Rural society and imperial settlement in the Ottoman Jawlan/Golan Heights, c. 1800–1915

This article reexamines the demographic, social and spatial transformation of the Jawlan/Golan Heights from the beginning of the nineteenth century to the First World War. Drawing on Ottoman provincial yearbooks, Arabic chronicles, European travelogues and local oral traditions, it challenges the historiographical trope of the region as an empty, lawless, or marginal frontier. The article argues that the Jawlan’s rural landscape emerged through negotiation between tribal authority, peasant continuity and the settlement and sedentarization of Circassian and Turkmen migrants. Moving beyond narratives of decline and recovery, it shows how local actors engaged the centralizing mechanisms of the late Ottoman state to reshape land tenure, taxation, mobility, and communal authority. By reconstructing village settlement patterns and administrative change, the article contributes to the social history of late Ottoman Levant and frontier governance in the modern Middle East.