Pastoralists, Camels and State-Making: The Banu Sakhr and Glubb Pasha in Early Twentieth-Century Jordan

Abstract

The administrative documents produced in Transjordan during the first decades of the British Mandate concerning the Banu Sakhr Bedouin tribe offer a detailed case study of state-making and the consequent disruption of autonomous nomadic pastoralist society. In the late Ottoman period, the tribe remained largely self-sufficient and beyond the reach of the authorities by virtue of their flocks of camels. But the extension of state-making into the desert regions during the Mandate, associated above all with the activities of one British army officer, John Bagot Glubb, served to undermine Banu Sakhr camel husbandry and alter the power dynamics between tribe and state. Taxation, control of mobility, border regimes and an end to inter-tribal raiding, combined with drought and economic depression, forced the tribe to diversify away from camel pastoralism. This process altered the Banu Sakhr social system and solidified the encapsulation of the tribe within the nascent state.

Keywords

• jordan
• bedouin
• interwar
• glubb
• state-making
• banu sakhr