From the Pages of the Defter (ص 30)

غرض

عنوان

From the Pages of the Defter (ص 30)

المحتوى

offices; the location and quantity of lands that they determined should be auctioned; how it
was decided which areas they would survey; and how their work affected land
registrations.”° It appears they were commissioned to enforce provisions in the Land Code
allowing the confiscation and auction of agricultural land that lay fallow for three
consecutive years without reason."
To return to the British Survey, Ruedy’s second source, what merits discussion is the
two-pronged claim we observe in this short excerpt from it and also in Ruedy. The claim that
the fear of taxation and the fear of conscription led small landowners to evade registration
of their properties en masse is one of the pillars upon which rests the claim that the
implementation of property-tenure reforms failed. | argue it would be extremely significant
if the claim that peasants feared taxation and conscription is reliable. This would mean that
someone somewhere had interviewed Ottoman villagers. (If a petition had been found —a
document source — surely it would have been cited.) The rural inhabitants of the Ottoman
Empire have rarely been the subject of history. Rather, rural Ottoman studies have tended to
focus rather narrowly on land-related questions and agricultural production.”° One reason
often cited is the dearth of sources that give insight into villagers’ lives. In a collection of
*3 Shechter states that the commissions worked in secret, p. 147.
** and Code, Article 68 (Ongley, 37)
*° Nicolas Michel, “Introduction: Ottomanisme et ruralisme”, in Mohammad Afifi, Rachida Chih, Brigitte
Marino, Nicolas Michel, and Isik Tamdogan, eds. Sociétés rurales ottomanes/ Ottoman Rural Societies
(Cairo: Institut francais d’archéologie orientale, 2005), 1
13

هو جزء من

From the Pages of the Defter

تاريخ

٢٠١٦

المنشئ

Susynne McElrone

مجموعات العناصر

Generated Pages Set

Theses رسائل ماجستير ودكتوراه