Governing property, making the modern state - PSI424

Part one | 4
prosecution of corrupt officials against whom complaints had been lodged in
lower councils, and supervision of the kaimakam and registrar (defterdar) in the
lower administrative circumscriptions.
Ottoman reform granted regional leadership a considerable place within the
context of a centralizing regime. In this respect, Ottoman government was not
a colonial regime on the model of the British or the French. Likewise, although
Ottoman reform worked to unify practice, the power of the councils meant that
they perforce translated the law in the light of regional political and economic
forces.
Land law
Although the general direction of legal reform of the land regime is clear, the
detailed history of legislation in the late 1830s and early 1840s is less so. Dina
Khoury has observed that as early as 1840 a nizamname was issued outlining
changes to the land tenure system. 30 The law ‘sought to limit the property in
revenue of malikane owners by ordering the reversion to the state of all land whose
revenue collectors or cultivators had died’. 31 It appears that the lands were then to
be reissued to the heirs of the malikane owners as land held by tapu, 32 creating
a new category of landholders enjoying usufructuary possession empowered to
rent out their land to cultivators. The new law allowed the holder to leave his
land to both male and female heirs in the manner of entitlement to shares in
waqf. ‘Fiscal and land transactions were to take place in the government office
of the tapu and not in the local court.’ 33 Lastly, the law was cast as contributing
to agricultural development more generally. 34
It would seem that the 1840 nizamname was a relatively short, programmatic
directive. Certain of its promises were to be developed in detail in laws of the
later 1840s which form part of the published genealogy of the 1858 Land Code
and 1859 Tapu Nizamnamesi. 35 The first and most important change, building on
the analogy between the devolution of rights to waqf and those to miri land, concerned
succession to miri land. The sultanic decree (irade) concerning this change,
together with the instructions governing tapu land drafted by the sheikh-ul-Islam,
were published in the official gazette Takvim-i Vakayi in 1847. In 1849 followed the
full text of the Ahkam-ı Meriye. 36 The law introduced five fundamental reforms.
The privilege of sons to succeed to their father’s land without payment of the tapu
fee was extended to daughters. Not only were daughters and sons to inherit equally,
they could also partition the holding. The circle of persons entitled to succession
to miri land without payment of tapu was greatly widened thus rendering escheat
very unlikely. The new rules applied not only to land left by a father but also to
that left by a mother. And lastly, the law confirmed the unfettered power of a tapu
holder to rent out his land.
The law treats usufructuary right to miri land as an estate. The entitlement of
female heirs to tapu land had long been problematic; excluded from succession
to office, daughters were entitled to succeed, after sons and before any sibling
or parent, to the fruits of their father’s (and their family’s, and thereby their
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