Governing property, making the modern state - PSI424

Introduction | 1
but the first where property was represented as shares in village land. In the two
villages registered before Hawwara descriptions of the borders of the separate
plots of land of each owner had been entered in the register. The apparent innovation,
which was thereafter widely adopted across the district, resulted from a
kind of political settlement. In this, officers of the state met regional and village
leaders to negotiate the representation of rights in land in accordance with the
law, the techniques of registration, the character of tax accounting, and the social
organization of production on the ground.
Individual property rights were constructed at the intersection of law, administration
and production. The three parts of this book consider these in turn. With
regard to law, the nineteenth-century Tanzimat reforms are not a failed attempt at
Western legal modernization. Nor are they simply a by-product of the imposition
of a world market. Rather the reforms, transforming legal vocabularies from within
Ottoman tradition, sought to respond to the competitive world system. 10
Law is constructive; doctrine matters. But following Wittgenstein, there is
no straightforwardly meaningful rule; meaning arises from interpretation. In
the nineteenth century, interpretation was not an effect of pure doctrine but of
an increasingly powerful administration of interpretation. Thus, the antinomy
between law and governmentality sketched by Foucault is best taken as rhetorical,
resting on an elegant but excessively narrow vision of law as God’s and the Prince’s
command. 11 Law did not give way to specialized techniques of government in the
nineteenth century; rather, it became increasingly bound up with administrative
formalization.
In this study we examine the forms of registration and cross-referencing of
persons and objects introduced by the Tanzimat reforms. Such processes of registration
can be interpreted as part of systems of power-knowledge in the manner
sketched by Foucault and developed subsequently in studies of ‘governmentality’.
But we go beyond ‘discourse’ to consider the political context of the production
of entries in particular registers and the consequences of registration for the social
agents appearing in the grids. Such analysis works against the ‘dissolution of the
subject’ characteristic of discursive analyses of power-knowledge. Government
registers were forms filled out by identifiable agents, institutional and political,
acting at two administrative levels: the district and the village. The methodology
adopted here moves back and forth: from a reading of the systems of registration
to a reconstruction of relations captured by that lens. Thus, through the filter of
the register something of the ‘local knowledge’ concerning right-holders in agricultural
production can be discerned. As this implies, the processes of agricultural
work, domestic labour and childbearing entail a density of social knowledge and
exchange distinct from their partial representation in the registers. Hence, in Part
three, different kinds of sources are drawn upon to portray the interaction of
village men and women with state administration and the character of property
relations in particular villages and in individual families.
And so, before we leave the case with which this chapter opened, let us briefly
place the parties to the dispute in the context of Hawwara’s political economy.
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