Anticolonialism in Middle East

An important effect of colonialism was to hasten the disintegration of long-established social and economic relations and to substitute the often harsher dictates of the market. The pre-colonial world was no egalitarian paradise, but, for example, the confiscation or purchase of land in colonial Algeria and mandatory Palestine and the formation of large landed estates in Syria and Iraq as a result of the establishment of regimes of private property under the mandates often resulted in cultivators either being driven off the land or being reduced from free peasants to serfs. Being far more incorporated into the world market than they had been before, with the concomitant pressure to cultivate cash crops, forced peasant houeholds to migrate to slum settlements on the edges of the major cities where they faced an uncertain and often near-destitute existence.