From the Pages of the Defter (ص 29)

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From the Pages of the Defter (ص 29)

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land in the northern part of the country. But also in the south, interested parties were
d.”*° | relate his observation to the semsiyye
provided with lists of purchasable lan
commissions.
| do not believe this was part of the tapu commissions’ work, as Shechter has
theorized. This is for two reasons. First, the geographical scope of these committees’ work
appears, at this stage, to have been quite limited. If this was a regular, empire-wide duty of
tapu commissions, one would expect to see reference to it in the laws and directives on
land-reform procedures, and one would expect these commissions to have been widely
known across the empire. They are not.”. Second, semsiyye clerks are listed in the Syrian
provincial salnames (yearbooks) of 1291 H (1874) and 1296 (1879) in the sancak (province)
of Tripoli (Tarablus-Sam). They appear as a division separate from the land and property
registration divisions.”~ It would be important to know more about these commissions and
the scope of their work; their relation with the tapu and property-tax commissions and
*° Alexander Schdlch, Palestine in Transformation 1856-1882: Studies in Social, Economic and Political
Development, trans. William C. Young and Michael C. Gerrity (Washington, DC: Institute for Palestine
Studies, 1993), 111. Schdlch relies on foreign diplomatic and Zionist sources.
*1 Not only have | found no research on these commissions or lists, with the exception of Shechter’s
article, Fischbach’s and Schdlch’s brief references and part of an article by Ruth Kark, | have not found
any Ottoman scholars who were familiar with these commissions. Ruth Kark has found documents
about the commissions in the Israeli State Archives. See pp. 57-59 in her article, “Mamluk and Ottoman
Cadastral Surveys and Early Mapping of Landed Properties in Palestine”, Agricultural History, 71/1
(Winter 1997), 46-70.
*? ISAM, Salname-i Suriye 1291 H (1874), 67. ISAM, Salname-i Suriye 1296 H (1879), 80. | am grateful to
Martha Mundy for the latter reference, for a number of discussions with her on the semsiyye
commissions, and for her suggestion that | look in the sa/names. In the 1871 provincial sainame,
semsiyye clerks are not mentioned.
12

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From the Pages of the Defter

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Susynne McElrone

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