What does it mean to discuss “national economy” in the late Ottoman context of imperial governance, where ideas about both the nation and the economy emerged under the shadow of European colonial expansion? This article considers Hamidian-era (1876–1908) Ottoman policy debates that set the parameters and foundation for a fully articulated national economy (milli iktisat) program after 1913, when many Committee of Union and Progress (CUP) leaders self-consciously abandoned free trade liberalism.Footnote 1 I argue that policy discussions among lawmakers, imperial officials, and regional capitalists in and about the future of Palestine and Syria during the Hamidian period were particularly important to setting the parameters for this program. Influential Hamidian-era lawmakers and officials saw these regions, along with Hijaz and Iraq, as full of economic potential and as a possible space of imperial redemption in the event of foreign expansion and loss of sovereignty in Istanbul and Anatolia.Footnote 2 Especially with regard to agrarian policy and immigration, realms in which Ottoman lawmakers and officials retained substantial but constantly threatened sovereignty, late nineteenth-century debates shaped early practices of national economy. Their discussions focused on how to encourage capitalist market expansion and prosperity within a clearly bounded sovereign territory shielded from European intervention and occupation, as well as the preferred religious (Muslim) and national (Ottoman) identities of loyal, productive, and market-oriented subjects. In this sense, this article also contributes to deeper understanding of the constitutive roles religious and national identities played in processes of capitalist expansion in the Ottoman context.
A growing body of literature traces the formation of national economy ideas and policies crucial to Turkish nation-state building in the 1920s and ’30s to the period after the 1908 revolution, especially in the context of the Balkan Wars. In this context, national economy referred to policies promoting a protected community of prosperous and loyal Muslim Ottoman consumers buying from Muslim Ottoman merchants who would invest in industry at home, delivering the empire from its fiscal and military crises and its reliance on foreign loans and imports.Footnote 3 The focus on Muslim Ottoman identity as a marker of loyalty was a response to suspicions over foreigners’ and non-Muslims’ perceived market dominance and connections to belligerent governments and separatist movements, as well as expansive European claims to protect Ottoman non-Muslims. Recent scholarship has also detailed regional social movements promoting ideals of national economy that were closely related to overlapping sectarian and class struggles, marked in particular by boycotts of both foreign and eventually all non-Muslim businesses.Footnote 4
While some existing scholarship has noted the importance of protectionist and exclusivist economic ideas among Hamidian intellectuals,Footnote 5 I show below that Hamidian restrictions on the newly constructed land market were also important conditions for the emergence of national economy ideas and practices at multiple levels of Ottoman society and governance after 1908. These restrictions worked alongside policies toward immigrants that constructed and maintained a normative Muslim Ottoman landowner in Hamidian official circles.Footnote 6 While the official reports and correspondence reviewed here did not use the phrase “national economy,” the ideal of the Muslim Ottoman landowner laid the groundwork for post-1908 discourse and practice by elevating this figure as the protector of Ottoman territory in response to threats to imperial sovereignty.Footnote 7 At the same time, restrictions on the newly constructed land market increased the extent and changed the meaning of state domain, defining the state as the exclusive owner of land in a competitive capitalist environment rather than the allocator of multiple revenue and use rights to Ottoman subjects. This consolidation was important to conceptions of land as a national asset that coalesced in the postimperial period.
