Governing property, making the modern state - PSI424

By 1895 the village had expanded in size and most of those registered as
householders in 1883 had remained in the village. We can therefore analyse
the population with greater sureness. The 15 householdings in 1883 of original
landholders all continue to hold land in 1895, although one is no longer resident
and another was succeeded by two daughters who married inside the village;
the 11 new landholders all continue to hold both land and houses; and of the
17 landless householders in 1883 (among whom there are some difficulties of
identification), one has acquired land (the father of Khattar al-Husain), ten still
have houses but no land, and six appear to have left the village. A further two
people who are named in the borders of houses in 1883 but not in the list can
also be identified among residents in 1895 who do not hold land. Finally there
are 19 new householders in 1895 who cannot be connected with anyone in an
earlier list.
Thus, of the 73 householdings in the 1895 tax list, 37 are not connected with
landholdings at the time. The figure of 37 includes ‘Ifnan Abu Tair, a resident
in 1883 who would buy land title in 1902, and Khalaf ‘Abdul-Ghani Shahada,
along with two sons of his brother ‘Ali, who would buy land title in 1895 but had
no land according to the tax list; and it includes the son of Salih al-Qadi who
was named as holding land in 1876 on the third plot of two tapu holders; but
it does not include one daughter of a landholder, who was also the daughter’s
daughter of someone who was landless in 1883, nor any brother of a landholder. 48
The proportion of 50 per cent of landless households (37/73) is thus as close a
measure as is possible. It can be taken to represent a village in the south west
of the Hauran plain which, judged from the rapid turnover of land after tapu
registration in 1876, experienced a boom in the last twenty years of the nineteenth
century. We shall see that the figure of 50 per cent stands in strong contrast to
villages in the Kura where virtually every household had land.
Landholdings in the 1895 tax register
The order in which holdings are listed in the 1895 tax register becomes important
when analysing landholdings. Houses are listed roughly in the order of
the 1883 house list, albeit in reverse, suggesting that the tax survey did go round
the village numbering house plots sequentially according to the spatial layout.
Each building has a separate number as well as a plot number, but the borders
of plots are not given, unlike the 1883 tapu list. The first 73 entries contain
houses, some with land, others not. The last twenty entries concern landholdings
without houses. Most of the last twenty are thus of non-residents, although
several belong to members of families which do have houses in the village, like
number 74 belonging to Na’il Gharaiba’s brother Muhammad with two shares.
But the order in which they are listed suggests that the authorities registered
landholders according to their affiliation to a tax-paying group. First among
the last twenty are holdings of those associated with Na’il Gharaiba, numbers
74–9. For these the criterion was apparently not whether they were entitled by
virtue of a tapu mutation but whether they were endorsed by Na’il as members
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Two plains villages