KONGRE BİLDİRİLERİ
was cast in terms of a man’s labour, counted as a zalama as the villagers say. There, village land was
thought of as the summation of parts, from the part to the whole, so to speak. Just as tax was collected
by the summation of the individual value of trees, vines and plantings, so the number of “men” and
their assemblage into local share-holding groups formed the basis of village land. But a full zeleme
represented a man and wife, the basic unit of labour cooperation being the married couple; a man on
his own was counted as a half zeleme.
Lastly the spatial organization of farming differed markedly: in the plains share-holders held
a number of separate plots, and cultivation discipline was tight at the level of sub-blocks, with the
redistribution of parcels occurring only rarely at the level of the village as a whole. There was soto-speak a synchronic equalization of the quality of land represented by a share and the spreading
of the risk of agricultural failure in a particular parcel by the holding of multiple plots. By contrast
in the hill villages, the particular plots in plough land were redistributed every two years between
the shareholders, thus assuring a diachronic equalisation of qualities of land and the spreading of
agricultural risk.
Transformation in farming and devolution of land over sixty years. With growing population
the plains villages saw a deepening of intra-village inequality alongside a decrease in the size of
average holdings. With only a few exceptions, the larger households of the time of registration came
to be divided into farming households built more about a married couple or two married brothers
with smaller holdings of livestock. Compared to a generation earlier, these smaller households did
more of the work themselves with less hired labour. Population growth led to a certain levelling of
fortune, save for the few who were to begin to build upon networks outside the village. In this context,
marriage which had earlier bound families to those of other villages, came to occur more frequently
within the village. The top families adopted a strategy of marrying within the family. But, whatever
the family’s economic endowment, men resisted granting female relatives their legal share in farming
land, all the more as land became subdivided.
In the hill villages, likewise, with population growth, average holding size decreased. But the
effect of the entitlement of women to land proved very different, ‘land’ itself not being the same
‘object’ as in the plains villages, and women’s role in cultivation more evident. The individuation of
right in shares allowed for shares in land (and olive trees) to be treated in the late 19th and early 20th
century as a form of wealth that entered also into mehr payments as well as devolved from father and
even mother to daughters. Thus, land continued to form part of the basic system of social reproduction
in the village and its individual families. Exceptional intra-village circulation of land and marital
exchanges between families underpinned an organisation of production in which there was virtually
no labour brought in from outside the village.
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If we stand back from the specific case of kaza `Ajlun, what emerges in terms of methodology
is the centrality of the tapu records for rural social and economic history. In regions such as `Ajlun
where cultivators obtained rights to land, the records allow one to write history at the level of particular
villages. This is a kind of historical work which has remained virtually absent – or at least extremely
rare, there being some work for Lebanon based primarily on Church records – in the former Ottoman
Arab lands as a whole. Historical scholarship has long focused on the cities and retained an elite and
political focus at the expense of socio-economic history of the bulk of the population who until the
1960s lived in the countryside not the city. Our work on `Ajlun thus represents an exception to this
dominant historiography. It was only possible thanks to our access to the tapu records before all the
other sources on which we later drew.
Although for reasons examined in Governing Property, in kaza `Ajlun cultivators obtained tapu
title, it is received wisdom that this did not occur in many other regions of the Arab lands. It is
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Tapu ve Kadastro Genel Müdürlüğü
noteworthy, however, that without actual research into the tapu records, it is impossible to advance
in an understanding of the relative role of the Ottoman registration, as opposed to consolidation of
holdings under the Mandate, in creating the structures of land holding that existed by the 1950s.
Indeed, at issue in work on the history of land tenure is not only the past, i.e. how a pattern
of tenure and land-use came about over the years. With Professor Rami Zurayk of the Faculty of
Agriculture of the American University of Beirut I am presently working on research, under the title
of The Palimpsest of Agrarian Change, concerning the divergent agricultural and agronomic history
of villages in the hinterland of Sayda where trading capital or former tax collectors obtained rights to
land as compared to those villages or mezraas where cultivators obtained title to land. In this work it
will be invaluable F