Here, I focus on the realm of property within the empire’s borders, where Hamidian-era officials and lawmakers retained extensive but constantly contested decision-making power. I explore the ways in which they navigated the tension between their deep commitment to capitalist markets and desire for investment in agrarian development on the one hand, and concerns about the identity of investors and potential for sovereignty loss on the other. As I will show, this tension emerged in particular through the protests of regional capitalists, many of whom were aligned with Ottoman bureaucrats or served in the bureaucracy themselves, against protectionist restrictions on the land market tailored to defend Ottoman territory against threats from within and without. In analyzing these dynamics in Syria and Palestine, this article asserts the importance of the Arab provinces to discussions of Ottoman national economy that have thus-far focused on post-1908 Anatolia and the Balkans. Hamidian officials’ focus on the land market in the Arab provinces was related to the empire’s loss of territory in the Balkans, their concerns about European colonial expansion in Palestine, Hijaz, and Iraq, and their hopes that these provinces could provide an alternative imperial base in the event of further territorial loss.Footnote 8
More broadly, revealing economic policy debates in the Hamidian Arab provinces offers fresh perspectives on the Ottoman Empire and Middle East’s role and position in the history of capitalism. Twentieth-century scholars of capitalism from Rosa Luxemburg to Karl Polanyi to Eric Hobsbawm emphasized the Ottoman Empire’s loss of economic sovereignty and peripheralization during the Hamidian period, asserting that European capitalist interests took over de facto administration in the Ottoman domains with the establishment of the Public Debt Administration in the early 1880s.Footnote 9 Likewise, still-influential scholarship on the economic history of the Middle East largely treated Ottoman authorities as helpless in the face of aggressive colonial capitalist expansion, following the twentieth-century arguments of both colonial and postcolonial nationalist historians.Footnote 10
This article contributes to a substantial body of recent scholarship that recognizes the limitations of these assessments, including analyses of Hamidian-era imperial symbology, imperial officials’ aspirations toward Ottoman colonial expansion in Africa and Arabia, and defensive policies related to nationality and extraterritoriality.Footnote 11 Recent scholarship has also demonstrated that colonial and postcolonial policies in the Middle East built directly onto pre-existing Ottoman attempts at modern state formation that accelerated during the Hamidian period.Footnote 12 A deeper understanding of the economic logics behind late Ottoman policies and their location among political entities occupying variant positions in the emergent global capitalist economy is therefore crucial for understanding the Ottoman institutional legacy across the postimperial and postcolonial landscape of the Middle East.Footnote 13
In recent years, scholars have asserted the importance of economic thought in other “peripheralized” regions—especially India and Egypt—for tracing the trajectories of ideas about national economy on a global scale. Manu Goswami and Aaron Jakes have shown that late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century anticolonial nationalists articulated critiques of colonial economic policy that included aspirations toward national economy in opposition to the imperial free trade policies that they blamed for deepening impoverishment in India and Egypt.Footnote 14 These oppositional ideas recalled or explicitly drew on the earlier work of Frederick List on “national systems of political economy” inspired by the experiences of the United States and Germany, and they became important elements of anticolonial nationalist thought among aspiring policymakers whose lack of economic sovereignty was palpable.Footnote 15 Similarly, Marvin Suesse has shown how List-inspired measures like collective land acquisitions, boycotts, and cooperatives with participation limited to particular ethnic and linguistic groups were foundational practices of late nineteenth-century anti-imperial nationalists in East-Central Europe.Footnote 16
These analyses are crucial for deepening our understanding of the history of capitalism beyond a paradigm of “winners and losers.”Footnote 17 The Ottoman authorities whose policies and correspondence I analyze below were not in the anticolonial or anti-imperial nationalist opposition in the sharply competitive global capitalist landscape of the late nineteenth century: they held dominant and powerful positions with extensive influence and authority over imperial policy before 1908. On a regional and global scale, their positionality has been theorized as “peripheral,” but the dynamics of attenuated economic sovereignty in such spaces is not well understood.Footnote 18 In what follows, I show the salience of protectionist agrarian thought and policy in the post-1870s Arab Ottoman provinces among imperial officials who maintained an effective but constantly threatened sovereignty.
