
in the context of Mandate Palestine. In a recent study, Assaf Likhovski devotes
a chapter to the administrative career of Palestinian historian Aref al-Aref, who
also served as the District Officer of Beersheba under the Mandate, and his legacy
among the Bedouin of southern Palestine from the perspective of legal thought.17
In a seminal work on the politics of land and identity in Israel/Palestine, Oren
Yiftachel offers a brief discussion on the emergence of new forms of tribal doc-
trines and strategies implemented in the Beersheba region, such as fractured
regionalism and urban ethnocracy.18 This was joined by two edited volumes on
the Palestinian Bedouin, which examine the Bedouin population of the Negev
from the perspective of settler colonialism and international law.19
These studies are advanced in both narrative and method, drawing on inter-
disciplinary approaches that combine history with subaltern studies, postcolonial
theory, and discourse analysis. Yet they still fall short of providing a fair picture
of the spectrum of policies and attitudes reshaping the history of nomadism in
 Introduction 7
modern Palestine, a gap which this study seeks to bridge by, first, tracing the
origins and genealogy of nomadism in the pre-state period; second, offering a
comparative and relational perspective to the legacy of British, Jewish, and Arab
narratives on nomadism; third, treating nomadism as an official discourse that
involves national and colonial institutions alike, not as a sporadic set of state
policies and hostile representations; and, finally, situating my research into the
broader context of settler colonialism in the Middle East, North Africa, and South
Asia.
Meanwhile, historians of the Jewish yishuv began to recognize nomadism as a
defining feature in the early stages of Labor Zionism in Palestine. Studies ranged
from historical inquiry to discourse analysis. Whereas some chose to examine
the integration of nomadic and tribal aspects into the formation of a new Jewish
identity in Palestine, such as Oz Almog’s seminal work on the Sabra generation,20
others chose to demonstrate how these tribal aspects provided early Zionist pio-
neers with a radical notion of otherness.21 Others, like Gil Eyal, still ventured to
show how orientalist memes in Zionist literature transformed its perceptions of
the Arabs and Jews alike.22 This revisionist literature offers an alternative narra-
tive to official Zionist historiography, where nomadism is pushed to the margin of
the historical survey of early Arab-Jewish interactions in Palestine.23
Despite its valuable contribution, this nascent literature suffers from the same
methodological limits that characterized the early revisionist literature on Pal-
estine. For the most part, it falls short of providing a comparative and relational
perspective on Zionist and Palestinian, let alone British, narratives on nomadism.
Moreover, there has been little attempt in this literature to account for the dual
suppression in both national narratives of those nomadic and tribal memes that
had shaped early Arabic and Jewish literatures in Palestine, a suppression which,
in the Zionist case, involves the unspoken erasure of Jewish nomadic identity.

