Summary
The 1858 Ottoman law requiring the registration of lands, whose most significant innovation in Doumani’s account was the legalization and registration of private ownership (milk) of what had long been considered inalienable state (miri) lands; in Jabal Nablus its consequences ran opposite to its intent because a commercial market in land and a merchant-dominated urban elite already existed to manipulate it (Rediscovering Palestine: Merchants and Peasants in Jabal Nablus, 1700-1900, lines 3160-3219, lines 3220-3279).
Details
- The law was an important step in the Ottoman government’s campaign to increase revenues by streamlining land-tenure relations, and it greatly reinforced local urban elites’ already substantial economic and political power over the hinterlands, on whom the government depended to implement its centralizing reforms (Rediscovering Palestine: Merchants and Peasants in Jabal Nablus, 1700-1900, lines 3160-3219).
- Peasants read the registration requirement as yet another initiative to improve tax collection and acquire knowledge of individuals for conscription, and their unwillingness to vigorously pursue registration in their own names made it easier for urban notables to lay claim to their lands (Rediscovering Palestine: Merchants and Peasants in Jabal Nablus, 1700-1900, lines 3220-3279).
- The government did not design the law to encourage large private estates or a class of absentee urban landholders: its intent, besides streamlining tax collection, was to protect the peasant base of production by preserving small landownership (Rediscovering Palestine: Merchants and Peasants in Jabal Nablus, 1700-1900, lines 3220-3279).
- Conversions of state lands into full private property in Jabal Nablus are evidenced from at least the late 1830s, roughly two decades before the code was promulgated, much less enforced; Doumani argues the law was “not an initiator of new land-tenure relations but, rather, a recognition by the Ottoman government of the need to contain and streamline already ongoing processes” (Rediscovering Palestine: Merchants and Peasants in Jabal Nablus, 1700-1900, lines 3220-3279).
- In Chapter 4’s Conclusion the code’s promulgation is listed among Ottoman reforms that “were both precipitated by and shaped by many of the very changes they were later credited with introducing” (Rediscovering Palestine: Merchants and Peasants in Jabal Nablus, 1700-1900, lines 3340-3372).
Related pages
Rediscovering Palestine: Merchants and Peasants in Jabal Nablus, 1700-1900, Commoditization of land, Tanzimat, Jabal Nablus