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Administrative Divisions of Ottoman Palestine, c. 1860-1914

Johann Buessow

Introduction

State administration can decisively shape people’s lives. A single line on a bureaucratic map may determine which court hears a dispute, which governor approves a road, or where a census ledger is stored. For historians, knowing a community’s precise jurisdiction is equally crucial: it guides archival searches and frames explanations of social, cultural, or economic change.

When administrative reforms bring benefits or hardships, they often provoke local excitement or resistance. This was especially true in late Ottoman Palestine, where provincial demarcations shifted repeatedly over the nineteenth century. In the summer of 1872, for example, local newspapers reported widespread enthusiasm when Jerusalem was briefly elevated to the capital of a newly created province that united all the Palestinian districts. Merchants and notables in Jerusalem greeted the decision with high hopes—especially because it placed Jerusalem and Nablus, the region’s two main economic centers, under a single jurisdiction. The new governor immediately ordered the construction of a road between the two cities, and according to one newspaper, “thousands of hands” of local workers were soon hard at work on the project (Buessow 2011, 41–44).

The mood must have darkened when the unification decree was repealed only a short time later. Jerusalem was reduced to an “independent district” (Mutasarrıflık), while Nablus was reassigned first to the province of Damascus and later to the distant port city of Beirut. Contemporary newspapers remained silent—likely to avoid offending the authorities—but a long series of petitions and disputations by local elites speak volumes. In 1890, a high-ranking delegation from Jerusalem traveled to Istanbul to request the creation of a full-fledged province that would reunite Jerusalem with the northern Palestinian districts and even parts of Transjordan. In 1906, notables from Nablus argued for attachment to Jerusalem, claiming that Beirut maintained “an anti-Nabulsi attitude” (Buessow 2011, 55–56).

Although scholarship on late Ottoman Palestine has grown steadily in recent decades, reliable details about how the region was actually administered remain surprisingly elusive. Drawing on largely unpublished primary sources, this blog post presents a series of tables that summarize the major administrative divisions—and at least some of their repeated reconfigurations—during the final half century of Ottoman rule, from the 1870s to the First World War.

The tables are meant as a research aid rather than a full analysis. The following remarks offer only brief context to help readers interpret the figures. First, I review the most important features of Ottoman provincial administration during this period. I then add some remarks on the sources that form the base for reconstructing the administrative makeup of late Ottoman Palestine. I conclude with some general remarks on what we might gain from a more detailed analysis of the information contained in the tables.

This compilation forms part of the groundwork in the LOOP project’s efforts to build a historical geographic information system (GIS) of late Ottoman Palestine. The tables below will be fed into a digital environment where administrative units, demographic data, and spatial relationships can be explored interactively. Readers are invited to use, critique, and expand this material as the project develops.

Major Administrative Changes during the Period

The territorial administration of the Ottoman Eastern Mediterranean—and especially of the Palestinian lands—was a highly politicized affair in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Decisions about provincial boundaries and jurisdiction reflected competing interests and power struggles at the local, imperial, and even international levels (see, e.g., Hanssen 2005, 25-54; Buessow 2011, 41-59). In the wake of the Vilayet Law of 1864, the Ottoman government embarked on a comprehensive overhaul of its administrative system across the empire (Sezen 2017; Buessow 2011). The following overview sketches these changes before presenting the detailed tables (Figures 2-6).

The Vilayet Law introduced a standardized hierarchy of territorial units designed to strengthen central control. From largest to smallest, these comprised the province (vilayet), the district (liva or sancak – both terms were used interchangeably), the subdistrict (kaza), and the rural district (nahiye, sometimes also translated a “parish”); municipalities (belediye) were added for urban centers. Some strategically or symbolically important territories were designated independent districts (müstakil sancak or liva gayr-ı mülhak), administered by a mutasarrıf reporting directly to the Interior Ministry in Istanbul. In everyday usage, these were known as mutasarrıflık (Mutasarrifate). In Palestine, Jerusalem was granted this special status.