Theory and method

My study focuses on the nexus of knowledge and power underpinning colonial
and national narratives. It examines how a particular form of knowledge (nomad-
ism), produced in a particular historical context (Mandate Palestine), is woven
into the deeper structures of power relations (colonialism/nationalism/statehood).
This involves the redistribution of historical, geographical, and ethnographic
imagination into new forms of knowledge and representation, discourse and
praxis, political expedience and social organization. To this end, I draw on an
interdisciplinary approach that combines recent findings in the fields of history,
environmental studies, political anthropology, and postcolonial theory. By under-
taking this approach, I explore the complex history of nomadism in Palestine
as a dynamic exchange between individuals, institutions, and the broader frame-
work of cultural discourse on nomadism. My research rests on the assumption
that nomadism can indeed serve as interpretative taxonomy for historical inquiry.
One significant area on which this research draws is postcolonial theory.24 Post-
colonialism asks how colonial power and hegemony both shape and are shaped by
8 Introduction
Western forms of knowledge, and how certain representations of colonial subjects
and native populations have served as a legal and moral justification for European
domination overseas.25 In its origin, the field of postcolonial and subaltern studies
flourished in South Asia, and British India in particular, where members of the
so-called Subaltern Studies Group have embarked on studying myriad aspects
of Indian colonial and postcolonial reality, showing how British imperial poli-
cies have culminated in the production of particular forms of knowledge of the
local Indian population, ranging from racial classifications, ethnographic theories,
and sweeping anthropological assumptions about native primitiveness and noble
savagery.26
Mandate Palestine, as we shall see, is ripe for this kind of postcolonial inquiry,
chiefly with regard to imperial Britain’s tribal policies, and British attitudes to
the Palestinian Bedouin population especially. Drawing on postcolonial theory
and critique, my study seeks to introduce to the history of tribal Palestine ques-
tions of colonial knowledge and representation, or what Robert Young calls the
“geographic zones of intensity that have remained largely invisible, but which
prompt or involve questions of history, ethnicity, complex cultural identities and
questions of representation.”27 By the same token, it aims to provide a systematic
deconstruction of the seemingly ordinary and often taken-for-granted concepts
shaping perceptions of nomadism in official and popular discourses such as ‘root-
edness,’ ‘territory,’ ‘nationhood,’ ‘statehood,’ ‘belonging,’ and ‘indigeneity.’ By
bringing into sharp focus the role of the Bedouin as passive agents of historical
and discursive transformation, it also asks “to draw attention to the analytical con-
sequences of such deeply territorializing concepts of identity for those categories
of people classified as ‘displaced’ and ‘uprooted.’ ”28
Another significant source for my study is environmental studies. Over the past
two decades, the field of Middle East studies has witnessed a surge in environ-
mental research linking climatic narratives to imperial and state policies. This
scholarship has largely focused on Ottoman Egypt,29 and the Ottoman Empire in
general.30 Others, notably Diana Davis, have focused on colonial North Africa
and environmental policy in the context of French Algeria.31 Davis’ Resurrecting
the Granary of Rome offers interesting insights on French colonial representa-
tions of the tribal populations of the Algerian Sahara, casting critical light on the
pseudo-scientific taxonomies depicting nomadic societies as destructive races in
the region, blamed for the desertification and deforestation of what was once the
‘fertile granary of Roman North Africa.’ My research uncovers a similar declen-
sionist narrative in British colonial discourse in Mandate Palestine, one which
portrayed the Bedouin population as a destructive race in the country, responsible
for the climatic devastation of what British officials, too, believed was the fertile
granary of Roman Palestine.
Despite these theoretical and methodological developments, nomadism remains
a curiously undertheorized phenomenon. Few scholars have contemplated its
exclusion from state and national formations. James Scott once wondered “why
the state is the enemy of the people who move around” and “why civilizations
cannot climb hills.”32 Little effort has been made since to explore the rationalities
 Introduction 9
underpinning this enmity. One significant area where the question of nomadism
has been closely investigated, at least in theory, is political anthropology. A curi-
ous theoretical exercise was pursued by a new generation of French anthropol-
ogists who ventured into this kind of inquiry during the 1980s, notably Pierre
Clastres, Gilles Deleuze, and Félix Guattari. Ironically, though, these scholars
ended up reproducing the very assumptions which they sought to refute in official
narratives. Clastres cultivated a romanticized image of the nomads as ‘a society
against the state’ employed, almost inherently, in a constant struggle against mod-
ern forms of settlement, progress, and economics.33 His intellectual successors
in France, Deleuze and Guattari, embarked on an ambitious philosophical exer-
cise to explore the ‘exteriority of nomadism to the state apparatus,’ but ended up
declaring the nomads a ‘war machine’ employed against the sedentary power of
the state.34
To bridge this theoretical gap, I employ Michel Foucault’s theory of govern-
mentality, which represents his interest in the role of political rationalities in shap-
ing the genealogy of the modern state.35 In Foucault, governmentality is “at once
internal and external to the state, since it is the tactics of government which make
possible the continual definition and redefinition of what is within the competence
of the state and what is not.” In this view, “the state can only be understood in its
survival and its limits on the basis of the general tactics of governmentality.”36
To translate Foucault’s theoretical notion into the reality of Mandate Pales-
tine is to see how colonial and national attempts to incorporate nomadism into
state and national formations culminated in a complex process of exclusion and
inclusion, assimilation and association. This is to see, for example, how Brit-
ish attitudes to the Bedouin allowed for both the exteriority of nomadism to the
state apparatus, and the demarcation of statehood onto this exteriority. Or how
for Zionist pioneers nomadism demarcated both the territorial boundary of the
Jewish yishuv and a coveted space of land redemption and desert reclamation. Or
how British attitudes to the Bedouin rendered nomadism at once exterior to the
state and a sphere of colonial domination and governance. Or how the Bedouin
were treated by the British as a martial race suited for security services on the one
hand, and a destructive race of foreign invaders and illegal intruders on the other.
Or how, for Arab nationalists, the Bedouin were both celebrated as the nucleus of
the modern Arab nation, and a primitive society to be modernized and settled after
the fashion of the sedentary population.
It is my contention that without situating the question of nomadism in this state
genealogy, one cannot adequately understand the technologies of power underpin-
ning its representations. For example, I show that one way to explain the exterior-
ity of nomadism to the state apparatus in Palestine is by tracing its origin in John
Locke’s labor theory of property, dubbed by some scholars ‘the agriculturalist
argument.’37 I maintain that Locke’s theoretical legacy, which had been adopted in
the course of British colonization of the Americas to justify its land appropriation
and conversion of Amerindians to agrarian labor,38 could as well explain British
land and tribal policies in Mandate Palestine. This is not merely to show how
European conceptions were imported into Palestine by British officials or Zionist
10 Introduction
pioneers, but how they often clashed with indigenous definitions of ownership,
land rights, and nationhood.
This, of course, is not to suggest that native Palestinian conceptions of nation-
hood were immune to European influences. On the contrary, one chief purpose of
this research is to show how native conceptions of nationhood were transformed
by a class of Arab and Jewish nationalists, whose seemingly ‘autochthonous’
models of nation-building often revolved in the same orbit of European national-
ism. Not that native Palestinian or Zionist nationalism was a mere mimicry of its
European counterpart, but as Partha Chatterjee points out, “nationalism sets out
to assert its freedom from European domination. But in the very conception of its
object, it remains a prisoner of the prevalent European intellectual fashions.”39
It has become customary to describe nationalism as a modern construct. What
seemed revolutionary thirty years ago has now become a common, if not fash-
ionable, intellectual and academic exercise. Over the past decades, an impres-
sive array of historians have ventured into tracing the ‘invention’ of peoples and
nations in time and space.40 This trend would not have been imaginable had it not
been for the publication of two groundbreaking books: Eric Hobsbawm’s The
Invention of Tradition and Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities (both
appeared in 1983).41 Since then, historians have shown that not only were tradi-
tions and communities ‘invented’ or ‘imagined,’ but so was the entire conceptual
apparatus of ‘people,’ ‘race,’ ‘ethnicity,’ ‘nation’ and, above all, ‘nationalism’:
all are the product of the nineteenth century. Grounded in the debate over the
origins of modern nationalism, my research draws on a vast body of literature on
the threefold relationship of nationalism, colonialism, and modernity, a literature
informed by a lively academic exchange among historians of nationalism.42
Perhaps it would be useful to conclude with what this study is not about. First,
it is not an anthropological research, but rather a critique of the anthropological
outlook embedded in the study of nomadism, that is, the reduction of nomadism
to the realm of anthropological, if not folkloric, investigation, which constantly
keeps it outside the broader scope of historical inquiry. This reductionist attitude to
anthropology is linked to what academics refer to as ‘the crisis of representation’
in the field. Scholars such as James Clifford, Johannes Fabian, and George Mar-
cus have convincingly demonstrated how anthropological knowledge in Western
discourse culminated in the misrepresentation of native cultures, and tribal and
nomadic societies in particular.43 Others, notably Talal Asad and Edward Said,
have critically illustrated how this form of anthropological knowledge was born
onto the encounters with the natives, and hence bears the undeniable stamp of
colonial legacy.44
Where historical research and traditional anthropology have clearly diverged is
on the validity of the desert/sown binary. Over the past decades, modern scholar-
ship has questioned the nomad/settler divide in the Middle East, along with the
traditional image of nomadic hordes pillaging the fertile granaries of the region.45
A close historical inquiry into the genesis of this divide reveals more complex
patterns. As Jan Retsö points out, this traditional view of the nomads reflects the
imperial ideology of the time, inherited by ancient urban societies who waged
 Introduction 11
long and constant wars against the desert-dweller nomads, not out of defense,
but out of purely imperialistic ambitions covered with claims of external threat
to peace, law, and order.46 In a similar fashion, Pierre Briant maintains that the
traditional concept of the hostile nomadic hordes threatening the peaceful city has
its roots in antiquity, where it was clearly stated by none other than Aristotle.47
In Palestine, the boundaries are even murkier. For one, the desert/sown binary
obscures the fact that thousands of Arab Bedouin had lived in the heart of the fer-
tile regions of the country, and hence engaged in agriculture and land cultivation.
Ironically, the traditional portrayal of the Bedouin as nomadic conquerors, a view
so prevalent in Zionist historiography, was originally derived from the knowledge
of two major historical events: the ancient Israelite conquest of Palestine, and the
Islamic conquests. Both events, however, have been recently challenged by the
introduction of more peaceful patterns, culminating in the abolition of the desert/
sown conflict as the main factor in the social and political development of the
region.48 An early refutation of the settled/nomadic binary had been pioneered by
Wolf Hütteroth and Kamal Abdulfattah in their study of rural Palestine and the
symbiotic relationship shaping Bedouin/peasant interactions, despite traditional
hostilities.49
Second, this is not a study of tribal policies in Palestine. Rather, it touches on
these policies only insofar as they reflect the discursive metamorphoses in the per-
ceptions of nomadism in Palestine. Steeped in the academic tradition of discourse
analysis, my study is concerned with the symbiotic relationship of knowledge and
power reshaping national and colonial narratives on nomadism. Knowledge and
power, as defined by Michel Foucault, are not independent entities, but inextrica-
bly connected, rendering knowledge an exercise of power and power a function of
knowledge. Simply put, power concerns the translation of discourse into policy.
Knowledge/power, in this sense, is both productive and constrictive, equally shap-
ing and obscuring the reality of its object. Thus nomadism, as a unique discourse
on the Bedouin that embodies the strong nexus of knowledge and power, is not
merely a discursive reflection of Bedouin reality, but its very creation.50

