Governing property, making the modern state - PSI424

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the Meclis-i Vala, concerning the lands of Sham (berr üş-Şam). In its report the
Meclis reiterated the classical legal argument for the miri status of land in Sham
– that it was haraciye land whose owners had died out without heirs – noting
that as yet none of the provisions of the Land Code and Tapu Nizamnamesi had
been applied there. 69 It recommended that a special commission be established
so as to apply the relevant legislation to Sham eyalet, building on the experience
acquired in Saida eyalet. 70 Southern Syria thus entered late into the property and
administrative reforms of the Tanzimat.
Administrative consolidation
It was in the 1860s that a law governing administrative development was
promulgated. Given the continuity between the 1864 and 1871 Vilayet Laws,
we shall discuss them together here. Instead of the previous eyalet administration,
the 1864 law established a hierarchy of administrative units – the vilayet,
liva/sanjak, kaza/district, and village council – to which was added in 1871 a
further level of administration between the district and the village council, the
nahiye. In 1877 the Law of Municipalities introduced municipal administration
for the towns in lieu of the councils of the villages. Higher-level provincial
councils were central to Tanzimat government from the 1840s; the 1864 and
1871 laws extended government by councils down throughout the levels of a
developed administrative hierarchy. The 1864 law specified the responsibilities
of the governor of the vilayet and the councils of vilayets and districts. It also
contained detailed instructions concerning village administration: the manner
of selection of the muhtar(s) (and the necessity of their confirmation by the
district kaimakam) and of the village council of elders, and their respective
duties: the distribution of taxes imposed collectively on the village, organization
of village guards, agricultural development and public health. The 1871 law
included yet more detailed instructions concerning the duties of the headman
(muhtar): communication downwards to the village of government laws and
notices and upwards of information concerning the village, its lands and inhabitants.
The 1871 law transformed the headman into a government employee,
albeit one with privileged access to the secrets of the village.
The same law of 1871 provided for the development of administrative departments
in the provinces. The first 34 of the 105 clauses of the law concern
the departments of finance, official correspondence, agriculture and commerce,
public education, roads, vakıf, and policing. Clauses 29–31 detail the duties of
the director of the defterhane and officials of the administration of property and
person (emlak ve nüfus) responsible for keeping the registers of crop and vergi
tax, of population and of property titles. The 1871 law regulates these offices
only for the vilayet level, but the later decades of the Tanzimat were to see
parallel administrative departments introduced at the district level. Alongside a
law establishing civil courts, the law of 1871 splits the one council into two, an
administrative council and a judicial one, at all administrative levels. The district
judicial council was to become the first-level court between the village and the
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