Creating a Bounded National-Imperial Territory: Regulating Land and Population
At first glance, land policy may seem an unlikely focus for a discussion of national economy that has usually hinged, in line with List, on trade policies like tariffs, customs dues, and attempts at industrialization and import substitution.Footnote 19 While Ottoman officials and lawmakers aspired to amend bilateral trade treaties they saw as detrimental to their ability to collect revenue on trade or support regional industry, they generally retained much more direct decision-making power in matters of land registration, the creation of a state-approved market in agricultural land, and taxation of land rights and revenues.Footnote 20 As we will see, their contested control over immigration was also extremely important to regulating who could own which land-as-territory.
Scholars have described Ottoman economic thought and policy in the period after the Crimean War as liberal, optimistic, and committed to the ideal of a capitalist free-trade order.Footnote 21 It was during this period that many of the structural conditions for a capitalist land market became entrenched, conditions that were also necessary for protectionist land policies in the Hamidian period.Footnote 22 Codified laws like the Provincial Administration Regulation and the transformed judicial system constructed the empire, in theory, as a cohesive territory legible through homogenous and modular units like district, county, and province, and detailed imperial and provincial yearbooks enumerated population, agrarian conditions, and administrative structures across the empire.Footnote 23 The 1858 Land Code and 1859 Title Regulation created the legal conditions for an individuated property regime and commodified agricultural land as an investment object, but they also enabled bounded territorial thinking and practice and granted state agencies powers to comprehensively monitor who owned which land and its revenue potential.Footnote 24 These laws fit the broader economic ideas policymakers shared at mid-century: Ottoman prosperity lay in its agricultural sector, and extending the area of cultivated land, increasing agricultural productivity, and rendering land an object of investment were the keys to the increased revenue necessary to maintain imperial sovereignty.Footnote 25
Ottoman officials’ ways of defining and monitoring ideal subjects also changed in the 1850s and 1860s, undergirding constructions of population and territory that emphasized nationality. An 1857 decree invited foreign immigrants into the empire and offered them free agricultural land on the condition that they adopted Ottoman nationality.Footnote 26 In 1867, the government issued a protocol allowing foreigners to buy land in the empire, with an addendum that foreigners would be treated like Ottoman subjects in land cases. Crucially, the one exception to this law was Hijaz province, marking it as a particularly sensitive object of British colonial interest.Footnote 27 Two years later, in 1869, a Nationality Law redefined the parameters for determining and legally categorizing Ottoman subjecthood. These laws were primarily concerned with regulating the status of Ottoman subjects with multiple national allegiances, including both Muslims and non-Muslims claiming European protégé status. Legally defining Ottoman nationality, and claiming sovereignty over Ottoman national subjects, was an attempt to regulate the privileges of the Capitulations.Footnote 28
After the wide-ranging crises of the 1870s, the urgency of both extending cultivation and monitoring and aggressively delimiting landholdings and the identity of landowners increased. The 1875 bankruptcy and the eventual creation of the Public Debt Administration that earmarked certain Ottoman revenues for European bondholders elevated the domestic importance of agrarian commodities like grains, which were not earmarked, for the empire’s fiscal viability.Footnote 29 The loss of valuable territory in the Russo-Ottoman wars of 1876–78 precipitated a large influx of immigrants entering what was left of the empire’s territory, especially Muslims from regions lost to Russia and new independent states in the Balkans. This situation transformed Ottoman officials’ perception of agrarian property relations from one of plenty, with land to spare for prosperous immigrants, to one of scarcity, with officials creating lists of “empty land,” aided by recent registrations, to allocate to destitute immigrants.Footnote 30 It was in this post-1870s context that concepts of landed property, bounded and imperial territory, and loyal Ottoman Muslim landowners came to overlap, interlinking agrarian questions to an idea of national economy.Footnote 31
Limiting the Land Market in Palestine
The intertwined dynamics of commodified land, immigration, and national and religious identity outlined above were visible in the Empire’s Arab provinces, especially in the period of intensive reform after the Crimean War and regional violence of the late 1850s and early 1860s. The sense of land scarcity in combination with heightened concerns about foreign intervention, especially after the 1882 British occupation of Egypt, precipitated numerous restrictions on both the newly created land market and immigration. A broader imperial shift toward stricter immigration policy applied to the question of Jewish immigration to Palestine from the early Hamidian period in the 1880s, but as I will show below, Ottoman officials’ concerns about capital-intensive Zionist colonization projects only became central to regional land policies in the 1890s.Footnote 32 In that context, in both Palestine and the wider geography of Ottoman Syria, Hijaz, and Iraq, a protectionist attitude toward the entire landscape of the Arab provinces as a well-bordered sovereign space to be inhabited by prosperous, loyal Muslim Ottomans monitored carefully by state agencies began to take shape.