In the Syrian and Palestinian lands, this reorganization coincided with a reshuffling of political power centers. Earlier in the century, the region had been ruled by semi-autonomous local warlords and was briefly occupied by Egyptian forces in the 1830s. After regaining control, the Ottomans faced the dual challenge of reasserting imperial authority as well as integrating Palestine into the new provincial system. European commercial and missionary interests—and later Zionist settlement initiatives—added further complexity to these administrative reforms (Buessow 2011).

Key stages of change

The main territorial adjustments can be summarized chronologically (for detailed source data, see Hanssen 2005; Buessow 2011; Schayegh 2017; Sezen 2017):

  • 1840s-1860s: Palestine formed part of the province (eyalet) of Sidon (Sayda). (Eyalet was the older Ottoman term for “province,” which was replaced by vilayet in 1864.)
  • 1865: With the creation of the Vilayet of Syria (Suriye vilayeti), Damascus became the principal administrative center for the Palestinian districts.
  • 1867–1917: After two short-lived attempts to create a “Province of Jerusalem” (in 1867 and 1872), the city was designated the capital of the Jerusalem Independent District (Kudüs Müstakil Sancak or Mutasarrifate) in 1872, encompassing the Jerusalem, Hebron, and Gaza regions. This arrangement remained in place until the end of Ottoman rule.
  • 1865-1887: The northern Palestinian districts remained within the Province of Syria, administered from Damascus.
  • 1888–1918: The establishment of the Beirut Vilayet transferred the northern districts of Acre (ʿAkka) and Nablus from the Damascus Vilayet to Beirut, marking a decisive shift in regional power and consolidating Beirut’s position at the expense of Damascus (Figure 1).

These changes illustrate once again that administrative division served as both an instrument of imperial policy and a field of negotiation for local coalitions, including merchants and powerholders in the ascending coastal regions (Hanssen 2005). Each new boundary not only reorganized the mechanics of governance but also recalibrated the relationships among local elites, provincial officials, and the central government.

Figure 1: Districts in the Palestinian region, 1888-1918. Adapted from Krämer 2008.

The tables presented here highlight two key aspects of late Ottoman administration. First, they highlight the designation of rural districts (nahiyes) to their respective subdistricts (kazas), providing the reader with a basic orientation of the administrative geography of Palestine (Figures 2–5). Second, they record the “rank” (derece) assigned to each subdistrict in the Ottoman hierarchy, an important clue to the Ottoman state’s own sense of priorities and its administrative weight within the region (Figure 6). In the next stage of this project, individual villages will be added to the tables with precise georeferences. This will make it possible to map the changing boundaries of the nahiyes, track their territorial shifts over time, and visualize the broader evolution of the rural settlement landscape.

Sources

Where can this data be found? The administrative landscape of about 1870—just before the major reordering of the Ottoman Eastern Mediterranean—is recorded in the official yearbook (Salname) of the Province of Syria for 1288 (1871–72 CE).

For the following decades, the evidence is more fragmented and must be pieced together from several types of sources:

  • Provincial yearbooks: From the 1890s onward, the northern districts of Acre and Nablus were regularly covered in the Salnames of the Province of Beirut. By contrast, the Independent District of Jerusalem never issued a Salname of its own, leaving a significant gap.
  • Archival surveys: Periodic handwritten reports prepared by Ottoman officials, preserved in the Ottoman Archives in Istanbul, provide crucial supplementary information for Jerusalem and other areas lacking printed yearbooks.
  • Imperial cartography: The Ottoman Atlas of 1907 offers yet another perspective. Its colorful empire-wide maps presented the Palestinian districts to its Ottoman Turkish readership within a broader imperial conceptual framework, revealing how Istanbul perceived its provincial order at the turn of the 20th century.
Figure 2. The northern parts of Ottoman Palestine as depicted in the Ottoman Atlas of 1907. Source: Wikimedia.

Why administrative (di)visions matter

As stated above, the tables presented here are intended as a starting point rather than a finished account. By gathering scattered administrative data in one place, they open the way for detailed investigations into population change, taxation, and local governance in late Ottoman Palestine. Future research—whether through GIS mapping, comparisons with census records, or integration with other archival material—will be able to trace shifting boundaries and their implications for both the Ottoman state and the region’s diverse communities.

