Competition in the Cultural Sector: Handicrafts and the Rise of the Trade Fair in British Mandate Palestine

Abstract

AbstractOn the eve of Palestine’s violent ethno-national clashes of the 1930s, two simultaneous, competing trade fairs were mounted in Palestine: the Levant Fair in Tel Aviv (1932) and the First National Arab Fair in Jerusalem (1933). This chapter sketches a lineage of trade fairs in Palestine in the decades immediately prior to the debut of these duelling “national” fairs to investigate the roots of this typology within Palestine and its rise as a space for political action and debate. Undergirding the evolution of the trade fair in Palestine, the author argues, was the formation of a “cultural sector”—a conglomerate of institutions delimited by a distinct regional focus, furthering cultural development as part of both economic and political missions.