The creation of a market in agricultural land and its transformation into an object of investment proceeded in the intensively cultivated regions of Syria and Palestine in the 1860s and 1870s.Footnote 33 Property registration offices produced comprehensive registers that connected particular pieces of land to individual taxpaying owners.Footnote 34 Whereas court records detailing property transactions prior to this period identified litigants in terms of their religious identity, in the late 1860s and early 1870s they began adding references to nationality in accordance with the 1869 Nationality Law.Footnote 35 In this way, the process of creating the conditions for a land market accessible and legible to both government officials and distant capitalists was closely linked to markers of both religious identity and nationality.Footnote 36 In Palestine, this process coincided with increasing concerns about European influence after the Crimean War. Scholars have identified these concerns as central to Ottoman lawmakers’ creation of the special province of Jerusalem in the early 1870s.Footnote 37
Concern with the nationality and religious identity of financiers, landowners, and immigrants heightened in the early Hamidian period after the 1878 Treaty of Berlin strengthened European claims to intervene on behalf of non-Muslim Ottoman subjects.Footnote 38 British Christian Zionist Laurence Oliphant’s proposal to establish an autonomous, self-governing Jewish colony in the interior region east of the Jordan River in 1879 was one such proposal that shaped subsequent Ottoman policy toward Jewish immigration and foreshadowed tensions between official desires for capitalist development and maintaining sovereignty. Oliphant described the region east of the Jordan as “empty,” meaning its inhabitants were not cultivating to a level he deemed deserving of land rights.Footnote 39 While noting that the region east of the Jordan was unsurveyed, unregistered, and in need of attention to encourage settlement and increase prosperity (mamuriyet), the Ottoman Council of Ministers eventually ruled that the proposed Jewish colony would constitute “a state within a state” and rejected it.Footnote 40
Proposals like Oliphant’s to establish self-governing colonies that would circumvent Ottoman sovereignty and early Zionist associations’ statements about Jewish nationalism heightened imperial officials’ concern about Jewish immigration.Footnote 41 Restrictions in the 1880s focused on immigration rather than land policy. In the early 1880s, Jewish settlers attempted to enter Ottoman domains, especially after pogroms and tightening anti-Jewish policies in Russia and Romania.Footnote 42 The central government directed the Russian and Romanian consuls as well as provincial officials that Jewish immigrants (muhacirin-i müseviyye) could settle in Ottoman domains in separate communities anywhere except “the land of Palestine” (arz-i Filistin), but they had to adopt Ottoman nationality and would be subject to Ottoman laws.Footnote 43
Ahmed Hamdi Pasha was a longtime Ottoman bureaucrat, governor of Anatolian provinces, and former Grand Vezir who spent the last few years of his life in the governorship of Syria in the early 1880s. He posed a number of territorial questions about the new restrictions on Jewish immigration in correspondence with Istanbul.Footnote 44 His questions stemmed from the fact that in the early 1870s the central government had decided against forming a single administrative jurisdiction called “Palestine,” presumably to avoid even more European interest in a region where consuls, missionaries, and tourists had proliferated since the Crimean War. This meant that the term “arz-i Filistin” mentioned in the directives limiting Jewish immigration unambiguously included the special province of Jerusalem, but also parts of the larger provinces of Syria (established in 1865) under Ahmed Hamdi Pasha’s governorship and, after its establishment in 1888, the