KONGRE BİLDİRİLERİ
THE IMPORTANCE OF THE TAPU RECORDS FOR UNDERSTANDING THE
SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC HISTORY OF THE ARAB PROVINCES OF THE OTTOMAN
EMPIRE IN THE LATE 19TH AND EARLY 20TH CENTURIES:
NORTH JORDAN AND SOUTH LEBANON
As Richard Saumarez Smith notes in his paper, one can read the tapu records both ‘inwards’ for
their place in a system of statecraft and ‘outwards’ to the society governed, that is, for what they can be
made to yield for agrarian and social history. The main concern in this paper is with the latter, but first
a word on the centrality of the late Ottoman legal and administrative structures for the construction of
the modern state in Arab lands. After all, the groundwork of modern statecraft was Ottoman be it in
Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Palestine or, to a much more limited extent, Yemen.
Tapu registration following the 1859 Tapu nizamnamesi took place within a transformation of,
rather than a rupture with, earlier legal traditions and administrative idioms governing miri land. In our
book Governing Property, Making the Modern State: Law, administration and production in Ottoman
Syria Chapters 2 and 3 are devoted to tracing the long history of legal transformation and debate that
lies behind the decades of reforms known as the Tanzimat (Chapter 4).1
In a development comparable to that in other major states of the 19th century, the Ottomans
introduced a regime that led to effectively private property in miri land, unifying through registration
previously different kinds of land (miri, mülk, vakıf); the regime extended the administration’s
bureaucratic reach to record the population at the level of individuals in households of every village.
Tapu records thus form part of a series of records, the others being the nüfus and the vergi/tax records,
which when taken together (and in conjunction with other sources, from oral history to court and
administrative records) can allow for the writing of history at the level of the village and at the higher
levels of the administrative hierarchy: nahiye, kaza, liva and vilayet. This is in theory: given the
labour required to do such detailed reconstruction, it is more realistic to work as we did for Governing
Property, maximally at the level of a kaza, and then at a more micro-level, on a handful of villages
belonging to distinct zones of agricultural production. In Governing Property we sketched the kazalevel history in chapters 6-8 and the village-level diachronic history in chapters 9-12.
There is, moreover, a good methodological argument for analysis at the level of the kaza. It
was at the kaza level that initial yoklama registration was administered, that tapu registers were kept
locally, and that in the early years the meclis-i idare countersigned land sales. It can be said, moreover,
that it was primarily at this administrative level that regional leadership negotiated with executive
(notably the kaimmakam) and administrative officers the modalities of the implementation of tanzimat
legislation and tapu registration. It should be borne in mind that the results of the reforms were not
uniform throughout the empire. On the one hand, tapu registration occurred earlier in some regions
than others, when in effect the detailed legislation, effective policy and bureaucratic institutionalization
differed in some notable ways, and, on the other, political economic structures varied markedly across
regions. Thus, if scholars are some day to write the later 19th and early 20th century agrarian socioeconomic history of the Arab lands of the Empire, this will require placing together, as if pieces in a
jigsaw, the distinct trajectories of the kazas that in turn compose the administrative units of livas and
vilayets.
In the early stages of my work with the tapu registers which had remained in the land record
office of the town of Irbid in Jordan, and after having catalogued the volumes that survived there
(unfortunately not complete, especially for the southern part of the kaza), I explored what could be
1 M. Mundy and R. Saumarez Smith, Governing Property, Making the Modern State: Law, administration and production in Ottoman Syria,
I.B. Tauris, London, 2007 and forthcoming with Tarih Vakfı, İstanbul as Modern Devlet’e Giden Yolda Mülk Siyaseti: Osmanlı Suriyesi’nde
Hukuk, Yönetim ve Üretim.
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Tapu ve Kadastro Genel Müdürlüğü
done cartographically with the data in the initial registration as recorded in the defter-i esas-ı yoklama.
A glance at some of the maps I then produced can allow us to explore the particular themes of research
that became prominent in work on kaza Aclun/`Ajlun. The wider regional map (Map 1) may serve to
remind us of the location of kaza `Ajlun (which at the time formed part of the Hauran liva and Suriye
vilayet). On a map not disfigured by modern boundaries, this region lies not that far from the villages
behind Sayda on which Professor Rami Zurayk and I are now working as part of a project comparing
the agrarian history of settlements where cultivators obtained title to land to those where land was
registered by landlords.
But back to the agrarian and agronomic history of kaza `Ajlun, a region that comprised both
settled villages and the urban Bani Hasan who practised mixed systems of pastoralism and agriculture
(see the hashed area of Map 2). In general this was a region where cultivators obtained title to land.
That is to say, most holdings were held by cultivators living in the village where they cultivated;
landowners who held in several villages were the exception but important to an understanding of
the regional political economy. In the semi-pastoral Bani Hasan an inventive solution, presumably
corresponding to a tax settlement, was adopted by registering rights of individual members of aşirets
in different areas, see Maps 3 and 4.2
In interpreting the data in the tapu defters it was important to know the time and administrative
context within which the registration of particular villages had been done. See Map 5 where aside
from one village (Jinin) which refused tapu registration altogether, and another (Rajib) whose lands
were registered in Damascus before the onset of yoklama registration, the bulk of the villages were
registered by a Special Commission for the Lands of Hawran. This was established following questions
about the registration done in a number of villages by the kaza officials of Irbid (the villages in grey
on Map 5).
The yoklama registers offer data of a reasonably synchronic nature. Thus I experimented with
mapping the main crops, see Map 6, and with mapping aspects such as the total number and total
taxable value of houses (Maps 7 & 8, these suffer evidently from the lack of data on important villages
in the south of the kaza). The villages with higher levels of inequality in the values of houses are
generally those with higher average land values (see Map 9). The ‘average’ in Map 9, where entered,
is not an arithmetic mean of different land values, but rather a valuation given to the dunum of land
right throughout a given village. Maps 9 and 10 speak to an aspect of the agrarian history of the region
about which there had been wider discussion for Palestine, Syria and Jordan: the holding of land in
shares and its cultivation in systems of periodic redistribution of particular holdings on the ground.
In earlier European (and Zionist) social evolutionist interpretations, such share-holding systems of
village agriculture were viewed as ancient and adduced, in polemical writing, as evidence of the
limited development of modern private property in ‘the East’. I do not aim to revisit this dead argument
here.3 Suffice it to say that share-holding systems of agriculture were to be found in areas of Eurasia
from as far apart as Romania and India. On Map 10 we can see how by simply mapping the patterns
of registration from the yoklama tapu defters, we can initiate an examination of the different forms of
village management (and of joint responsibility for tax payment) of land planted in the main types of
crops across the kaza. The map (where again the registers/data were missing especially in the southern
and eastern parts) reveals a number of sub-regions. First, with the exception of Maru (held by a single
family of erstwhile religious status and later sold to the cultivators of Maru), the plains villages planted
in field crops were held in shares. On Map 10 these forms of holding are termed musha` although
musha` was not a legal category in the tapu registers. Rather it represents a vernacular expression for
2 The village boundaries are the modern Mandate ones and hence the placement of the rights registered do not concern the whole area of
today’s village boundaries.
3 For a review of earlier arguments concerning share-holding farming systems in the Near East see M. Mundy, ‘La propriété dite musha`
en Syrie: une note analytique à propos des travaux de Ya’akov Firestone’, in the special issue ‘Biens communs, patrimoines collectifs et gestion
communautaire dans les sociétés musulmanes’, Revue du monde musulman et de la Méditerrannée, 1996, vol. 79-80/1-2, pages 267-281.
Arşiv Dairesi Başkanlığı
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