From nomadism to agronationalism: a redefinition

Based on the previous brief review, three definitions of nomadism can be sorted
out: (1) Anthropological: nomadism as a particular way of living, as opposed to
sedentary and settled ways. This basic definition sorts out nomadism as a set of
social, economic, and cultural traits, characterized by seasonal mobility, pastoral-
ism, desert and steppe dwelling, tribal customs, and so forth. (2) Ethnographic:
nomadism as a particular mode of living identified, almost exclusively, with a
specific racial group. Nomadism, by this definition, serves as a racial taxonomy
that rests on the tendency to translate spatial categories into racial ones. In our
case, for example, Arabs, let alone Bedouin, are classified as inherently nomadic,
and vice versa. (3) Discursive: nomadism as a discourse, a particular form of
representation that involves both inclusion and exclusion, but mainly exclusion.
This definition, which underlines a strong nexus of knowledge and power (in the
12 Introduction
Foucauldian sense), has its origin in colonial and national narratives, in which
nomadism is often defined by its exteriority to national and state formations. The
three definitions, as we shall see, are not only interdependent, but also comple-
mentary. They constitute the nucleus of my study.
Perhaps one way to define nomadism is by comparing it to what I term ‘agro-
nationalism,’ that is, the shift from nomadic to sedentary sectors of society as
the locus of national revival. In Mandate Palestine, agronationalism can serve as
an analytical framework for discursive representation in three key aspects. First,
I ask how British administrators, Zionist pioneers, and Arab nationalists have
facilitated the shift from the Bedouin to the fellah (peasant) as the prototype of
the new nation. Second, I explore how a new set of legal epistemes, such as labor,
property, and cultivation, came to constitute the national ethos in modern Pales-
tine, linking national redemption to the single apparatus of land settlement. Third,
I trace how the shift from nomadism to agronationalism culminated in rewriting
national history into the ancient system of agricultural settlement in Palestine,
and how in this spatial reconfiguration, nomadism demarcated both a territorial
and national boundary. In short, I am interested in how modernizing schemes
to settle the Bedouin after the fashion of the sedentary fellahin were vested in
the nation-building enterprise in pre-state Palestine, and how this enterprise has
evolved across a wide spectrum of intellectual fields, such as ethnography, geneal-
ogy, anthropology, legal theory, economics, and political geography.
Agronationalism, in this view, applies to both colonial (British and Zionist)
and nationalist (Arab/Palestinian) attitudes to nomadism. Because it rests on the
tendency to infuse agrarian elements into the very fabric of nationhood, agrona-
tionalism marks a transitional stage at which tribal and nomadic elements become
no longer imaginable under colonial and national institutions, but are either erased
(in the Zionist case), largely excluded (in the British case), or modified and inte-
grated (in the Arab/Palestinian case) into the nation-state apparatus. This is not
to classify national and colonial tribal legacies into a hierarchy of integrative and
separatist attitudes, but to see how agronationalism, emerging from the uneasy
combination of the agrarian and the national, operates in the broader dispute over
land and national rights, how Arab and Jewish nationalists variably deploy, wit-
tingly or unwittingly, elements of the agriculturalist argument (in the Lockean
sense described earlier) to bestow these rights on their respective national groups;
in short, how agronationalism acts as a meta-narrative for national rights in Man-
date Palestine.
Because agrarianism is employed here in a wider sense that cuts across geo-
graphical, historical, and cultural spaces (e.g. agrarian reading of the Bible),
agronationalism marks not only the exteriority of nomadism to national and state
formations. It is rather a radical reconfiguration of the concept of agrarianism
itself, which is no longer taken to mean simply a demographic or socioeconomic
delineation, but a loaded ideological designation that serves broader colonial and
national interests, allowing governing elites on both sides of the aisle to equally
justify and translate these interests into concrete policies (e.g. sedentarization,
pacification, assimilation, modernization, desert reclamation, land redemption,
 Introduction 13
and nation-building). Agronationalism, in this sense, acts as a defining feature
in the creation of a conception of national identity that is largely and exclusively
agrarianist (in the Lockean sense), and it is on this ideological demarcation where
colonial and national narratives on nomadism ultimately converge.
Another related concept is autochthony. Autochthony, which literally means
‘to be born from the soil,’ describes land-based attempts to establish an authentic
and primordial right to belong, while denying this right to outsiders. A politically
and ideologically charged notion, it also describes how various groups tend to
defend their claims to belonging by deploying a host of discursive tools, which
not infrequently involve historical imagination, mythmaking, and invention. Yet
‘autochthony’ remains a largely academic term, a rather descriptive concept that
is rarely used by those groups who invoke it. Its epistemic merit lies in its breadth,
complexity, and relative ambiguity.
Perhaps one way to understand autochthony is to compare it with another,
related term: ‘indigeneity.’

While indigenous became increasingly centered in its meaning – roughly

referring to the ‘tribal other’ – autochthonous became employed in much
more variable ways. Its use is no longer restricted to marginal areas, since
even majority groups within the West came to defend their position in
the name of their ‘autochthony’. It is the free-floating profile of this term,
combining apparent self-evidence with great ambiguity and variation in its
meaning, that makes it of popular interest for unraveling the conundrum of
belonging in our globalizing world.51

Thus, one way to understand the notion of autochthony in the Palestinian con-
text is to see how it was deployed by various groups to advance contending claims
to belonging, rootedness, and land and national rights, and how autochthony, as
a marker of land-based group identity, was employed by national and colonial
elites to facilitate the transition from the Bedouin to the peasant as the locus of
this identity.
As we shall see, the shift from nomadism to agronationalism was neither lin-
ear nor smooth. The heterogeneous corpora of textual evidence show a complex
process of transformation, characterized by a series of ruptures and continuities,
internal conflicts and compromises, assimilation and disintegration. In order to
fully account for these unsteady metamorphoses, chapters are divided chrono-
logically, although generally arranged into British, Arab, and Zionist attitudes to
nomadism.
The three first chapters deal with British perceptions of nomadism. Chapter 1
explores the ethnographic legacy of the Palestine Exploration Fund Society in the
late nineteenth century. It focuses on the works of a new breed of desert explor-
ers whose views on nomadism would reshape British policies and attitudes to the
Bedouin into the Mandate period. I show how this legacy, steeped in the scientific
racism of the nineteenth century, helped reinforce the image of the Bedouin as a
race of foreign conquerors in Palestine, blamed for the decay of agriculture and
14 Introduction
the destruction of the ‘fertile granary of Roman Palestine.’ Chapter 2 examines
British perceptions of nomadism on the eve of the Mandate by drawing on the
burgeoning ethnographic literature of country handbooks that flourished in the
early decades of the twentieth century. Sponsored by the British Naval Intelli-
gence Division, this literature sheds critical light on British official discourse on
the Bedouin in a period of mounting Arab nationalism. Chapter 3 examines the
legacy of British desert administrators in southern Palestine during the Mandate.
I look at how this legacy, rooted as it was in English legal theories of land rights
and ownership, helped reinforce the time-honored opposition between nomad-
ism and nationhood in British colonial discourse. The chapter is concluded with
a comparative perspective situating British tribal policies in Mandate Palestine
against the backdrop of French colonial policies in Algeria and British own poli-
cies in India, which I believe offers a better understanding of British colonial
discourse in Palestine within the broader context of European colonialism.
A major theme running through these chapters is the nexus of race and ethnog-
raphy reshaping British perceptions of the Bedouin of Palestine. This involves the
classification of the local Arab population into a hierarchy of settled and nomadic
races, a typology mediated by the dominant tendency to translate spatial catego-
ries into racial ones. I show how this racial taxonomy was vested in Britain’s
attempts to come to terms with the embryonic Arab movement in Palestine, how
it was employed by colonial officials to explain the ‘limits’ of Arab nationalism
vis-à-vis its Jewish counterpart and, ultimately, how it guided the administrative
division of Palestine along newly demarcated racial boundaries.
Chapter 4 explores Arab perceptions of nomadism, with special focus on the
legacy of Aref al-Aref, who served as the District Officer of Beersheba under the
Mandate. Aref was an exemplary figure whose life and legacy betray multiple foci
of national loyalty, ranging from Ottomanism to Arabism, and from Arabism to
Palestinian nationalism. Drawing on a vast body of historical and ethnographic
literature by the Palestinian historian, I show how his tribal policies in south-
ern Palestine were invested in a broader nation-building enterprise, one which
involves settling, mapping, enumerating, and rewriting the Bedouin tribes into a
territorialist past.
I chose to focus on Aref as an exemplary figure of the nationalist Palestin-
ian discourse on nomadism because his large corpus, both published and unpub-
lished, offers an alternative story to Zionist and British narratives, especially his
legal and ethnographic treatises on the Negev Bedouin. Aref is also exemplary in
the sense that his tribal legacy – that is, the double legacy of his national enter-
prise and colonial service among the Bedouin – offers a perfect example of how
colonial and national narratives converge on the question of nomadism and its
complex relation to nation- and state-building, which is one of the major themes
of this study.
Chapter 5 examines perceptions of nomadism in Zionist historiography, with
special focus on Second Aliyah Zionist pioneers, notably A. D. Gordon, Moshe
Smilansky, David Ben-Gurion, and Yitzhak Ben-Zvi. I locate Zionist attitudes to
nomadism into two formative stages in the development of the Jewish yishuv in
 Introduction 15
Palestine. The first is characterized by the emergence of autochthonous move-
ments with unmistakably Bedouin character, notably Ha-Shomer (the Watchman),
Ha-Roeh (the Shepherd), and the Sabra. The second is marked by the founding
in the Jewish yishuv of new forms of political expedience and social organiza-
tion with a distinctly and increasingly territorialist character, such as the kibbutz,
Hebrew Labor, and Canaanism.
A comparative historiographical observation is in order. In Palestinian histo-
riography, Aref’s legacy is treated as a historical source on the Bedouin, not as
a particular form of cultural and national discourse. He is often portrayed as an
“amateur and bureaucratic scholar.”52 His works on the Bedouin are mined as
ethnographic and anthropological evidence, not as a nation-building exercise. In
Zionist historiography, men like Ben-Gurion and Ben-Zvi are treated as political
leaders and founding fathers of political Zionism, not as historians and ethnogra-
phers who wrote extensively on the Arabs. My aim is to turn this approach around
and treat these figures for what they were: founders of a new and unique discourse
on the Bedouin, which I term ‘nomadism.’ Curiously, these men were not writing
in a contextual vacuum, but in a constant debate and argument with one another:
Aref read in Hebrew, his tribal accounts were translated into Hebrew, and he was
widely read in Zionist circles.
Although at first glance the (ethnic) division of my chapters seems superficial,
it allows to better articulate one of the major themes of this study, namely, how
colonial and national narratives converge on the question of nomadism and its
complex relation to race, nationhood, and statehood. In other words, this division
is not completely nominal; rather, it bodes well for my conclusion that if set-
tler colonialism denies nomadism a national history, nationalism reinvents it, thus
representing yet another form of official discourse in which this history is recon-
structed to fit into the deeper structures of power relations in Mandate Palestine.
More important still, this division, by virtue of its relative simplicity, is intended
to show how in the struggle over the meaning of nomadism, national and colonial
narratives tend also to part ways, not only coalesce.