The tables can be read in multiple ways. Augmented with georeferences, they can help reconstruct the changing administrative and settlement map of the region. From a social-historical and demographic perspective, the numbers of villages add another layer to our understanding of rural development. Among other things, they illustrate how population growth, which has been documented in previous studies (McCarthy 1990; Grossmann 2011, 112), translated into settlement expansion. For example, in the District of Jerusalem, thirteen more villages were counted in 1914 than in 1872. The data also reveal regional differences. The north of Palestine appears less densely settled than the south around Jerusalem and Nablus, yet the figures reveal even stronger growth in rural settlement there: the villages administered by Haifa rose from 41 in 1872 to 62 around 1903. Overall, the Syrian provincial yearbook of 1872 listed 657 villages, while Ottoman provincial statistics from around 1910 mention 785—roughly a twenty-percent increase.

The administrative and technical sides of administrative knowledge production about Palestine’s geography merit equally close scrutiny. Spelling errors in the Syrian Salname of 1872 reveal that the scribes who prepared the lithograph draft were unfamiliar with many Palestinian place names. We can even learn about the lithography department in the Damascus Provincial Press in one of the yearbooks themselves (Salname 1292, 66). Later Salnames show a shift to movable-type printing and a gradual consolidation of geographical knowledge. The Ottoman Atlas of 1907 also indicates the hierarchical position of each unit within the imperial structure, even though the numerical data accompanying its maps are unreliable. Its rankings highlight the prominence accorded to Jerusalem and Acre and the comparatively low status of Nablus and other urban centers of the interior—a point that Nabulsi petitioners criticized in their complaints of the same period.

Finally, these documents should also be read as reflections of political visions for the region, coproduced through ongoing exchanges between Ottoman officials and local actors. They reveal how fluid administrative divisions could be. After the northern districts of Acre and Haifa were placed under the Beirut Province in 1888, for example, a series of administrative adjustments followed. Previous research has shown that such seemingly routine acts of territorial administration often emerged from intense lobbying and power struggles (Hanssen 2005; Buessow 2011; on the city level, see Buessow 2023). In the case of Acre and Haifa, competition between the long-standing administrative center of Acre and the rapidly rising port city of Haifa—both backed and contested by imperial authorities—significantly shaped the reordering of jurisdictions (Yazbak 1998; Ben-Bassat and Ben-Artzi 2016). These revisions were therefore not merely technical measures, but part of broader Ottoman–local power dynamics that merit closer study.

