Introduction

Tribes, chiefdoms and early states have been defined using specific traits by Elman Service and others (see Chapter 1). Most of these traits belong to two “categories”. The first is the way in which leadership is organized and how it relates to the social group. The second is the social organization of the population: whether it is class or kinship based, and the various forms of segmentation and fusion that define sections within the group.

Three case studies are presented here, three different polities originating in the nineteenth-century tribal society of the Near East. These are the tribe of Akila Agha in Galilee; the town-based polity of Kerak; and the Emirate of Ibn Rashid on the Arabian Peninsula. These polities are followed from their origins to their final downfall, or in the case of Kerak, to its incorporation within the Ottoman Empire. They illustrate the various stages in the development of tribal social and political organizations. The case of Akila Agha and the Henadi is an example of how a tribe can evolve from a disorientated and amorphous fringe on the edge of society, what Rowton (1977) calls the “parasocial element”. The second case, the polity of Kerak, illustrates the development of what can perhaps be called a segmentary chiefdom, consisting of a number of partly nomadic, partly sedentary tribes, headed by a town-based clan.