Notes
1 John B. Glubb, A Soldier with the Arabs (New York: Harper, 1957), 29–30.
2 Baruch Kimmerling and Joel Migdal, Palestinians: The Making of a People (New
York: Free Press, 1993).
3 Musa Budeiri, “The Palestinians: Tensions Between Nationalist and Religious Identi-
ties,” in James Jankowski and Israel Gershoni (eds.), Rethinking Nationalism in the
Arab Middle East (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997).
4 Yehoshua Porath, The Emergence of the Palestinian-Arab National Movement, 1918–
1929 (London: Cass, 1974); Muhammad Muslih, The Origins of Palestinian Nation-
alism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988); Rashid Khalidi, Palestinian
Identity: The Construction of Modern National Consciousness (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1997).
5 Rashid Khalidi, “The Formation of Palestinian Identity: The Critical Years, 1917–
1923,” in James Jankowski and Israel Gershoni (eds.), Rethinking Nationalism in the
Arab Middle East (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 145–76.
16 Introduction
6 See, for example, Beshara Doumani, Rediscovering Palestine: Merchants and Peas-
ants in Jabal Nablus, 1700–1900 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1995);
Rashid Khalidi, Palestinian Identity (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997).
7 For this debate, see Ranajit Guha, A Subaltern Studies Reader, 1986–1995 (Minneapo-
lis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1997).
8 See on this issue, Nicholas Roberts, “Re-Remembering the Mandate: Historiographi-
cal Debate and Revisionist History in the Study of British Palestine,” History Compass
9, no. 3 (March 2011): 215–30.
9 There are few exceptions, notably Zeina B. Ghandour, A Discourse on Domination
in Mandate Palestine: Imperialism, Property and Insurgency (London: Routledge,
2010), and Rashid Khalidi, The Iron Cage: The Story of the Palestinian Struggle for
Statehood (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2006).
10 See Partha Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative
Discourse (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1993); James McDou-
gall, History and the Culture of Nationalism in Algeria (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge
University Press, 2006); Benjamin Brower, A Desert Named Peace: The Violence of
France’s Empire in the Algerian Sahara, 1844–1902 (New York: Columbia University
Press, 2009); Osama Abi-Mershed, Apostles of Modernity: Saint-Simonians and the
Civilizing Mission in Algeria (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010).
11 See, for example, the recent edited volumes, Mansour Nasasra et al. (eds.), The Naqab
Bedouin and Colonialism (New York: Routledge, 2014); Ahmad Amara et al. (eds.),
Indigenous (in) Justice: Human Rights Law and Bedouin Arabs in the Naqab/Negev
(Cambridge, MA: Human Rights Program at Harvard Law School, 2012).
12 Andrew Shryock, Nationalism and the Genealogical Imagination: Oral History and
Textual Authority in Tribal Jordan (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press,
1997).
13 Joseph Massad, Colonial Effects: The Making of National Identity in Jordan (New
York: Columbia University Press, 2001). On the imperial careers of the three men, see
Robert Fletcher, British Imperialism and ‘the Tribal Question’: Desert Administration
and Nomadic Societies in the Middle East, 1919–1936 (Oxford, UK: Oxford Univer-
sity Press, 2015). See also Yoav Alon, The Making of Jordan: Tribes, Colonialism and
the Modern State (London: I. B. Tauris, 2007).
14 Karen Barkey, Empire of Difference: The Ottomans in Comparative Perspective (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008); Resat Kasaba, A Moveable Empire: Otto-
man Nomads, Migrants, and Refugees (Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press,
2009).
15 Clinton Bailey, “The Ottomans and the Bedouin Tribes of the Negev,” in Gad G. Gilbar
(ed.), Ottoman Palestine: Studies in Economic and Social History 1800–1914 (Leiden:
E. J. Brill, 1990).
16 Y. Avci, “The Application of Tanizmat in the Desert: The Bedouins and the Creation
of a New Town in Southern Palestine (1860–1914),” Middle Eastern Studies 45, no. 6
(2009).
17 Assaf Likhovski, Law and Identity in Mandate Palestine (Chapel Hill, NC: University
of North Carolina Press, 2006).
18 Oren Yiftachel, Ethnocracy: Land and Identity Politics in Israel/Palestine (Philadel-
phia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006).
19 See the recent edited volumes, Mansour Nasasra et al. (eds.), The Naqab Bedouin and
Colonialism (New York: Routledge, 2014); and Ahmad Amara et al. (eds.), Indigenous
(in) Justice: Human Rights Law and Bedouin Arabs in the Naqab/Negev (Cambridge,
MA: Human Rights Program at Harvard Law School, 2012).
20 Oz Almog, The Sabra: The Creation of the New Jew (Berkeley, CA: University of
California Press, 2000).
21 Gilah Ramraz-Ra'ukh, The Arab in Israeli Literature (Bloomington, IN: Indiana Uni-
versity Press, 1989).
 Introduction 17
22 See, most notably, Gil Eyal, The Disenchantment of the Orient: Expertise in Arab
Affairs and the Israeli State (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006).
23 Yosef Gorny, Zionism and the Arabs, 1882–1948: A Study of Ideology (Oxfordshire:
Clarendon Press, 1987).
24 For a historiographical review, see Gyan Prakash, “Subaltern Studies as Postcolonial Crit-
icism,” The American Historical Review 99, no. 5 (December 1994): 1475–90, 1476.
25 A milestone in this critique was Edward Said’s Orientalism (New York: Pantheon
Books, 1978).
26 For a recent analysis of this trend, see Gayatri Spivak, Ethics, Subalternity and the
Critique of Postcolonial Reason (Malden, MA: Polity, 2007).
27 Robert Young, “What Is the Postcolonial?” Ariel 40, no. 1 (2009): 13–25.
28 Lisa Malkki, “National Geographic: The Rooting of Peoples and the Territorialization
of National Identity Among Scholars and Refugees,” Cultural Anthropology 7, no. 1
(1992): 24–44, 25.
29 Alan Mikhail, Nature and Empire in Ottoman Egypt: An Environmental History (Cam-
bridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2011); Timothy Mitchell, Rule of Experts:
Egypt, Techno-Politics, Modernity (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2002).
30 Sam White, The Climate of Rebellion in the Early Modern Ottoman Empire (New
York: Cambridge University Press, 2011).
31 Diana Davis, Resurrecting the Granary of Rome: Environmental History and French
Colonial Expansion in North Africa (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2007).
32 James Scott, “Hill and Valley in Southeast Asia . . . or Why the State Is the Enemy
of People Who Move Around . . . or . . . Why Civilizations Can’t Climb Hills,” in
Christian Erni (ed.), The Concept of Indigenous Peoples in Asia: A Resource Book
(Copenhagen: International Work Group for Indigenous Affairs, 2008), 161–82.
33 Pierre Clastres, Society Against the State: Essays in Political Anthropology (New
York: Zone Books, 1987).
34 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Min-
neapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1983).
35 Michel Foucault et al., The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality: With Two
Lectures by and an Interview with Michel Foucault (Chicago, IL: University of Chi-
cago Press, 1991).
36 Ibid., 103.
37 Thomas Flanagan, “The Agricultural Argument and Original Appropriation: Indian
Lands and Political Philosophy,” Canadian Journal of Political Science 22, no. 3 (Sep-
tember 1989): 589–602.
38 For the implementation of Locke’s theory in the American context, see Barbara Arneil,
John Locke and America: The Defence of English Colonialism (Oxford, UK: Claren-
don Press, 1996).
39 Partha Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Dis-
course (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 10.
40 These include, most recently, Shlomo Sand, The Invention of the Jewish People (Lon-
don: Verso, 2009).
41 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (London: Verso, 1983); E. J. Hobsbawm
and T. O. Ranger, The Invention of Tradition (New York: Cambridge University
Press, 1983).
42 See Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press,
1983); Frederick Cooper, Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History
(Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2005); Anthony Smith, Nationalism
and Modernism: A Critical Survey of Recent Theories of Nations and Nationalism
(London: Routledge, 1998); Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments: Colo-
nial and Postcolonial Histories (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993).
43 See James Clifford, “On Ethnographic Allegory,” in James Clifford and George Mar-
cus (eds.), Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography (Berkeley, CA:
18 Introduction
University of California Press, 1986); Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How
Anthropology Makes Its Object (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983).
44 See Talal Asad, Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter (New York: Humanities
Press, 1973); Edward Said, Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient (Rout-
ledge: London, 1978).
45 On the abolition of the desert/sown divide, see M. Rowton, “Enclosed Nomadism,”
Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 17, no. 1 (1974): 1–30.
46 Jan Retsö, The Arabs in Antiquity: Their History From the Assyrians to the Umayyads
(London: Routledge Curzon, 2005), 108.
47 Quoted in Retsö, Arabs in Antiquity, 114.
48 For a historiographical review on the debate see Jan Retsö, The Arabs in Antiquity:
Their History from the Assyrians to the Umayyads (London: Routledge Curzon, 2005),
113–16.
49 Wolf Hütteroth and Kamal Abdulfattah, Historical Geography of Palestine, Transjor-
dan and Southern Syria in the Late 16th [Sixteenth] Century (Erlangen: Fränkische
Geographische Ges, 1977).
50 See Michel Foucault and Alan Sheridan, The Archaeology of Knowledge (New York:
Pantheon Books, 1972).
51 Peter Geschiere, The Perils of Belonging: Autochthony, Citizenship, and Exclusion in
Africa and Europe (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 6.
52 Nasasra et al. (eds.), The Naqab Bedouin and Colonialism, 15.
Another random document with
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birthday ceremonies to present congratulations and gifts.
Conspicuous by his absence, however, was the Emperor’s brother,
Prince Ch’un (the present Regent), who had applied for short leave
in order to avoid being present, and who offered no presents.
A significant incident occurred in connection with the birthday
ceremonies. Among the many complimentary scrolls, presented by
friends and hanging on the walls, were a pair which attracted much
attention, until they were hurriedly removed. One contained the
following inscription:—“5th day of the 8th Moon of the Wu Shen year”
(this was the date of the crisis of the coup d’état when Yüan Shih-k’ai
warned Jung Lu of the plot, and thus brought about the practical
dethronement of the Emperor), and on the other were the words:
—“May the Emperor live ten thousand years! May Your Excellency
live ten thousand years.”
The words “wan sui,” meaning “ten thousand years,” are not
applicable to any subject of the Throne, and the inner meaning of
these words was, therefore, interpreted to be a charge against Yüan
of conspiring for the Throne. It was clear that some enemy had sent
the scrolls as a reminder of Yüan’s betrayal of his Sovereign ten
years before, and that they had been hung up either as the result of
connivance or carelessness on the part of Yüan’s people. Four
months later, when the great ex-Viceroy fell, this incident was
remembered and inevitably connected with Prince Ch’un’s non-
appearance at the birthday ceremonies.
In September, the Dalai Lama reached Peking, but owing to a
dispute on certain details of ceremonial, his audience was
postponed. It was finally arranged that the Pontiff should kowtow to
the Throne, and that the Emperor should then rise from his seat and
invite the Lama to sit beside him on a cane couch. This ceremonial
was most reluctantly accepted, and only after much discussion, by
the Dalai Lama, who considered his dignity seriously injured by
having to kowtow. He had brought with him much tribute, and was
therefore the more disappointed at the Old Buddha’s failure to show
him the marks of respect which he had expected. His audience was
held early in October, when Her Majesty requested him to offer up
prayers regularly for her long life and prosperity.
 In October, the foreign Ministers were also received at the
Summer Palace, and on the 20th of that month the Court returned to
the Lake Palace for the winter. On this, her last State progress, the
Empress Dowager approached the city as usual in her State barge,
by the canal which joins the Summer Palace Lake with the waters of
the Winter Palace, proceeding in it as far as the Temple of Imperial
Longevity, which is situated on the banks of this canal. It was
observed that as she left the precincts of the Summer Palace she
gazed longingly towards the lofty walls that rise from the banks of the
lake, and from thence to the hills receding into the far distance.
Turning to the “Lustrous” concubine who sat at her feet, she
expressed her fears that the critical condition of the Emperor would
prevent her from visiting her favourite residence for a long time to
come.