Figure 3: Administrative Divisions of Ottoman Palestine c. 1860-1872.
Province (vilayet) District (liva)Number of Villages per DistrictSubdistrict (kaza)Number of Villages per SubdistrictRural District (nahiye) Number of Villages per Rural District
Syria  Jerusalem  284Jerusalem  116Bani Zayd24
Bani Murra wa-Bani Salim12
Bani Malik23
Bani Hasan9
Wadiya10
Bani Harith (al-Qibli wa-l-Shimali)17
Bira wa-Jabal al-Quds21
Gaza55Khan Yunis14
Majdal7
Gaza (merkez)34
Jaffa61Jaffa (merkez)11
Lydda18
Ramla32
Hebron52Hebron (merkez)14
ʿAmama5
Bayt Jibrin12
ʿArqub21
Acre  158Acre34Sahil (Acre)19
Shaghur15
Haifa41Ruha19
Sahil (Haifa)15
Jabal (Carmel)7
Nazareth38Nazareth (merkez)21
Shafa ʿAmr17
Safed38Jabra25
Jabal (Safed)13
Tiberias7Shafa wa-Ghawr7
Balqa (including territories in Transjordan)215Nablus176Mashariq Nablus20
Mashariq al-Jarar28
Jammaʿin al-Awwal23
Jammaʿin al-Thani25
Wadi al-Shaʿir20
Shaʿrawiyya al-Sharqiyya24
Shaʿrawiyya al-Gharbiyya8
Bani Saʿb28
Jenin39Shafa al-Qibli12
Shafa al-Shimali13
Shafa al-Gharbi14
Total3 11 38657
Source: Salname-yi Vilayet-i Suriye 1288/1872.
Figure 4: Administrative Divisions of the District of Acre, 1903.
District (sancak) Subdistrict (kaza) Number of Villages per SubdistrictRural District (nahiye)
AcreAcre (merkez)58Shafa ʿAmr
Sahil ʿAkka
Shaghur
Haifa62Qaysariyya
Ijzim
Nazareth53Safuriyya
Tiberias38Ghawr
Shafa
Safed60Jabal
Jabra
Total527110
Source: Salname-yi Vilayet-i Suriye, 1291/1874 and 1299/1884; Salname-yi Vilayet-i Beyrut, 1310/1895 and 1318/1903, summarized in Aydın 2013, 22.
Figure 5: Administrative Divisions of the District of Nablus, 1906.
District (sancak) Subdistrict (kaza) Number of Villages per SubdistrictRural District (nahiye)Number of Villages per Rural District
NablusNablus (merkez)101Mashariq Nablus27
Mashariq Baytawi28
Jamaʿin al-awwal (Cemain-i evvel)25
Jamaʿin al-thani (Cemain-i sani)21
Jenin72Shaʿrawiyya15
Bisan Çiftlik-i Hümayunu9
Bilad Haritha34
Mashariq al-Jarrar14
Bani Saʿb44Haram9
Bani Saʿb35
Total 3 10217
Source: Salname-yi Vilayet-i Beyrut, 1324/1906.
Figure 6: Administrative Divisions of the Subdistrict of Jerusalem 1914-1917
Province (Vilayet or Independent District (Mutasarrıflık)Subdistrict (kaza) Number of Villages per SubdistrictRural District (nahiye) Number of Villages per Rural District
JerusalemJerusalem127Jerusalem (merkez)49
Bethlehem8
ʿAbwayn24
Safa22
Ramallah20
Jericho (Ariha)*1
Gaza63Gaza merkez15
Majdal27
Faluja18
Khan Yunis3
Jaffa60Jaffa (merkez)19
Ramla29
Niʿlin12
Hebron46Hebron (merkez)18
Bayt Jibrin16
Bayt Iʿtab12
Total   16297
Sources: BOA, DH.İ.UM.EK00124, dated 1914; DH. UMVM, 145/49, dated 1917

* Note: The numbers exclude three tribal groups assigned to Jericho.

Figure 7: The hierarchy of administrative units in Ottoman Palestine according to the Ottoman Atlas of 1907.

The “ranks” assigned to subdistricts are indicative of the relative importance that the Ottoman imperial government perceived in the respective area. Note: The numbers of villages have been left out, because they are unreliable.

Independent District (Mutasarrıflık) District (sancak) with Class(sınıf)Subdistrict (kaza)‍Rank (derece)Rural District (nahiye)
JerusalemJerusalem‍-Bethlehem
ʿAbwayn
Safa
Ramallah
Gaza‍2Majdal
Falluja
Khan Yunis
Jaffa,‍1Ramla
Niʿlin
Hebron,‍3Bayt Jibrin
Bayt Iʿtab
Beersheba,‍1Azazme
Tiyaha
Jabarat
Tarabin
Khanajira
BeirutAcre, first class (1nci sınıf)  Acre (-)‍-Sahil
Shaghur
Shafa ʿAmr
Tiberias‍2
Safed‍3
Nazareth‍3
Nablus, second class (2nci sınıf)Nablus‍-Mashariq Nablus
Wadi al-Shuʿaraʾ al-Gharbi
Jamaʿin al-awwal (Cemain-i evvel)
Jamaʿin al-thani (Cemain-i sani)
Jamaʿin
Jenin‍2Jenin (merkez)
Shaʿrawiyya al-Sharqiyya
Mashariq al-Jarrar
Bani Saʿb‍2Bani Saʿb
Shaʿrawiyya al-Gharbiyya
Wadi al-Shuʿaraʾ al-Gharbi

References

Sources
Ottoman Archives of the Presidency of Turkey, BOA

Dahiliye Nezâreti İdare-i Umumiye Evrakı (Documents of the Ministry of the Interior, Department of General Affairs),DH.İ.UM.

