[...]... confused since its holders (ashabu-ha) contract the land by sale, rental, sharecropping and suchlike and pay its kharaj tax to the military or to other persons appointed by the sultan, but if they sell [their land], then the person appointed by the sultan to collect the tax takes part of the price And if they die leaving sons, then the sons take all the inheritance to the exclusion of other heirs, and no... immaterial ‘things’.2 How then are the persons and the objects in the social relationship of ownership defined in the notices above? The persons are of two kinds: institutional personae and individual persons Anthropology generally focuses on the second, but let us begin with the first Central to the making of property here are the court, the tapu office, and the governor’s office above them The court issues the basic... [Second thesis] If we say not that the lands are owned by their occupants but rather that the essence (raqaba) belongs to the treasury as has been the practice in our time and the time of our fathers and grandfathers; that when the sultan conquered a region he did not divide its land among those entitled to a part in the booty since the imam may choose between dividing the land and keeping it for the Muslims... notice of the judgment in Arabic, dated in the Ottoman financial calendar, whereas the notice sent to the tapu office is in Turkish with the date of the decision in the hijri calendar The institutional personae have defined responsibilities: the court to judge by the law on the challenge mounted against the original sale, the tapu office to amend the title registers and issue new deeds accordingly, and the governor’s... of the judgment, all the more so as the challengers to the sale were refusing to hand over the deeds they had received for the land The language of the court is formal and technical in both Ottoman Turkish and Arabic, the latter the mother tongue of the villagers The double forms of dating reflect the court’s character as part of Ottoman government as well as its august Islamic genealogy Before the institutional... negotiate the representation of rights in land in accordance with the law, the techniques of registration, the character of tax accounting, and the social organization of production on the ground Individual property rights were constructed at the intersection of law, administration and production The three parts of this book consider these in turn With regard to law, the nineteenth-century Tanzimat reforms... chapter examines doctrinal debate concerning major aspects of the land and tax regimes during the centuries between the classical regime of the sixteenth century and the modern reforms of the nineteenth century Emphasizing change in doctrine, we sketch a genealogy of the jurisprudential tradition against which to judge nineteenth-century codification regarding land The account draws on a continuous series... doctrine and the practices of Ottoman administration developed in the course of conquests in Anatolia, the Balkans and Hungary A brief sketch of the most important features of the classical land taxation regime will make clear what the muftis sought to interpret in terms of Hanafi jurisprudence On conquest the administration confirmed the particular imposts paid by the cultivators in formal kanuns, within... over the course of the nineteenth century, differed according to the timing of its introduction and to the political economic relations obtaining in particular regions The district of ‘Ajlun formed part of the Ottoman province of Suriye, the chef-lieu of which was Damascus; since the Mandate partition of the Near East in 1922, it has formed part of (Trans)Jordan The analysis of Part two highlights the. .. whereas they were almost entirely excluded in the other 8 PART ONE | Ottoman jurisprudence concerning ownership of agricultural land 2 | Jurisprudential debate in the sixteenth century The practices of Ottoman administration were set down from the fifteenth century in texts of administrative law, kanuns and kanunnames, but it was only in the sixteenth century that the technical terms of land tax administration . alt="" Governing property, making the modern state martha mundy & richard saumarez smith Governing property, making the modern state Law, administration. discussing terms in the text and not citing directly from documents. In general, in passages about the villages, terms that are Arabic in origin and meaningful