coastal province of Beirut.Footnote 45 In 1882, Ahmed Hamdi Pasha asked Yildiz Palace about the advisability of allowing Jewish immigration and settlement in Hawran, “inside the province of Syria but outside the land of Palestine,” concluding that permitting significant settlements of foreign Jews in the immediate vicinity of Palestine was not advisable.Footnote 46 In 1884, he sent another inquiry about whether Jewish merchants and pilgrims should be allowed to visit and which nationalities fell under the ban on foreign Jewish immigration—did it apply to Russian and Romanian passport holders only, or would it also apply to Austrian Jews attempting to settle in the land of Palestine?Footnote 47
Ahmed Hamdi Pasha posed these questions from a broader context of territorial concerns about uneven Ottoman presence and market conditions in the province of Syria, especially in the interior and southern arid regions that were, like the region east of the Jordan River Oliphant had targeted, outside the zones of historical cultivation and tax collection where land registration was centered. In May 1884, a few months before his death, he added his perspective to a growing genre of proposals to develop the southern and interior regions of the province of Syria.Footnote 48 Like his predecessors, Ahmed Hamdi Pasha articulated a sharp divide between the zones of historical cultivation closer to urban centers and Mediterranean ports and the “desert” interior. He advocated extending market conditions—especially policing and administrative districts—into lands where he argued the main authorities were people he described as Bedouin shaykhs. Toward these goals, he proposed the creation of a new province, called “Palestine or another name approved by the government,” in the southern part of the existing province of Syria that would expand the existing special province of Jerusalem.Footnote 49
Strikingly, despite his requests for clarifications about how to implement the limitations on Jewish immigration in previous years, neither that issue nor Zionist land purchase attempts like Oliphant’s featured in Ahmed Hamdi Pasha’s 1884 report. His deep concerns about foreign influence centered on Christian missionaries and the intrigues of foreign tourists. His concerns about the loyalties of Ottoman subjects were focused squarely on Bedouin, who he saw as particularly susceptible to “Christian intrigue” because of their lack of formal imperial education opportunities. Their access to British arms was a main reason he argued for stronger Ottoman security on the border with British-occupied Egypt.Footnote 50 In the mid-1880s, Hamdi Pasha and Ottoman officials from Istanbul to the provinces preferred to tolerate existing Jewish colonies established after the 1882 ban while pledging to better uphold the ban on additional immigration and settlement in future.Footnote 51 Strikingly, this practice of discouraging while not reversing Jewish immigration and settlement parallels Lale Can’s findings with regard to the inconsistent implementation of the ban on non-Ottoman property ownership in Hijaz in the same period.Footnote 52
Ottoman officials extended Hamdi Pasha’s integrative-within-limits attitude toward Jewish immigration and property acquisition in the period after his death. In 1886, the Ministry of the Interior and the Council of State discussed founding a nahiye, an Ottoman administrative unit made up of a few villages, that would include the Jewish settlements in Haifa district established in the preceding years, where 272 settlers from Romania had reportedly applied for Ottoman nationality, alongside other pre-existing non-Jewish villages.Footnote 53 This plan, which was never realized, represented one vision for administratively incorporating new Jewish settlements without allowing them to become religiously homogenous, self-governing colonies or a legitimation strategy for the expansive efforts of foreign consuls to increase their influence in Palestine.