View, from the K’un Ming Lake, of the Summer Palace.

 The Old Buddha sat in a cane chair on the raised deck of her
magnificent barge adorned with carved dragons and phœnixes; she
was surrounded by her favourite eunuchs, and half a dozen of the
chief ladies of the Court. As she descended from the barge,
supported by two eunuchs, and entered the sedan chair which bore
her to within the temple precincts, her vivacity and good spirits
formed a subject of general comment. She performed the usual
sacrifices at the Temple of Imperial Longevity, a shrine which she
had liberally endowed; but it was remembered after her death, as an
unfortunate omen, that the last stick of incense failed to ignite. Upon
leaving the temple she begged the priests to chant daily liturgies and
to pray for her longevity, in view of her approaching birthday.
After leaving the temple precincts she proceeded with her ladies-
in-waiting to the Botanical and Zoological Gardens, which lie just
outside the “West-Straight gate” of the city. On arrival at the gates,
she insisted upon descending from her sedan chair, and made the
entire round of the gardens on foot. She expressed interest and
much pleasure at the sight of animals which she had never seen
before, and announced her intention of frequently visiting the place.
She asked numerous questions of the keepers, being especially
interested in the lions, and created much amusement amongst her
immediate entourage by asking the director of the gardens (a
Manchu official of the Household) for information as to where the
animals came from, a subject on which he was naturally quite
uninformed. “You don’t seem to know much about zoology,” she
observed, and turned from the crestfallen official to address one of
the keepers in a most informal manner. The chief eunuch, Li Lien-
ying, wearied by such unwonted exercise, implored Her Majesty not
to tire herself, but the Old Buddha took pleasure, clearly malicious, in
hurrying him round the grounds. The occasion was unusual and
remarkably informal, and the picture brings irresistibly to the English
mind memories of another strong-minded Queen and her inspection
of another garden, where heads were insecure for gardeners and
Cheshire cats. Eye-witnesses of that day’s outing commented freely
on their Imperial Mistress’s extraordinary spirits and vitality,
predicting for her many years of life.
 Her Majesty, whose memory on unexpected subjects was always
remarkable, referred on this occasion to the elephant which had
been presented to her by Tuan Fang upon his return from Europe,
and which, together with several other animals for which she had no
fitting accommodation in the Palace grounds, was the first cause and
first inmate of the Zoological Gardens. The elephant in question had
originally been in charge of the two German keepers who had
accompanied it from Hagenbeck’s establishment; these men had
frequently but unsuccessfully protested at the insufficient rations
provided for the beast by the Mandarin in charge. Eventually the
elephant had died of slow starvation, and the keepers had returned
to Europe, after obtaining payment of their unexpired contracts, a
result which brought down upon the offending official Her Majesty’s
severe displeasure. She referred now to this incident, and expressed
satisfaction that most of the animals appeared to be well cared for,
though the tigers’ attendant received a sharp rebuke.
After Her Majesty’s return to the Winter Palace, everything was
given over to preparations for the celebration of her seventy-third
birthday on the 3rd of November. The main streets of the city were
decorated, and in the Palace itself arrangements were made for a
special theatrical performance to last for five days. A special
ceremony, quite distinct from the ordinary birthday congratulations of
the Court, was arranged for the Dalai Lama, who was to make
obeisance before Her Majesty at the head of his following of priests.
The health of His Majesty did not permit of his carrying out the
prescribed ceremony of prostration before Her Majesty’s Throne in
the main Palace of Ceremonial Phœnixes; he therefore deputed a
Prince of the Blood to represent him in the performance of this duty,
and those who knew its deep significance on such an occasion
realised that the condition of his health must indeed be desperate.
This impression was confirmed by the fact that he was similarly
compelled to abandon his intention of being present at a special
banquet to be given to the Dalai Lama in the Palace of Tributary
Envoys. The high priest, who had been compelled to kneel outside
the banquet hall to await the arrival of His Majesty, was greatly
incensed at this occurrence.
 The Empress Dowager, with the Chief Eunuch, Li Lien-Ying.

