Land, rural classes, and law: Agrarian conflict and state regulation in the Ottoman Empire, 1830s--1860s

This dissertation examines the relation between rural conflict and aspects of agrarian relations on the one hand, and the changing forms of state regulation, on the other, in mid-nineteenth-century Ottoman Empire. Its main goal is to show that the changes at the level of state and law took place in the context of, and as a response to, to the changes in agrarian class relations.; The dissertation studies four cases of intense and protracted conflict over cultivated land, namely Canik, Vidin, Bosnia and Tirhala. It also examines more isolated cases of conflict over village commons and the wasteland in different provinces, and aspects of peasant indebtedness in two Western Anatolian districts, Mihalic and Kirmasti. It explores the causes of rural unrest, mechanisms of surplus extraction, forms and goals of cultivator protest, and the context and consequences of state actions. It also analyses the repercussions of the correspondence between rural class demarcation and religious difference seen in all four major cases mentioned above, and, based on that analysis, argues that religious difference (not religion per se) was a relation of production in these localities around mid-nineteenth century.; The central state tried to keep a low profile regarding rural conflict and was involved more actively only in exceptional circumstances. When it was involved in agrarian relations more directly, however, its actions mostly amounted to defending landed interests against cultivators. In many cases, the state effectively recognized, legitimized, and enforced the claims of landlords and other local magnates over the land and labor of the cultivators. Contrary to the dominant tendency in the scholarship, this dissertation attributes such state actions and policies not to the weakness of the state vis-a-vis local forces or the failures of Tanzimat-era statesmen and bureaucrats, but to the fragile and somewhat contradictory configuration of the coalition of ruling classes, which constituted a structural constraint on the central state in its dealings with the agrarian question.; This study analyzes the Land Code of 1858 as the most important instance of legal regulation of agrarian relations in the nineteenth century. The Code included clauses that might have provided a limited degree of protection to smallholding peasants and to village commons and the wasteland. On the other hand, landed interests found reflection in the Code, most importantly through its non-regulation of sharecropping and semi-feudal relations between cultivators and landlords. The main thrust of the Land Code of 1858 was, in the final analysis, modern-bourgeois. It pushed for more gender equality in terms of inheritance, and significantly enlarged the rights of sale, transfer, purchase, mortgaging, and devolution by inheritance of miri land. As a whole, it was a major leap forward towards the dominance of capitalist relations of production in the late Ottoman Empire.