From the Pages of the Defter (ص 23)

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From the Pages of the Defter (ص 23)

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evidential substantiation. Raymond E. Crist’s early, general study (1957-1961) on Middle
Eastern land tenure provides a rough general sketch of this paradigm-in-the-making:
In 1858 the Ottoman government decided to establish a Land Registration
Service, which would clarify the general land-holding situation and give
each holder of mulk or miri land a clear title, or sanad tapu. The service
was a signal failure. Many peasants, convinced that the purpose of the
proposed reform was to increase taxes, refused to talk, or they gave false
information. Unscrupulous officials from the central government could
write their own names in on the titles instead of those peasants who were
working the land. A village notable would declare all the land of a village to
be his .... There were no surveys, boundary lines or written documents.°
Toward the end of that decade, a study that would be influential for decades was published
on the first half of the Tanzimat by Moshe Ma’oz. Regarding the Land Code of 1858, Ma’oz
argued that it discouraged large landownership in theory but encouraged it in practice since
many peasants, unwilling to register their land for fear it would involve
more taxation or conscription, registered it in the name of their chiefs or
powerful urban notables.’
Already you, the reader, begins to become convinced that this was indeed what happened.
The uneducated peasants could not grasp the meaning of this modernizing reform and
6 Raymond E. Crist, Land for the Fellahin: Land Tenure and Land Use in the Near East. (New York: Robert
Schalkenbach Foundation, 1961), 31-32. The chapters of this book were originally published in serial
form 10.1957-1.1961 in The American Journal of Economics and Sociology.
’ He relies on Avraham Granott’s classic 1952 study, The Land System in Palestine and Bernard Lewis’ 1961
work, The Emergence of Modern Turkey. Moshe Ma’oz, Ottoman Reform in Syria and Palestine 1840-
1861: The Impact of the Tanzimat on Politics and Society (London: Oxford University Press, 1968, 162-
163.

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From the Pages of the Defter

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Susynne McElrone

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