Sending petitions to the sultan with requests for justice or favors was an established custom in the Ottoman Empire since early times and helped mitigate some of the effects of a regime that was an absolute monarchy. This became an important instrument for gaining justice, especially from the end of the sixteenth century to the end of the eighteenth century, when many of the empire's institutions had fallen into a state of corruption and arbitrary rule. The Ottoman sultans, despite a strong sense of responsibility toward their subjects, were not able to tend personally to the great number of petitions arriving at the court. Instead, they delegated authority to their Imperial Council, headed by the chief minister (grand vezir), which took care of everyday matters of government and administration. Once approved, a decision would be sent in the form of an Imperial Decree (ferman) to the relevant officials for execution. Copies were kept in the palace archives for future reference and were likewise registered in the Muslim courts at their destination.

The custom of petitioning high authorities persisted and increased into the closing years of the Ottoman Empire, regarded as a period of reform and renewal. The establishment of an array of new state institutions, fashioned after Western models, and the implementation of the post and telegraph throughout the empire made the government more accessible to the people and enabled them to more easily turn to it for a solution to their problems. Proper procedures were established for handling petitions sent to the grand vezir, ministries, and departments, and they habitually resulted in some decision (irade) conveyed to the officials concerned and to the applicants.

In researching this subject, Ben-Bassat has made use of hundreds of petitions written and sent from Palestine (particularly the subdistricts of Gaza and Jaffa) during the closing years of Ottoman rule and found today in the Ottoman Archives in Istanbul. He sought to learn about the nature of petition writing during the period and to elucidate the conditions of life and the concerns of the Palestinian people at the time. In this he may have taken as his model Uriel Heyd's Ottoman Documents on Palestine, 1552–1615: A Study of the Ferman According to the Mühimme Defteri (Oxford: Clarendon, 1960), which explores the procedure taken all the way from application to decision.

The book is divided into eight chapters, with the first two dealing with the institution of petitions, its global and Islamic perspectives, and its features. The author then analyzes petitions sent by the urban population of Gaza and Jaffa as well as the normally “silent” rural population and the Bedouins. Following are discussions of requests made by Ottoman officials, social and economic matters, and bureaucratic and administrative features. Finally, the book discusses Templar and Jewish-Zionist activities. It is the author's contention that in spite of all the changes that occurred within the empire, the institution had retained much of its earlier importance and historians would be well advised to use the source to learn more on Palestinian society in that age. Additionally, the book's appendices present several petitions in translation as well as an abundant number of notes.

A few comments are in order. The author concentrates on the subdistricts of Gaza and Jaffa. During that era, Palestine comprised several more subdistricts, two of them (Hebron and, after 1900, Beersheba) in the same district of Jerusalem (aside from the separate districts of Nablus and Acre). Thus, the question arises whether these two subdistricts serve as a representative sample. The book would have benefited from further explanation and elaboration on this point. The same goes for the time period. The author states that he has covered the years 1865 to 1908, but most of the petitions date from the 1880s and 1890s. Again, is this the result of a relatively greater number of petitions for those years or because the author believes they can be representative of other years as well?

A comment should also be made with regard to the author's discussion of the petition institution itself. He examines the continuity between the classical petition and the nineteenth-century version and poses the question of whether new institutions created in the later period, be they legal or administrative, could not end the need to petition the sultan. The answer seems simple enough. As for the legal system, made up of the old traditional courts or the new state courts (nizami), it dealt essentially with private matters, and courts had their own procedures for testimony, evidence, and the like. By and large, the topics raised in the petitions were different. The latter had to do with public and administrative affairs that did not come under the authority of courts and could not be decided by them.

As for the applications made to the new governing and administrative institutions created by the reform movement, and even those that went to the grand vezir, they could be regarded, in a sense, as going to the sultan himself. All institutions of state were under his sovereignty, and even the Constitution of 1876, which restricted the sultan's powers, did not deprive him of his ultimate authority. The author is therefore right in discussing “petitioning the sultan” but should not have perhaps been as surprised that many people preferred to turn directly to the center. As the author states, they still regarded sending petitions to Istanbul as the ultimate promise that their complaints and requests would be answered. Even today, Western democracies possess institutions that allow citizens to submit their complaints to the very top, and their presidents or kings are afforded some powers of interfering in the regular decisions of the government.

The book makes a most valuable contribution to our knowledge of Palestine's population during a crucial period in its history. It does that in a number of ways: it sheds new light on the life of the people and particularly those among them, villagers and Bedouins, the “subalterns,” who had few other ways, except through petitions, of making themselves heard. Their concerns lay chiefly in matters of unjust and heavy taxation, land ownership, and cases of oppression by officials and landowners. (Interestingly, conflicts with neighboring Jewish settlers that are discussed in the book do not appear chief among the villagers' concerns and were still devoid of the political dimensions of later years.) Urban classes were noted chiefly for their internal rivalries and their friction with the local authorities. The author brings all this to light through the meticulous perusal of Ottoman sources that had so far not been used in research on Palestine. There is also much that these documents bring to light about the workings of Ottoman government at the time as it was trying to keep its people as content as it could and save the empire from its looming fate.