From the Pages of the Defter (ص 53)

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From the Pages of the Defter (ص 53)

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registration, and also to write these numbers on the walls.°° This procedure was not an
innovation. It had first been implemented in Anatolia and the European provinces in the
1840s, as part of the temettuat surveys of individuals’ property and income. As Huri
islamoglu has observed, the technicality of assigning numbers to residences, and to
individuals, was essential to the innovation in the Empire of individualizing ownership and
tax responsibility.°”
The first chapter of the 1860 directive prescribed the appointment of four property
assessors and twenty-two registrars to record the population and their properties. The
second and fourth chapters mapped out the proscribed system as well as the composition
and procedure to be followed by provincial commissions. Chapter Three, which will be
discussed below, spelled out how the new vergi (property tax) would be assessed, charged,
updated, and collected.°® Chapter Four Chapter Five of the law explained the duties of the
66 Ibid., Chapter 2, Article 6, p. 116.
°7 Huri islamoglu, “Politics of Administering Proeprty: Law and Statistics in the Nineteenth-century
Ottoman Empire”, in Huri islamoglu, ed., Constituting Modernity: Private Property in the East and West
(New York: |.B. Tauris, 2004) , 297.
88 Mundy and Saumarez-Smith suggest that the 1860 law was ambitious because it proposed “a system of
registration where both persons and objects of taxation, and their mutations, were somehow to be
entered ina single register.” (Footnote 22, p. 254). This is not clearly so, however. The law envisioned
one commission for population and property assessment, and another to be in charge of tax
matters.(Chapter 1; Chapter 2, Article 2; and Chapter 3, Article 1). Additionally, Article 6 of Chapter 3
refers to a building book in which the tax on buildings was to be recorded. Article 9 of the same chapter
states that approved census books would be delivered to the Inspector of the Census, but there is no
indication that tax officials were to record tax information in these. Rather, in Article 7, it is stated that
the taxes of those who are unable to afford the fees for securing a title-deed will be paid from the
Treasury, after their poverty has been certified through verification with details recorded in the census
register. (Ongley, 124).Finally, the law’s concluding segment stipulates only that property, land, and
36

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From the Pages of the Defter

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Susynne McElrone

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