Governing property, making the modern state - PSI424

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were issued that marked a break in Ottoman juridical language: these decreed
a cadastral survey on European models, the introduction of mortgage (termed
hypothèque) on the model of ‘other civilized nations’, and the unification of
property categories across all types of land.
The legislation of 1912 appeared too late to be introduced into the Arab
provinces. Nor does it appear to have been treated in practice as part of the
Ottoman legal corpus by the French and the British who at the end of the First
World War occupied and divided the Arab provinces between them. British
officials under the Mandate in Palestine and Jordan were to implement a similar
programme but were to celebrate their land registration not as part of Mandate
legal responsibility to apply Ottoman law, but as evidence of the progress in
civilization that European forms of property represented.
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