At eight in the morning of the birthday His Majesty left his Palace
in the “Ocean Terrace” and proceeded to the Throne Hall. His
emaciated and woe-begone appearance was such, however, that the
Old Buddha took compassion upon him, and bade his attendant
eunuchs support him to his palanquin, excusing him from further
attendance. Later in the day she issued a special Decree praising
the loyalty of the Dalai Lama, and ordering him to return promptly to
Thibet, “there to extol the generosity of the Throne of China, and
faithfully to obey the commands of the Sovereign power.” The
Empress Dowager spent the afternoon of her birthday in the
congenial amusement of a masquerade, appearing in the costume of
the Goddess of Mercy, attended by a numerous suite of concubines,
Imperial Princesses, and eunuchs, all in fancy dress. They picnicked
on the lake, and Her Majesty appeared to be in the very highest
spirits. Unfortunately, towards evening, she caught a chill, and
thereafter, partaking too freely of a mixture of clotted cream and crab
apples, she had a return of the dysenteric complaint from which she
had suffered all through the summer. On the following day she
attended to affairs of State as usual, reading a vast number of
Memorials and recording her decision thereon, but on the 5th of
November neither she nor the Emperor were sufficiently well to
receive the Grand Council, so that all business of government was
suspended for two days. Upon hearing of Her Majesty’s illness, the
Dalai Lama hastened to present her with an image of Buddha,
which, he said, should be despatched forthwith to her mausoleum at
the hills, the building of which had just been completed under the
supervision of Prince Ch’ing.[127] The high priest urged all haste in
transmitting this miracle-working image to her future burial-place; if it
were done quickly, he said, her life would be prolonged by many
years, because the unlucky conjunction of the stars now affecting
her adversely would avail nothing against the magic power of this
image. The Old Buddha was greatly reassured by the Dalai Lama’s
cheerful prognostications, and next morning held audience as usual.
She commanded Prince Ch’ing to proceed without delay to the
tombs, and there to deposit the miraculous image on the altar.[128]
She ordered him to pay particular attention to the work done at the
mausoleum, and to make certain that her detailed instructions had
been faithfully carried out. Prince Ch’ing demurred somewhat at
these instructions, inquiring whether she really wished him to leave
Peking at a time when she herself and the Emperor were both ill. But
the Old Buddha would brook no argument, and peremptorily ordered
him to proceed as instructed. “I am not likely to die,” she said,
“during the next few days; already I am feeling much better. In any
case you will do as you are told.” On Monday, November 9th, both
the Empress Dowager and the Emperor were present at a meeting
of the Grand Council, and a special audience was given to the
Educational Commissioner of Chihli province, about to leave for his
post. At this audience the Old Buddha spoke with some bitterness of
the increasing tendency of the student class to give vent to
revolutionary ideas, and she commanded the Commissioner of
Education to do all in his power to check their political activities.
Shortly afterwards four more physicians, who had come up from
the provinces, were admitted to see His Majesty. That same
afternoon he had a serious relapse, and from that day forward never
left his palace. On the following morning he sent a dutiful message
(or it was sent for him) enquiring after the Empress Dowager’s
health, she being also confined to her room and holding no
audiences. The Court physicians reported badly of both their
Imperial patients: being fearful as to the outcome, they begged the
Comptroller-General of the Household to engage other physicians in
their place. The Grand Council sent a message to Prince Ch’ing,
directing him to return to Peking with all haste, his presence being
required forthwith on matters of the highest importance. Travelling
night and day, he reached the capital at about eight o’clock in the
morning of the 13th, and hastened to the palace. He found the Old
Buddha cheerful and confident of ultimate recovery, but the Emperor
was visibly sinking, his condition being comatose, with short lucid
intervals. His last conscious act had been to direct his Consort to
inform the Empress Dowager that he regretted being unable to
attend her, and that he hoped that she would appoint an Heir
Apparent without further delay. Whether these dutiful messages
were spontaneous or inspired, and indeed, whether they were ever
sent by the Emperor, is a matter upon which doubt has been freely
expressed.
Immediately after the arrival of Prince Ch’ing, an important
audience was held in the Hall of Ceremonial Phœnixes. Her Majesty
was able to mount the Throne, and, although obviously weak, her
unconquerable courage enabled her to master her physical ailments,
and she spoke with all her wonted vehemence and lucidity. A well-
informed member of the Grand Council, full of wonder at such an
exhibition of strength of will, has recorded the fact that she
completely led and dominated the Council. There were present
Prince Ch’ing, Prince Ch’un, the Grand Councillor Yüan Shih-k’ai,
and the Grand Secretaries Chang Chih-tung, Lu Ch’uan-lin and Shih
Hsü.
Her Majesty announced that the time had come to nominate an
Heir to the Emperor T’ung-Chih, in accordance with that Decree of
the first day of the reign of Kuang-Hsü, wherein it was provided that
the deceased Sovereign’s ancestral rites should be safeguarded by
allowing him precedence over his successor of the same generation.
Her choice, she said, was already made, but she desired to take the
opinion of the Grand Councillors in the first instance. Prince Ch’ing
and Yüan Shih-k’ai then recommended the appointment of Prince
P’u Lun, or, failing him, Prince Kung. They thought the former, as
senior great-grandson of Tao-Kuang, was the more eligible
candidate, and with this view Prince Ch’un seemed disposed to
agree. The remaining Grand Councillors, however, advised the
selection of Prince Ch’un’s infant son.
After hearing the views of her Councillors, the Old Buddha
announced that long ago, at the time when she had betrothed the
daughter of Jung Lu to Prince Ch’un, she had decided that the eldest
son of this marriage should become Heir to the Throne, in
recognition and reward of Jung Lu’s lifelong devotion to her person,
and his paramount services to the Dynasty at the time of the Boxer
rising. She placed on record her opinion that he had saved the
Manchus by refusing to assist in the attack upon the Legations. In
the 3rd Moon of this year she had renewed her pledge to Jung Lu’s
widow, her oldest friend, just before she died. She would, therefore,
now bestow upon Prince Ch’un as Regent, the title of “Prince co-
operating in the Government,” a title one degree higher than that
which had been given to Prince Kung in 1861, who was made
“Adviser to the Government” by herself and her co-Regent.
 The Son of Heaven. H.M. Hsüan-T’ung, Emperor of China.

Upon hearing this decision, Prince Ch’un arose from his seat and
repeatedly kowtowed before Her Majesty, expressing a deep sense
of his own unworthiness. Once more Yüan Shih-k’ai courageously
advanced the superior claims of Prince P’u Lun: he was sincerely of
opinion that the time had come for the succession to be continued
along the original lines of primogeniture; it was clear also that he fully
realised that Prince Ch’un was his bitter enemy. The Old Buddha
turned upon him with an angry reprimand. “You think.” she said, “that
I am old, and in my dotage, but you should have learned by now that
when I make up my mind nothing stops me from acting upon it. At a
critical time in a nation’s affairs a youthful Sovereign is no doubt a
source of danger to the State, but do not forget that I shall be here to
direct and assist Prince Ch’un.” Then, turning to the other
Councillors, she continued:—“Draft two Decrees at once, in my
name, the first, appointing Tsai-feng, Prince Ch’un, to be ‘Prince co-
operating in the Government’ and the second commanding that P’u
Yi, son of Prince Ch’un, should enter the palace forthwith, to be
brought up within the precincts.” She ordered Prince Ch’ing to inform
the Emperor of these Decrees.
Kuang-Hsü was still conscious, and understood what Prince
Ch’ing said to him. “Would it not have been better,” he said, “to
nominate an adult? No doubt, however, the Empress Dowager
knows best.” Upon hearing of the appointment of Prince Ch’un to the
Regency, he expressed his gratification. This was at 3 p.m.; two
hours later the infant Prince had been brought into the Palace, and
was taken by his father to be shown both to the Empress Dowager
and the Emperor. At seven o’clock on the following morning the
physicians in attendance reported that His Majesty’s “nose was
twitching and his stomach rising,” from which signs they knew that
his end was at hand. During the night, feeling that death was near,
he had written out his last testament, in a hand almost illegible,
prefacing the same with these significant words:—

