Governing Property, Making the Modern State

Law, Administration and Production in Ottoman Syria

Martha Mundy, Richard Saumarez Smith

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2007
• Print ISBN:
  9781845112912
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9780857713025
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Social History
• Index: History

Was 'modernity' in the Middle East merely imported piecemeal from the West? Did Ottoman society really consist of islands of sophistication in a sea of tribal conservatism, as has so often been claimed? In this groundbreaking new book, Martha Mundy and Richard Saumarez Smith draw on over a decade of primary source research to argue that, contrary to such stereotypes, a distinctively Ottoman process of modernisation was achieved by the end of the nineteenth century with great social consequences for all who lived through it. Modernisation touched women as intimately as men: the authors' careful work explores the impact of Ottoman legal reforms, such as granting women equal rights to land. Mundy and Saumarez Smith have painstakingly recreated a picture of such processes through both new archival material and the testimony of surviving witnesses to the period. This book will not only affect the way we look at Ottoman society, it will change our understanding of the relationship between East, West and modernity.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• Maps, figures and tables
• Notes on transliteration, datation and abbreviation
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part One: Ottoman jurisprudence concerning ownership of agricultural land
• 2. Jurisprudential debate in the sixteenth century
• 3. Jurisprudential debate in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries
• 4. Legal reform from the 1830s to the First World War
• Part Two: The administration of property in one district of the empire
• 5. Production and settlement in the district of 'Ajlun
• 6. The introductino of bureaucratic registration
• 7. Regional leadership and the prosecution of a governor
• 8. Property and administration in the later Tanzimat
• Part Three: Governing property: administration, village, household
• 9.Registration and political economy in two plains villages
• 10. Registration and political economy in two hill villages
• 11. A village of the plains: Hawwara
• 12. A village of mixed agriculture in the hills: Kufr 'Awan
• 13. Epilogue
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index