The tone of these discussions shifted in the early 1890s in response to reports from Ottoman officials and subjects in Jerusalem that Jewish immigration and settlement was increasing rapidly both in the city and in coastal colonies. These reports emphasized the persecution many of the recent Jewish immigrants had experienced in Russia and the hypocrisy of Russian consular claims to protect Jews in Ottoman territory under these circumstances. They also documented the expansionist practices of the new colonies, praising their educational institutions and agricultural skill but critiquing their refusal to admit non-Jewish students and expressing concern that highly skilled Jewish graduates would flood the regional labor markets. One report from the Jerusalem special province highlighted increasing land prices that enticed the region’s agriculturalists to sell, buttressed by the new colonies’ connections to European capital and reliance on European consular protection and intervention.Footnote 54
These warnings combined with evidence of the increasing attempts of the Rothschild Administration to expand existing colonies and acquire land in the broad region including the special district of Jerusalem and the provinces of Syria and Beirut.Footnote 55 An acquisition that prompted particular concern in Istanbul involved Rothschild agent, Beiruti businessman, and Alliance Israélite Universelle executive Emile Franck. In 1892, Franck attempted to finalize a purchase of 40,000 donums of land (close to 10,000 acres) comprising the two villages of Nafa‘a and Sahm al-Jawlan in Hawran district from Ahmad Rafiq Pasha Sham‘azade in order to settle Russian Jewish immigrants.Footnote 56 Ahmad Rafiq Pasha was an elite Damascene landowner who had been a member of the first Ottoman parliament and served on the provincial administrative council and in other high-level provincial positions throughout the 1880s and early 1890s.Footnote 57 In a long, anxious letter to the Minister of the Interior, he explained that he had been burdened by taxes on the Hawran land and had announced its sale at a low price, agreeing to sell to Franck because he did not think the restrictions on Russian Jewish immigration applied to Hawran. He only went through with the sale under great financial duress, he wrote, when Franck procured an order from the Ministry of the Interior. Ahmad Rafiq Pasha insisted on his loyalty to his state and religious community (devlet ve milletim sadaket olan).Footnote 58 He fell out with the sultan a decade later, but the substantial land sale was finally concluded with Franck’s “strong assurances” that no foreign Jewish immigrants would be settled on the land. Ahmad Rafiq Pasha’s prominence on the provincial administrative council, where he headed the main investigative committee in the early 1890s, likely influenced this outcome.Footnote 59 However, the tone of his letter and his emphasis on his identity as a loyal Muslim subject points to the changing regional politics around Jewish immigration and settlement.
Such warnings, large-scale deals, and reports of Zionist capital and financing, as well as the difficulty of monitoring land acquisitions across multiple provinces and jurisdictions, seem to have been the main factors in the 1892 attempt to entirely ban Jewish participation in the land market. This ban applied to registration of new holdings and trade in existing ones across the entire provinces of Syria, Beirut, and Jerusalem. Ministry of Interior officials described this policy to their subordinates in the provinces as designed to support and implement the struggling ban on Jewish immigration and settlement.Footnote 60 This was a significant shift in Ottoman policy. Both European consuls and Ottoman Jews in Palestine protested the decree, explicitly challenging the emergent coding of all Jewish Ottoman subjects as potentially disloyal. The rabbinate in Istanbul complained to the Grand Vezir’s office that the restrictions on Ottoman Jews buying and selling land in the special province of Jerusalem were having a negative effect on “loyal Jewish individuals” (efrad-i sadike-i müseviyye) and singling them out among religious communities (milel).Footnote 61 A January 1893 telegram to the office of the Grand Vezir, signed by forty-six Ottoman Jewish men from Jerusalem, also contested the ban, asserting their undying loyalty to the Ottoman Sultan as inheritors of Jerusalem property from their ancestors (aba-an-cad). They appealed directly to official commitments to foster prosperity, arguing that the ban would precipitate their economic ruin and cause intercommunal unrest:
Here, people from all religious schools (mezaheb) engage in trade and other kinds of transactions with each other. Just like other places, property (emlak ve akkar) is the axis of wealth (medar-i servet). This ban on transactions with Jews will cause the value of people’s property to fall in general, but especially for the Jewish community (millet), it will cause ruin and great suffering. It will end the transactions back and forth, eliminate the cooperation between people and make them poor. This is hurtful for all people, but especially for us loyal Ottoman Jews.Footnote 62