“We were the second son of Prince Ch’un when the

Empress Dowager selected Us for the Throne. She has
always hated Us, but for Our misery of the past ten years
Yüan Shih-k’ai is responsible, and one other” (the second
name is said to have been illegible). “When the time comes I
desire that Yüan be summarily beheaded.”
 The Emperor’s consort took possession of this document, which,
however, was seen by independent witnesses. Its wording goes to
show that any conciliatory attitude on the part of the Emperor during
the last year must have been inspired by fear and not by any revival
of affection.
Later in the day a Decree was promulgated, announcing to the
inhabitants of Peking and the Empire that their sovereign’s condition
was desperate, and calling on the provinces to send their most skilful
physicians post-haste to the capital so that, perchance, His Majesty’s
life might yet be saved. The Decree described in detail the
symptoms, real or alleged, of Kuang-Hsü’s malady. It was generally
regarded as a perfunctory announcement of an unimportant event,
long expected.
At 3 p.m. the Empress Dowager came to the “Ocean Terrace” to
visit the Emperor, but he was unconscious, and did not know her.
Later, when a short return of consciousness occurred, his attendants
endeavoured to persuade him to put on the Ceremonial Robes of
Longevity, in which etiquette prescribes that sovereigns should die. It
is the universal custom that, if possible, the patient should don these
robes in his last moments, for it is considered unlucky if they are put
on after death. His Majesty, however, obstinately declined, and at
five o’clock he died, in the presence of the Empress Dowager, his
consort, the two secondary consorts, and a few eunuchs. The
Empress Dowager did not remain to witness the ceremony of
clothing the body in the Dragon Robes, but returned forthwith to her
own palace, where she gave orders for the issue of his valedictory
Decree and for the proclamation of the new Emperor.
The most interesting passage of the Emperor’s valedictory Decree
was the following:—“Reflecting on the critical condition of our
Empire, we have been led to combine the Chinese system with
certain innovations from foreign countries. We have endeavoured to
establish harmony between the common people and converts to
Christianity. We have reorganised the army and founded colleges.
We have fostered trade and industries and have made provision for
a new judicial system, paving also the way for a Constitutional form
of government, so that all our subjects may enjoy the continued
blessings of peace.” After referring to the appointment of the Regent
and the nomination of a successor to the Dragon Throne, he
concludes (or rather the Empress concluded for him) with a further
reference to the Constitution, and an appeal to his Ministers to purify
their hearts and prepare themselves, so that, after nine years, the
new order may be accomplished, and the Imperial purposes
successfully achieved.
The Old Buddha appeared at this juncture to be in particularly
good spirits, astonishing all about her by her vivacity and keenness.
She gave orders that a further Decree be published, in the name of
the new Emperor, containing the usual laudation of the deceased
monarch and an expression of the infant Emperor’s gratitude to the
Empress Dowager for her benevolence in placing him on the Throne.
It will be remembered that the Censor Wu K’o-tu committed
suicide at the beginning of Kuang-Hsü’s reign, as an act of protest at
the irregularity in the succession, which left no heir to the Emperor
T’ung-Chih, that monarch’s spirit being left desolate and without a
successor to perform on his behalf the ancestral sacrifices. The
child, P’u Yi, having now been made heir by adoption to T’ung-Chih,
in fulfilment of the promise made by Tzŭ Hsi at the time of this
sensational suicide, it appeared as if the irregularity were about to be
repeated, and the soul of Kuang-Hsü to be left in a similar orbate
condition in the Halls of Hades, unless some means could be found
to solve the difficulty and meet the claims of both the deceased
Emperors. In the event of Kuang-Hsü being left without heir or
descendant to perform the all-important worship at his shrine, there
could be but little doubt that the feelings of the orthodox would again
be outraged, and the example of Wu K’o-tu might have been
followed by other Censors. The Empress Dowager, realising the
importance of the question, solved it in her own masterful way by a
stroke of policy which, although without precisely applicable
precedent in history, nevertheless appeared to satisfy all parties, and
to placate all prejudices, if only by reason of its simplicity and
originality. Her Decree on the subject was as follows:—
 “The Emperor T’ung-Chih, having left no heir, was
compelled to issue a Decree to the effect that so soon as a
child should be born to His Majesty Kuang-Hsü, that child
would be adopted as Heir to the Emperor T’ung-Chih. But
now His Majesty Kuang-Hsü has ascended on high, dragon-
borne, and he also has left no heir. I am, therefore, now
obliged to decree that P’u Yi, son of Tsai Feng, the ‘Prince co-
operating in the Government,’ should become heir by
adoption to the Emperor T’ung-Chih, and that, at the same
time, he should perform joint sacrifices at the shrine of His
Majesty Kuang-Hsü.”

To those who are acquainted with the tangled web of Chinese

Court ceremonial and the laws of succession, it would seem that so
simple (and so new) an expedient might suitably have been adopted
on previous similar occasions, since all that was required was to
make the individual living Emperor assume a dual personality
towards the dead, and one cannot help wondering whether the
classical priestcraft which controls these things would have accepted
the solution so readily at the hands of anyone less masterful and
determined than Tzŭ Hsi.
In a subsequent Decree the Empress Dowager handed over to the
Regent full control in all routine business, reserving only to herself
the last word in all important matters of State. The effect of this
arrangement was to place Prince Ch’un in much the same position of
nominal sovereignty as that held by Kuang-Hsü himself, until such
time as the young Emperor should come of age, or until the death of
the Empress Dowager. In other words, Tzŭ Hsi had once more put in
operation the machinery by which she had acquired and held the
supreme power since the death of her husband, the Emperor Hsien-
Feng. There is little doubt that at this moment she fully expected to
live for many years more, and that she made her plans so as to
enjoy to the end uninterrupted and undiminished authority. In her
Decree on this subject, wherein, as usual, she justifies her
proceedings by reference to the critical condition of affairs, she
states that the Regent is to carry on the Government “subject always
to the instructions of the Empress Dowager,” and there can be no
doubt that had she lived the Emperor’s brother would no more have
been permitted any independent initiative or authority than the
unfortunate Kuang-Hsü himself.
 XXVII
TZŬ HSI’S DEATH AND BURIAL

At the close of a long and exciting day, Her Majesty retired to rest
on the 14th of November, weary with her labours but apparently
much improved in health. Next morning she arose at her usual hour,
6 a.m., gave audience to the Grand Council and talked for some time
with the late Emperor’s widow, with the Regent and with his wife, the
daughter of Jung Lu. By a Decree issued in the name of the infant
Emperor, she assumed the title of Empress Grand Dowager, making
Kuang-Hsü’s widow Empress Dowager. Elaborate ceremonies were
planned to celebrate the bestowal of these new titles, and to
proclaim the installation of the Regent. Suddenly, at noon, while
sitting at her meal, the Old Buddha was seized with a fainting fit, long
and severe. When at last she recovered consciousness, it was clear
to all that the stress and excitement of the past few days had brought
on a relapse, her strength having been undermined by the long
attack of dysentery. Realising that her end was near, she hurriedly
summoned the new Empress Dowager, the Regent and the Grand
Council to the Palace, where, upon their coming together, she
dictated the following Decree, speaking in the same calm tones
which she habitually used in transacting the daily routine of
Government work:—

“By command of the Empress Grand Dowager: Yesterday I

issued an Edict whereby Prince Ch’un was made Regent, and
I commanded that the whole business of Government should
be in his hands, subject only to my instructions. Being seized
of a mortal sickness, and being without hope of recovery, I
now order that henceforward the government of the Empire
shall be entirely in the hands of the Regent. Nevertheless,
should there arise any question of vital importance, in regard
 to which an expression of the Empress Dowager’s opinion is
desirable, the Regent shall apply in person to her for
instructions, and act accordingly.”

