Governing property, making the modern state - PSI424

absence of a mechanism to enforce sale by the state. Thus, in the Code there
is no mention of what happens in the event of crippling tax arrears; given that
tax farmers were often rural financiers, they too appear to have challenged the
provisions of the original law. Thus in June 1860 the Meclis-i Vala issued a first
report concerning why miri land should be exempted from forced sale to cover tax
arrears. 53 But the power to force sale was eventually granted the tax department. In
another report dated 8 October 1860, the Meclis-i Vala appears to support forced
sale of miri land on the grounds that its not being treated as part of ‘property’
(emval ve emlak) entails a logical contradiction between tax law and the Land
Code. Yet simultaneously the Meclis rejected appeals from traders and interested
parties to permit miri land to be sold on demand of individual lenders who had
not registered their loans at the registry in the form of ferağ bil-vefa. The Meclis’
report proposed excluding from forced sale, in the case of the owner being a
cultivator, the roof over the person’s head and a basic amount of land required
for survival. 54 These provisions of the report were translated quite rapidly into
sultanic decrees. 55 The best protection for the interests of both the state and the
lenders was seen to be a system of auction through the district administrative
council. 56 This promised to ensure proper valuation of the land as well as to
safeguard the capital of money-lenders. The administrative mechanism for forced
sale was first sketched in law in 1862 and developed in a more extensive legal
ordinance in the early 1870s. 57
These debates, and their resolution, reveal the Janus-faced character of the
senior political administration. The centrality of cultivators’ rights to land for
government as a whole resulted in the proposal, later turned into law, to exempt
from seizure for debt the house of a cultivator and the miri fields required for
the maintenance of that house. The importance of administrative control over
transactions in miri land resulted in auction through administrative channels. On
the other hand, the pressure to render convergent laws governing the different
forms of real property characterized the work of the Meclis and was to culminate
in legislation of the 1870s. The Meclis-i Vala sought to protect the return on investments
by traders and tax farmers in the agricultural sector. The administration
mediated the interests of the state, the commercial classes, and the cultivators
in an increasingly integrated market for land. The complexity of the procedure
of foreclosure, entailing an announcement in the vilayet newspaper, acted as a
limited brake on dispossession, but it nevertheless institutionalized the principle
that miri land, like other property (emval ve emlak), could be sold for debt.
Such administrative management of mortgage was predicated on government
registration of miri land. In the tapu regulations of the 1840s persons were
enjoined to exchange their older documentation for new tapu of standardized
form crowned by the sultanic signature (tuğralı). The Tapu Nizamnamesi, issued
in 1859 immediately after the Land Code, states that the finance officials, namely
the registrar, the finance director and the directors of the districts, were to be
legally recognized as the sahib-i arz with regard to all transactions of miri land.
But only in 1860 did a subsequent set of instructions governing tapu titles require
47
Legal reform from the 1830s