Hamama

Abstract

This article explores the history of Hamama, an Arab village in the Gaza Sub-District during the Late Ottoman and British Mandate period c. 1750–1948 CE, combining the often disparate fields of Ottoman/Levantine archaeology and Ottoman/Palestinian history for tracing its rise from an ordinary village into the Sub-District’s third largest settlement. Ethnographic sources and historical evidence testify that the village of Hamama had been inhabited continuously from the Mamluk period until 1948. The paper uses the case of Hamama to argue that the detailed history of specific villages and towns cannot be reconstructed out of a synchronous (specific point-in-time) reading of the sources without considering the influence of previous stages in their socioeconomic development. Using a vast array of primary sources and archaeological materials, this study explores the interaction between local topography and existing social fabrics with broader transformative processes on the regional and trans-regional levels. It shows how the region of Hamama underwent a significant economic growth and settlement expansion. In the 1860s, local administrative re-structuring took hold as part of the implementation of the tanzimat reforms at the district level. The establishment of the “quarter system”—the division of village land between the groups of families—led to considerable economic development, which was evident in village land uses by the early 20th century. Later, British town plans and building permits testify to the involvement of the colonial administration in the architectural and spatial planning of the Arab countryside. These were local manifestations of globalization and the modernization efforts of the Ottoman Empire and later the British Mandate.