Governing property, making the modern state - PSI424

Epilogue
bedouin groups. Thus, in the land registration of the Bani Hasan, exceptionally
individuals were ordered under aşiret, although there too the owners were listed
as individuals in what announced a basic change in their political relations with
the state.
In late nineteenth-century Ottoman administration, religious identifications
were central to institutions of cult and to household registration in the civil
registry. But in the basic spheres of property and taxation, the state recognized
no such labels. In our analysis we have sought to understand the patterns of
formation of local social groups as arising from subjects combining in the work
of making persons and agricultural wealth. It is on these grounds that we have
argued that the object of right in agricultural land differed fundamentally between
the two social systems of production, the plains and the hill villages, analysed in
Chapters 9–12. Thereby, we have elaborated a comparative historical sociology
distinct from European political constructions of Arabs (and Others) as congeries
of tribes and sects.
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