KONGRE BİLDİRİLERİ
ve 19. yy’ı ilgilendiren bazı tarih çalışmalarında Osmanlı rejiminin Arap eyaletlerindeki siyasetinin
“sömürgeci” tarzda ele alınmasına karşı bir bakış açısı sunmayı amaçlamaktadır.
Diğer yandan tapu kayıtlarının hem tarih yazımı hem de antropolojik çalışmalar açısından arz
ettikleri önem de bu çalışmanın önemli bir boyutunu teşkil etmektedir. Bunun takdir edilebilmesi,
arşivlerde saklanan bu belgelere araştırmacıların erişiminin kolaylaştırılmasına bağlıdır. Bunn için
de iki noktaya vurgu yapılacaktır: Öncelikle, devlet kayıtlarının korunması teknolojilerini anlamada
tarihsel araştırmanın önemi vurgulanacak ardından tarihçilere ulaşımının kolaylaştırılması için,
hukuksal açıdan delil niteliği taşıyabilecek kayıtlara belirli bir zaman limitinin konulması gerektiği
vurgulanacaktır. Bu tarz bir yaklaşım bu belgelerin araştırmacılara sunulması açısından elzemdir. Sonuç
olarak, her ne kadar tarım topraklarına olan hakkın belirlenmesi açısından tapu kayıtları analiz odağı
olsalar dahi, köy seviyesindeki toplumsal tarih araştırmaları açısından merkezi nitelik taşıdıklarından,
nüfus ve vergi kayıtları da bu çalışmada önemli birer kaynak olarak tahlil edileceklerdir.
Paper
Starting from the above abstract, I shall summarize the first issue in four related points. a)
Historians and anthropologists use records differently from the administrators who look after the
records and guide access to lawyers and members of the public who consult them. b) Any system of
guided access tends to direct attention in particular ways and unwittingly to cover over patterns and
correlations within the records. For example, tracing a particular family’s holding in one village may
not bring to the surface the relation between that family’s holding and the holdings of other families
in the village, just as it will not bring to the surface the same family’s holdings in other villages. c)
It is the patterns and correlations of the underlying structure of holdings that interest a historian/
anthropologist, not the transactions of any one particular individual except in so far as it is used as
an example of an underlying pattern. (There is a methodological principle here of not assuming that
records of rights to land have an immediate, obvious relation to what they represent on the ground,
but I take up the issue of legal truth of representation by the registers below.) d) There is no way of
building an understanding of the patterns and correlations of the underlying structure of holdings from
primary records except by working with the names and entries of all those registered. e) Discussion
between the different users of a records room should therefore take place if records rooms are to be
made more accessible to the public.
The difficulties of constructing a picture of transactions relating to tapu holdings in a village
over a period of time in order to throw light on the socio-economic conditions of the period or the
character of the system of registration should not be underrated. Considering only what is presently
north Jordan for the period from the 1880s, when tapu registration was effected, to the subsequent
registration of land under the British Mandate in the 1930s, any transaction in land had to be followed
by a change in the tapu register by the individuals involved, and the identity of the register in which
the up-dated entry could be found was written in the margin of the previous entry, just as the identity
of the register in which the previous entry could be found was written in the margin of the up-dated
entry. Tapu registers in a kaza were organized by the date of transactions in a continuous sequence,
not by the smaller administrative unit of a village; moreover the system of updating tapu entries was
both individualized and dependent on the continuing interest of those involved. There was no system
of regularly bringing the tapu register of a village as a whole up to date, there was no designated
official whose job was to keep individual entries in the register of a village up to date, nor was there for
each village a single book containing the original lists of all types of holdings, with entries up-dated
in the book itself, as was done in the case of vergi/wirko registers dating from 1895. To discover all
transactions in a village over a given period we had to look through the registers of the entire kaza,
indexing those relating to the particular village in which we were interested. In theory such a procedure
of compilation would uncover all transactions, but in practice a good number of transactions, identified
in earlier or later transactions by their reference number, were not found; and some entries in the
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Tapu ve Kadastro Genel Müdürlüğü
original lists were simply never up-dated in the entire fifty-to-sixty year period after tapu registration,
although doubtless on the ground changes occurred from season to season. Moreover, because tapu
registration did not at that time involve field maps or cadastral maps of villages, we could never be
sure that our compilation was complete for all types of holdings within the boundaries of a village.
It may be presumptuous to claim that a scholar has anything of administrative value to say about
techniques of registration to those who guard the records, and I do not wish to be understood as
wanting to compare one system of registration unfavourably with another. At a personal level I have
benefited enormously from the knowledge and kindness of those locally in char