The Divided Economy of Mandatory Palestine. By Jacob Metzer. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Pp. xxii, 275.

2001 ◽  
Vol 61 (4) ◽  
pp. 1128-1129
Author(s):  
Tarik M. Yousef

Like the rest of the Middle East, the economic history of Palestine in the early twentieth century has traditionally been the domain of social and political historians. The complexity and controversy surrounding the era of the British Mandate (1919–1948) ought to deter any serious economic historian from contemplating a comprehensive, quantitative analysis of economic life. After all, this was the period when the Zionist goal to create a Jewish national home in Palestine came into direct conflict with the native Arab community, and stretched the flexibility of a British administration that had committed itself to promoting the Zionist project while protecting the native population. Fortunately, Jacob Metzer has assumed the difficult task of producing an economically sophisticated study of the origins and the evolution of this divided economy while circumventing the political pitfalls associated with Mandatory Palestine.

1994 ◽  
Vol 10 ◽  
pp. 75-94 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joel S. Migdal ◽  
Baruch Kimmerling

No period was more decisive in the modern history of Palestine than the British Mandate, which lasted from the end of World War I until 1948. Not only did British rule establish the political boundaries of Palestine, the new realities forced both Jews and Arabs in the country to redefine their social boundaries and self-identity. But the cataclysmic events that continued through 1948, with the creation of Israel and what Arabs called al-Nakba (the catastrophe of dispersal and exile), took shape in the wake of key changes stretching over the last century of Ottoman rule. What was to be Palestine after World War I became increasingly more integrated territorially during the nineteenth century. And Arab society in the last century of Ottoman rule underwent critical changes that paved the way for the emergence of a Palestinian people in the twentieth century.


1963 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
pp. 215-223
Author(s):  
Frederic C. Lane

When requested in the spring of 1961 to review the overdue third volume of The Cambridge Economic History of Europe, I read eagerly the proof copy sent me and then wrote this review, fearing that if I delayed until the volume was actually out the lapse of time would dull my reactions. Time had already blunted the impact of some of the contributions, for example, the opening essay, “The Rise of Towns,” by H. van Werveke. No wonder, since he finished writing it, as he tells us in a footnote, in 1940 (sic), and retouched it in 1953 and 1956 Such long-suffering contributors deserve to be reviewed before 1963, but only in this year has the Cambridge University Press finally released the last of the three volumes planned as an authoritative and balanced account of the economic life of Medieval Europe.


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