Mitter, Sreemati (2027) Liquidated: The Colonial Theft of Private Palestinian Financial Assets, 1917-1951. American Historical Review. (In Press)

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Abstract

What is the impact of colonial rule on native-owned financial property? This article examines this question via the story of the Ottoman Agricultural Bank in Palestine, whose assets, comprising the savings and tithe payments of thousands of Palestinian peasants, were seized by British agents during their wartime occupation of Palestine in 1917. Though the British promised to release these after the war and upon the establishment of the British Mandate Palestine, this research finds that they never did so. Instead, they forcibly liquidated the bank and plundered its assets for years before transferring its remaining balance, in 1951, to Israel, after the termination of the Mandate.
By comparing the differing fates of the Palestinian and Transjordanian OABs under the same British colonial rule in the same period, this article identifies two related reasons for this divergence: the first was the overt British deference to Zionist opposition to the OAB; the second was the systematic exclusion of Palestinians from the staff of the Mandate administration, and the antipodal appointment of committed Zionists to key administrative roles.
It is too simple to conclude that colonialism has a detrimental impact on the financial property of the colonized; it is, as this Palestinian example shows, how - and by whom - the colony is run, that matters.