In a post-1860 context of anxiety about intercommunal strife in the Eastern Mediterranean, this petition specifically raised the question of what might happen were one community to become impoverished and excluded from social life due to Ottoman policy. Petitioners spoke directly to the intertwined nature of the sovereign and social questions in the late Ottoman context. At the same time, their insistence that “property is the axis of wealth” is striking because of its alignment with liberal ideas about the importance of individuated and freely circulating property rights to general commerce and prosperity. As we will see, men of property used this argument across a wide Eastern Mediterranean spectrum in the 1890s and 1900s to protest the increasing restrictions and regulations on the still quite new “regular” (nizami) market in transactable land titles.Footnote 63
The German, Austrian, and Italian consuls also contested the blanket restriction on Jewish participation in the regional property market. They complained that the new regulation contradicted the 1867 protocol permitting foreigners of any religion to own and transact in land in the Ottoman domains.Footnote 64 Ottoman officials responded that the restriction on the land market did not intend to alter the wider privileges granted in the 1867 protocol, but were rather related to “political considerations” in Palestine specifically.Footnote 65 In other words, they asserted the right to claim Palestine as an exception to a wider existing rule within Ottoman territory, as they had earlier claimed Hijaz on religious grounds.
These contestations over the land market forced the Ministry of the Interior and the Grand Vezir’s Office to articulate the connections they perceived between land, nationality, religious identity, and sovereignty underlying their protectionist approach. A Council of State report on the conditions in the Jerusalem special province prepared soon after the issuance of the 1892 ban on Jewish participation in the land market recommended that denying Ottoman Jews who had inhabited Palestine for generations and Jewish settlers who had already acquired land and built houses in the preceding decade in Safad, Haifa, and Jaffa the right to trade in their property would not be prudent. However, the report also expressed significant concerns about the land acquisition attempts of “Baron Rothschild and the men of the Israel Association”Footnote 66 and the propensity of aggressive foreign consuls, especially the Russian, to claim protection rights over Jews holding their passports. Echoing the reports of provincial officials, this report claimed that Russian Jewish immigrants residing in Jerusalem’s environs were segregationist in their property practices: their numbers were rapidly increasing, they bought up as much property as they could and would only sell it to their co-religionists, and if they were “left free to acquire land” they would eventually displace the region’s “ancient inhabitants (ahali-i kadime).”Footnote 67
The Council of State report also articulated Ottoman officials’ concerns about nationality as a reliable marker of loyalty, an important element of the move to exclude all Jews, rather than only foreign Jews, from the property market. In the 1880s and early 1890s, financiers sometimes offered to make settlers’ adoption of Ottoman nationality a precondition of their immigration and land purchases. Adopting Ottoman nationality had been a strategy for avoiding the ban on Jewish immigration prior to 1892, and Ottoman officials did consider whether new settlers held it in their discussions of issuing licenses for land ownership or building permits.Footnote 68 In the debates following the 1892 ban on participation in the land market, the Minister of the Interior argued that settlers accepted Ottoman nationality without renouncing their original passports, which they used whenever they needed consular protection. Notably, agents of the Rothschild administration also complained about the strong relationship between the Russian consul and the new settlers, who would seek consular protection in their conflicts not only with Ottoman authorities but also with Rothschild administrators whose oversight in the colonies they resisted.Footnote 69
Despite this reasoning, and in response to the protests of Ottoman and foreign Jews as well as consular agents, by 1893 Ottoman officials developed a complex permissions policy for Jewish property holders to prove that they had come to Palestine before 1892 and would not support or enable further Jewish immigration and settlement. This entailed presenting stamped declaration certificates from Ottoman and consular authorities to land registry officials when applying to complete transactions.Footnote 70 This policy created multiple routes for aspiring Jewish settlers to obtain land titles. However, it also demanded minute attention to parcelized plots of land as objects of investment that were simultaneously valuable assets and potential threats to Ottoman sovereignty.
