Jerusalem Quarterly 54 [57] above.‘Adel Manna ‘has recently characterized the 1834 Palestinian revolt against the rule of Mehmed ‘Ali as “remarkable” because it united “people widely separated by geographical features, local cultures, and even religion” in common cause. 3 This essay is not about 1834, but Manna’s assertion raises a question central to it, which known primary sources relating to the popular revolt are regrettably silent about: did the revolt bring Palestine together, or did it spread so quickly and widely because of pre-existing, broad networks of relations?

Studies of geographically and administratively defined areas have clearly demonstrated the growing bureaucratization and standardization, ie modernization and incorporation, of local society around and through government institutions in the Tanzimat years. These reforms encouraged and promoted compartmentalization of regions around urban-based government institutions. Studies unbounded by geographical space can bring into focus another dimension of how local society was conceived, understood and fashioned–the popular conception. This essay uses evidence from the Hebron shari ‘a-court records with this goal in mind. It traces and examines everyday movement and interaction among villagers in Palestine in the last third of the nineteenth century. 4 Its frame of reference is a developing consensus in Middle Eastern studies that peregrination, mobility and migration–long recognized in and beyond the Empire among notables, merchants, Sufis, Jews, and bedouin–are historically society-wide phenomena. 5 In the case of late-Ottoman, southern bilad al-sham, this essay will demonstrate through a focus on patterns of mobility that a plethora of subaltern networks of so-called “inter-regional” relations had been forged on the ground by the last third of the nineteenth century, the pervasiveness and historical significance of which has heretofore been overlooked. I maintain that the amplitude, nature, and extent of these quotidian relations occasion a re-thinking of our historiographical conceptualization and approach to Palestinian society on three levels. Firstly, they suggest there is a need to re-think the conventional “urban center–rural hinterland” model as the only appropriate methodology for examining rural society. Secondly, and concomitantly, they impel us to expand a common, city-basedmicroregion approach to the study of late-Ottoman Palestine in order to incorporate the multitude of historical circuits and interactions that were not bounded by geomicroregional borders. Finally, they prompt a reassessment of conceptualizations such as “local” and “regional” as they have been commonly used to divide Palestine into sub-units, and the ways these relative terms have been applied to address historical questions of Palestinian identity.