Governing property, making the modern state - PSI424

Part three | 10
unpredictable exclusions. But no case has come to light where a contradiction
between the two registers was made the basis of a claim to any individual plot
or holding of trees.
Regarding plough land and houses, however, there is good continuity between the
tapu and tax registers. Indeed there is evidence from the order in which holdings
were listed in the tax register that the scribe went over existing lists more than
once to ensure nobody with existing title was missed out. 36 Of the 105 holders
of plough land in 1895, only five had shares that differed from what they held
in 1884, including one person who cannot be identified in the 1884 register or an
intervening tapu mutation. Conversely only four shareholders in 1884 were not
registered in 1895. 37 None of these changes was the result of a tapu mutation.
Three tapu mutations of inheritance had been registered in 1890 which were
all taken into account in the tax register, while neither of the two further tapu
mutations of 1894 and 1895 was. 38 In general names of heirs were not entered in
place of deceased holders in the tax register, unlike for Hawwara.
Shares in plough land were not explicitly registered in 1895. Instead, as in
Hawwara, the areas and taxable values of holdings in four fields – not the two
blocks of tapu registration – bore certain fixed proportions to the total areas and
values of those fields, which correspond to the shares registered in 1884. Plots were
numbered 1–105 in each field, every shareholder having the same plot number in
each field. The combined area of the four plots of a full share of 24 qirat was
322½ dönüm, each plot differing in area though valued at the same rate. 39 The
average share per holding was exactly 10q: four holdings of one share, 12 of ¾,
34 of ½, and 55 of ¼.
The subsequent maintenance of the tax register in relation to tapu mutations
can be summarized. First, the mutation history in the tapu registers of Khanzira
is strikingly simple: 58 tapu mutations of shares in plough land were registered
between 1895 and 1939. But 56 of these occurred between 1905 and 1913; and,
ignoring sales from an only daughter to her father’s brother’s son or from the
mother of an only unmarried son to his co-sharer in the holding (her brother),
only ten of the 56 were sales, all to existing landholders of the village. Between
1912 and 1939 only two tapu mutations of plough land were registered, one in 1930
concerning the abandonment of land by someone who had been registered in 1884
but had already left the village by 1895, the other a sale in 1926. One mutation
concerned the registration of a new plot in 1906, which led to the first new entry
in the tax register (number 192). The remaining cases were all of inheritance. The
bunching of mutations in the year 1906, when 34 were registered of which only two
were sales, shows that the administration concertedly brought the tapu registers
up to date. The order of the 27 mutations registered in September 1906 largely
follows the order of the original tapu list. 40 Although a mutation was registered
in 1894 in which four daughters inherited, this was a special case of no sons, and
it was not until halfway through 1905 that daughters were consistently named
as heirs. Whether all surviving daughters were mentioned is a different matter,
for the ratio of sons to daughters in the 27 mutations of September 1906 is 68
184