Fellahin (Ar. pl. peasants) made up the majority of Palestinians before the twentieth century. The figure of the fellah has occupied much of Western and regional writing on Palestine in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. From Ottoman-era travelogues and ethnographic writings to the Arab Nahda and the social commentaries it heralded, and to Mandate-era British and Zionist colonial writing, fellahin featured prominently in many works analyzing Palestine’s conditions and potential for development – as an imperial province, a mandated region, or a future independent state.
This paper investigates how different writers acquired knowledge about the fellahin of Palestine and how they perceived them as social, economic, and environmental agents. It considers the role writers assigned to the fellahin within society and explores the futures these actors envisioned for the fellahin in the empire, the region, and the nation. Furthermore, it examines their perspectives on the potential roles that the fellahin could or should assume within the framework of the then-emerging global capitalist system. Many of these forms of knowledge relied heavily on and were influenced by imaginaries imported from elsewhere, whether in Europe or various colonial contexts, and were then translated into the Palestinian context. This body of knowledge about the fellahin assumed the authority to deeply impact their lives and livelihoods, and ultimately the country's fate.