The significance of the conclusion of this Decree is apparent to

anyone familiar with Chinese Court procedure and with the life
history of the Empress herself. Its ingenious wording was expressly
intended to afford to the new Empress Dowager and the Yehonala
Clan an opportunity for intervention at any special crisis, thus
maintaining the Clan’s final authority and safeguarding its position in
the event of any hostile move by the Regent or his adherents. And
the result of this precaution has already been shown on the occasion
of the recent dismissal of Tuan Fang[129] from the Viceroyalty of
Chihli for alleged want of respect in connection with the funeral
ceremonies of the Empress Dowager, an episode which showed
clearly that the Regent has no easy game to play, and that the new
Empress Dowager, Lung Yu, has every intention to defend the
position of the Clan and to take advantage thereof along lines very
similar to those followed by her august predecessor.
After issuing the Decree above quoted, the Empress Dowager,
rapidly sinking, commanded that her valedictory Decree be drafted
and submitted to her for approval. This was done quickly. After
perusing the document, she proceeded to correct it in several
places, notably by the addition of the sentence, “It became my
inevitable and bounden duty to assume the Regency.” Commenting
on this addition, she volunteered the explanation that she wished it
inserted because on more than one occasion her assumption of the
supreme power had been wrongfully attributed to personal ambition,
whereas, as a matter of fact, the welfare of the State had always
weighed with her as much as her own inclinations, and she had been
forced into this position. From her own pen also came the touching
conclusion of the Decree, that sentence which begins: “Looking back
over the memories of these fifty years,” etc. She observed, in writing
this, that she had nothing to regret in her life, and could only wish
that it might have lasted for many years more. She then proceeded
to bid an affectionate farewell to her numerous personal attendants
and the waiting maids around her, all of whom were overcome by
very real and deep grief. To the end her mind remained quite clear,
and, at the very point of death, she continued to speak as calmly as
if she were just about to set out on one of her progresses to the
Summer Palace. Again and again, when all thought the end had
come, she recovered consciousness, and up to the end the watchers
at her bedside could not help hoping (or fearing, as the case might
be with them) that she would yet get the better of Death. At the last,
in articulo mortis, they asked her, in accordance with the Chinese
custom, to pronounce her last words. Strangely significant was the
answer of the extraordinary woman who had moulded and guided
the destinies of the Chinese people for half a century: “Never again,”
she said, “allow any woman to hold the supreme power in the State.
It is against the house-law of our Dynasty and should be strictly
forbidden. Be careful not to permit eunuchs to meddle in
Government matters. The Ming Dynasty was brought to ruin by
eunuchs, and its fate should be a warning to my people.” Tzŭ Hsi
died, as she had lived, above the law, yet jealous of its fulfilment by
others. Only a few hours before she had provided for the
transmission of authority to a woman of her own clan: now,
confronting the dark Beyond, she hesitated to perpetuate a system
which, in any but the strongest hands, could not fail to throw the
Empire into confusion. She died, as she had lived, a creature of
impulse and swiftly changing moods, a woman of infinite variety.
At 3 p.m., straightening her limbs, she expired with her face to the
south, which is the correct position, according to Chinese ideas, for a
dying sovereign. It was reported by those who saw her die that her
mouth remained fixedly open, which the Chinese interpret as a sign
that the spirit of the deceased is unwilling to leave the body and to
take its departure for the place of the Nine Springs.
Thus died Tzŭ Hsi; and when her ladies and handmaidens had
dressed the body in its Robes of State, embroidered with the
Imperial Dragon, her remains and those of the Emperor were borne
from the Lake Palace to the Forbidden City, through long lines of
their kneeling subjects, and were reverently laid in separate Halls of
the Palace, with all due state and ceremony.
 The valedictory Decree of Tzŭ Hsi, the last words from that pen
which had indeed been mightier than many swords, was for the most
part a faithful reproduction of the classical models, the orthodox
swan song of the ruler of a people which makes of its writings a
religion. Its text is as follows:—

The Valedictory Mandate of Her Majesty Tz’ŭ-Hsi-Tuan-Yu-

K’ang-I-Chao-Yü-Chuang-Cheng-Shou-Kung-Ch’in-
Hsien-Ch’ung-Hsi, the Empress Grand Dowager,
declareth as follows:—
“I, of humble virtue, did reverently receive the appointment
of the late Emperor Hsien-Feng, which prepared for me a
place amongst his Consorts. When the late Emperor T’ung-
Chih succeeded in early childhood to the Throne, there was
rebellion still raging in the land, which was being vigorously
suppressed. Not only did the Taiping and turbaned rebels
engage in successive outbreaks, but disorder was spread by
the Kuei-chou aborigines and by Mahomedan bandits. The
provinces of the coast were in great distress, the people on
the verge of ruin, widespread distress confronting us on all
sides.
“Co-operating then with the senior Consort of Hsien-Feng,
the Empress Dowager of the Eastern Palace, I undertook the
heavy duties of Government, toiling ever, day and night.
Obeying the behests of His late Majesty, my husband, I urged
on the Metropolitan and provincial officials, as well as the
military commanders, directing their policies and striving for
the restoration of peace. I employed virtuous officials and was
ever ready to listen to wise counsel. I relieved my people’s
distress in time of flood and famine. By the goodwill and
bounty of Heaven, I suppressed the rebellions and out of dire
peril restored peace. Later, when the Emperor T’ung-Chih
passed away and the Emperor Kuang-Hsü, now just
deceased, entered by adoption upon the great heritage, the
crisis was even more dangerous and the condition of the
people even more pitiable. Within the Empire calamities were
rife, while from abroad we were confronted by repeated and
increasing acts of aggression.
“Once again it became my inevitable and bounden duty to
assume the Regency. Two years ago I issued a Decree
announcing the Throne’s intention to grant a Constitution, and
this present year I have promulgated the date at which it is to
come into effect. Innumerable affairs of State have required
direction at my hands and I have laboured without ceasing
and with all my might. Fortunately, my constitution was
naturally strong, and I have been able to face my duties with
undiminished vigour. During the summer and autumn of this
year, however, I have frequently been in bad health, at a time
when pressing affairs of State allowed me no repose. I lost
my sleep and appetite, and gradually my strength failed me.
Yet even then I took no rest, not for a single day. And
yesterday saw the death of His Majesty Kuang-Hsü; whereat
my grief overwhelmed me. I can bear no more, and so am I
come to the pass where no possible hope of recovery
remains.
“Looking back upon the memories of these last fifty years, I
perceive how calamities from within and aggression from
without have come upon us in relentless succession, and that
my life has never enjoyed a moment’s respite from anxiety.
But to-day definite progress has been made towards
necessary reforms. The new Emperor is but an infant, just
reaching the age when wise instruction is of the highest
importance. The Prince Regent and all our officials must
henceforth work loyally together to strengthen the foundations
of our Empire. His Majesty must devote himself to studying
the interests of the country and so refrain from giving way to
personal grief. That he may diligently pursue his studies, and
hereafter add fresh lustre to the glorious achievements of his
ancestors, is now my most earnest prayer.
“Mourning to be worn for only twenty-seven days.
“Cause this to be everywhere known!
 “Tenth Moon, 23rd day (November the 15th).”

The title by which Her Majesty was canonised contains no less

than twenty-two characters, sixteen of which were hers at the day of
her death, the other six having been added in the Imperial Decrees
which recorded her decease and praised her glorious achievements.
The first character “Dutiful”—i.e. to her husband—is always
accorded to a deceased Empress. It is significant of the unpractical
nature of the literati, or of their cynicism, that the second of her latest
titles signifies “reverend,” implying punctilious adherence to ancestral
traditions! The third and fourth mean “Equal of Heaven,” which
places her on a footing of equality with Confucius, while the fifth and
sixth raise her even higher than the Sage in the national Pantheon,
for it means “Increase in Sanctity,” of which Confucius was only a
“Manifestor.” In the records of the Dynasty she will henceforth be
known as the Empress “Dutiful, Reverend and Glorious,” a title,
according to the laws of Chinese honorifics, higher than any woman
ruler has hitherto received since the beginning of history.
Since her death the prestige of the Empress Dowager, and her
hold on the imagination of the people, have grown rather than
decreased. Around her coffin, while it lay first in her Palace of
Peaceful Longevity and later in a hall at the foot of the Coal Hill,
north of the Forbidden City, awaiting the appointed day propitious for
burial, there gathered something more than the conventional regrets
and honours which fall usually to the lot of China’s rulers. Officials as
well as people felt that with her they had lost the strong hand of
guidance, and a personality which appealed to most of them as
much from the human as from the official point of view. Their
affectionate recollections of the Old Buddha were clearly shown by
the elaborate sacrifices paid to her manes at various periods from
the day of her death to that day, a year later, when her ancestral
tablet was brought home to the Forbidden City from the Imperial
tombs with all pomp and circumstance.
On the All Souls’ day of the Buddhists, celebrated in the 7th Moon,
and which fell in the September following her death, a magnificent
barge made of paper and over a hundred and fifty feet long was set