Governing property, making the modern state - PSI424

of first instance. 25 Only a few years after tapu registration, the villagers became
familiar – not always successfully – with the institutions of the new legal order.
That Na’il was an accomplished performer in this system surely escaped no one;
and that he had a particular interest in assuring the sale by Yusuf Suwaidan to
the Sabbah, a family allied to his own as putative agnates, provoked vehement
resistance by men cultivating the land.
Property in land is constructed at the articulation of three moments: the
law as text and interpretive tradition; the administration of law by government
institutions wherein a regional elite comes together with government employees appointed
from above; and lastly, the translation and negotiation of legal categories
by actors in productive systems where right is generated, in part, by forces
independent of the first two moments. While the letter of the law may be common
to all the empire, administration entails a regional realization of models of
governance. And the recasting of property in land occurred at yet a smaller scale
– in each and every village. In order to understand the ‘translation’ so effected,
we need to consider not only the techniques of registration and the character of
local administration but also how the registration related to the genesis of right
from below. The administration could not impose law on the village as if the
latter were a tabula rasa. Agriculture entailed social relations of production in
the course of which claims to rights in objects and labour were recognized by
actors of the locality. The administration thus negotiated the imposition of its
new terms upon the living and inherited grid of claims established in production.
This process led to divergent outcomes in the different systems of village social
production.
§
This introduction has given a brief sketch of the central themes and argument
of our study; in later chapters we shall consider in turn the three moments of
property: law, administration and production.
Part one of the book sketches a genealogy of the nineteenth-century law governing
miri land. This genealogy covers a long period of time: Chapter 2 the sixteenth
century, Chapter 3 the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and Chapter 4 the
nineteenth century. This historical depth is required both to read the legal changes
of the nineteenth century as internal to the juridical tradition and to understand
how Ottoman Hanafi legal tradition responded to economic change.
Against this background of the legal context, Part two documents nineteenthcentury
political administration in one district of the empire. This limited compass
is methodologically important since the effects of reform, which itself evolved
over the course of the nineteenth century, differed according to the timing of
its introduction and to the political economic relations obtaining in particular
regions. The district of ‘Ajlun formed part of the Ottoman province of Suriye, the
chef-lieu of which was Damascus; since the Mandate partition of the Near East in
1922, it has formed part of (Trans)Jordan. The analysis of Part two highlights the
centrality of political administration in the reworking of property relations, but it
7
Introduction