Description
Book SynopsisMalissa Taylor is Assistant Professor of Middle Eastern Studies at University of Massachusetts Amherst, USA. Her published articles have appeared in
Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient and The Journal of Ottoman Studies.Trade ReviewA mind-blowing and innovative study of the supposedly dry subject of Ottoman land law, gracefully written and designed to overturn all your stereotypes of Islamic law, sultanic power, and Ottoman decline. Taylor is to be congratulated on her deeply original take on obscure but vitally important aspects of imperial legal modernization. * Linda T. Darling, Professor, University of Arizona, USA *
This book shows how three centuries of legislation and legal interpretation, instead of a European model, underlay the Ottoman land code of 1858. Deeply researched and cogently argued, it upends much that we thought we knew about Ottoman history from the age of Süleyman to the Tanzimat era. * Kenneth M. Cuno, Professor, University of Illinois, USA *
Taylor boldly reinterprets the foundational relationship among land/property rights, law/legal authorities and sovereignty in the Ottoman Empire. This ambitious, lucid and compact study recasts peasant cultivators as holding a “bundle of property rights” that slowly “trickled up” to model property rights among the highest-ranking property holders in the empire by the eighteenth century, enduring through land law reforms in the nineteenth. Whether accepted or challenged, Taylor’s reconceptualization of the Ottoman agrarian state and society offers a fulcrum for rethinking the entire history of the empire. _____________________________ * Amy Singer, Professor, Brandeis University, USA *
Table of ContentsIntroduction Sources Harmonization and Sovereignty Property: Bundles and Layers 1. Lifelong
tasarruf, Land Tenure Practices, and Law over the
longue durée Ottoman territories and varieties of tenure for the military class Cultivator Tenure and its legal Systemization Military fiscal change and land tenure Land tenure rights trickle up The Old and the New 2. Conquering a New Terrain: Establishing the Sultan’s Legislative Authority Texts and Contexts “Preserved in the Bayt al-Mal”: Acquiring Land for the Treasury “Neither Tithe nor
Kharaji”: The Status of the Land for Transaction and Tax Building a coherent law Conclusion 3. Canonical Voices: Discretion and analogy in the formation of the harmony tradition of land tenure Contexts of the Text Pir Mehmed and Sultanic Latitude The Formation of a Tradition: Deferential and not so Deferential Interpretation Conclusion 4. “The Books of
Fiqh”: The
Kanunname of Candia and the Consolidation of a New Doctrine in Hanafi Academic Texts Harmony at a crossroads The
Kanunname of Candia as critique: Reinstituting the Hanafism of the “books” The Sultan as Legislator: texts, commentaries and fatwas The Change in Doctrine: the sultan has a choice Conclusion 5. The Age of the
Mutasarrifs: Diffusion, Rights, and Discretion in the Eighteenth Century Background Convergence Expansive Transactions: Permission and Analogism Conclusion 6. From Harmony to Uniformity: Defensive Sovereignty and the Ottoman Nineteenth-Century Reforms
Miri Tasarruf: Stability in a sea of change Creating a Normal Subject Codifying Islamic Law Defending Islam: From “built on the
kanun” to “built on the
fiqh” Conclusion Conclusion Bibliography
