Governing property, making the modern state - PSI424

Notes to chapter 1
landholdings in Ottoman Palestine.’ There
is no evidence that Stein examined the
registers.
7 The richest commentary on the
Land Code is that of Eşref, Külliyat-ı
Şerh-i Kanun-i Arazi (1897). But there
are other commentaries: Hüsnü, Arazi
Kanunnamesi Şerhi (1892–93); Ziya’l-Din,
Mükemmil ve Muvazzıh Şerh-i Kanun-i
Arazi (1893–94); Haydar, Şerh-i Cedid-i
Kanun-i Arazi (1893–94); Atef Bey, Arazi
Kanunname-i Hümayunu Şerhi (1901); and
finally Karakoç, Tahşiyeli Arazi Kanunnamesi
(1921–22). For these authors the
Land Code formed part of a living legal
tradition.
8 This is true not only of Ömer Lütfi
Barkan in his Türkiye’de Toprak Meselesi
(1980) but also of a legal scholar such
as Halil Cin, Mirî Arazi ve Bu Arazinin
Özel Mülkiyete Dönüşümü (1987) and the
revisionist historian Huricihan İslamoğlu-
İnan, State and Peasant in the Ottoman
Empire (1994) and ‘Property as a contested
domain’, in Owen (ed.), New Perspectives
on Property and Land in the Middle East
(2000), pp. 3–61. Mehmet Genç marked
a departure, followed increasingly today
by younger scholars, in his Osmanlı
İmparatorluğu’nda Devlet ve Ekonomi
(2000).
9 This too is changing, as Turkish
intellectuals re-examine Islamic jurisprudence
and seek alternative frameworks
to Ataturkism. See the works of Kaşıkçı,
İslam ve Osmanlı Hukukunda Mecelle
(1997) and of Akarlı, as in his ‘Gedik:
A bundle of rights and obligations for
Istanbul artisans and traders, 1750–1840’,
in Pottage and Mundy (eds), Law, Anthropology,
and the Constitution of the Social
(2004), pp. 166–200.
10 See the remarks on Ottoman history
in Ahmad, ‘Post-colonialism: what’s in a
name?’, in de la Campa et al. (eds), Late
Imperial Culture (1995), p. 23.
11 Foucault, ‘Governmentality’, in
Burchell et al. (eds), The Foucault Effect
(1991), pp. 87–104.
238
12 DLS.AT.Yoklama, 1295–98, p. 205.
13 Düstur, vol. 1, p. 167, clause 8 of the
Land Code reads: ‘All the lands of a village
or town may not be registered as a single
entry in the name of the corporation of all
its inhabitants, nor in the name of one, two
or three persons as their representatives.
Rather, lands must be registered in the
name of every individual of the village
separately and tapu documents given to
each one stating clearly the manner of
usufructuary possession.’ [our translation]
14 See Düstur, vol. 1, p. 200, Tapu
Nizamnamesi, clause 3, which requires
specification of village and district,
boundaries of land, seed sown, and size
of land in dönüms. In fact specification in
seed was uncommon in the ‘Ajlun district,
but the quantum of dönüms commonly
reflected thumbnail measures of land by
plough team, see Mundy, ‘Shareholders
and the State’, in Philipp (ed.), The Syrian
Land in the 18th and 19th Centuries
(1992), p. 220.
15 See Chapter 6 for the earlier opposition
to Na’il’s acquisition of land.
16 Yusuf al-Suwaidan disappears from
view in every documentary source after his
appearance in the first land registration
and no one in Hawwara could remember
him. Suwaidan is an established Christian
family in the nearby settlement of al-Husn;
perhaps Yusuf al-Suwaidan was from this
group.
17 Terms that are Arabic in origin and
meaningful also to the villagers are spelt in
Arabic transcription when issues concern
villagers in general and not translation
from documents composed in Turkish.
18 See Lane, An Arabic–English
Lexicon (1865), vol. 2, pp. 788–9.
19 The terms, conjoined, formed a
recognized legal concept related to miri
land long before the Land Code. Atef Bey:
Arazi, p. 5, notes that in older law if a person
died without male heirs, and relatives
who could claim succession on payment
of tapu did not take up their right, the
following persons, in rank order, could