Dahiliye Nezâreti Umûr-ı Mahalliye ve Vilâyât Müdürlüğü Evrakı (Documents of the Ministry of the Interior, Local and Provincial Affairs Directorate), DH. UMVM.

Ottoman Atlas (Memâlik-i Mahrûse-i Şâhâne’ye mahsus mükemmel ve mufassal atlas), 1907

Tekin, Rahmi and Yaşar Baş (eds), Osmanlı Atlası: XX. Yuzyil Başları [The Ottoman Atlas, Early Twentieth Century]. Istanbul: Osmanlı Araştırmaları Vakfı Yayınları, 2003.

Salnames (Ottoman yearbooks)

Salname-yi Vilayet-i Suriye 1288 / c. 1872. Damascus: Suriye Vilayet Matbaası.

Salname-yi Vilayet-i Suriye, 1291 / c. 1874. Damascus: Suriye Vilayet Matbaası.

Salname-yi Vilayet-i Suriye, 1292 / c. 1875. Damascus: Suriye Vilayet Matbaası.

Salname-yi Vilayet-i Suriye, 1299 / c. 1884. Damascus: Suriye Vilayet Matbaası.

Salname-yi Vilayet-i Beyrut, 1310 / c. 1895. Beirut: Vilayet Matbaası.

Salname-yi Vilayet-i Beyrut, 1318 / c. 1903. Beirut: Vilayet Matbaası.

Studies

Aydın, Ali İhsan. 2013. Akkâ’nın İdarî ve Sosyo-Ekonomik Yapısı (1864–1918) [The Administrative and Socio-Economic Structure of Acre, 1864–1918]. Yüksek Lisans Tezi, T.C. Marmara Üniversitesi, Türkiyat Araştırmaları Enstitüsü, Türk Tarihi Anabilim Dalı, Yakınçağ Tarihi Bilim Dalı.

Ben-Bassat, Yuval, and Yossi Ben-Artzi. 2016. “Cartographical Evidence of Efforts to Develop Acre during the Last Decades of Ottoman Rule: Did the Ottomans Neglect the City?” Mediterranean Historical Review 31, 1: 65–87. https://doi.org/10.1080/09518967.2016.1173358

Buessow, Johann. 2023. J. Büssow, “The Municipal Compound in Late Ottoman Gaza: Local Appropriations of a Tanzimat Institution and Their Visual and Material Communication,” in From the Household to the Wider World, edited by Yuval Ben-Bassat and Johann Büssow, 179–194. Tübingen: Tübingen University Press. https://publikationen.uni-tuebingen.de/xmlui/handle/10900/126565

Grossmann, David. 2011. Rural Arab Demography and Early Jewish Settlement in Palestine: Distribution and Population Density during the Late Ottoman and Early Mandate Periods. London: Routledge.

Hanssen, Jens. 2005. Fin de Siècle Beirut: The Making of a Provincial Capital. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Krämer, Gudrun. 2015. Geschichte Palästinas: Von der osmanischen Eroberung bis zur Gründung des Staates Israel, 6th edition. Munich: C.H. Beck (English translation: A History of Palestine: From the Ottoman Conquest to the Founding of the State of Israel. Translated by Graham Harman and Gudrun Krämer. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008).

McCarthy, Justin. 1990. The Population of Palestine: Population History and Statistics of the Late Ottoman Period and the Mandate. Columbia University Press.

Schayegh, Cyrus. 2017. The Middle East and the Making of the Modern World. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Sezen, Tahir. 2017. Osmanlı Yer Adları [Ottoman Place Names]. Ankara: T.C. Başbakanlık Devlet Arşivleri Genel Müdürlüğü, Yayın No. 26.


Johann Büssow
Johann Büssow

The text only may be used under licence Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial No Derivatives 4.0 International. All other elements (illustrations, imported files) are “All rights reserved”, unless otherwise stated.


OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
Johann Büssow (October 1, 2025). Administrative Divisions of Ottoman Palestine, c. 1860-1914. LOOP – Late Ottoman Palestinians. Retrieved June 5, 2026 from https://doi.org/10.58079/14tza


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