For the Ottoman government, the continuing anxiety over naturalized Jewish immigrants exposed the tensions embodied in the Treaty of Berlin and the occupation of Egypt. While Ottoman nationality made it more difficult for Jewish settlers to claim judicial immunity or avoid taxes, from the perspective of many Ottoman policymakers an expanding community of naturalized Ottoman Jews in Palestine with connections to prominent European financiers could still create a locus of competitive Great Power influence in a region where maintaining Ottoman sovereignty had become both more important and more precarious.Footnote 71 These tensions over restrictions on the property market were important to the construction of the ideal normative loyal Muslim landowner in the Arab provinces as protector of Ottoman territory. As we will see below, the extension of similar bans in the 1890s also solidified a new construction of protected and exclusive state domain.
Exclusive State Domain in the Syrian Interior
The 1892 ban on Jewish land acquisitions, the subsequent debates over its amendment, and the attempts to circumvent it assumed the existence of a land market sanctioned and regulated by Ottoman officials in the terms of the 1858 Land Code, the 1859 Tapu Regulations, and their amendments. It was especially relevant in the coastal regions of Beirut, Jerusalem, and Syria, where individuated land registration had taken place by the 1880s and offices of the Imperial Registration Ministry were well established.Footnote 72 However, Ottoman officials were aware that Baron Rothschild and other financiers did not limit their efforts to these heavily populated landscapes—Oliphant’s original proposal had been focused on a region outside the limits of existing land registration in 1879.
Ottoman governors and other officials who had served in regional provinces during the Hamidian period were well placed to recognize the geographical extent of early Zionist land acquisition and colonization attempts in the 1890s.Footnote 73 Rauf Pasha, who was governor of Jerusalem for twelve years (1877–1889) and then became governor of Syria in 1892, was one such official who was well known in the region for his opposition to the expansion of foreign Jewish settler colonies.Footnote 74 Rauf Pasha’s bureaucratic experience had begun in the Balkans, where his father had been governor of Bosnia and his first assignments coincided with the period of administrative restructuring under Midhat Pasha in the 1860s.Footnote 75 While these experiences surely shaped his understandings of territoriality, nationality, and the land market, there were also reports that he had become a landowner in the Jerusalem province during his tenure there and had involvement in the Sultanic Estates Administration’s acquisitions in Gaza district.Footnote 76
In 1893, Rauf Pasha expressed his increasing concern about Rothschild’s agents obtaining land that had never been previously registered, especially on the eastern side of the Jordan River (in contemporary Jordan) in the regions Oliphant targeted in the late 1870s, in reports to the Grand Vezir’s office in Istanbul.Footnote 77 He criticized what he described as corrupt practices among district-level land administrators in Syria, Jerusalem, and Beirut who would declare unregistered interior state land legally unused (mahlul) and then sell it at auction to the highest bidder, making prior deals with local capitalists who would buy the land for low prices. The governor reminded the Ministry of the Interior that once state land had entered the market in this way, it was much harder to limit transactions. Rauf Pasha suggested a radical measure that went further than the previous efforts to ban Ottoman Jews from the land market: prohibiting the auction and registration of legally unused and unregistered state land across the entirety of the provinces of Beirut, Syria, and Jerusalem, effectively keeping these lands off the market altogether. In this way, he argued, these newly strategic lands could be carefully settled with Muslim immigrants and cooperative and loyal Muslim Bedouin, plot by plot, in a strengthened and exclusive state domain.Footnote 78 In 1893, Istanbul approved this proposal, issuing a ban on the auction and sale of legally unused state land across the provinces of Syria, Beirut, and Jerusalem.Footnote 79
It is important to note that most of the southern interior landscape around the towns of Salt and Karak in the southeastern region of the province of Syria that Oliphant’s proposal had targeted could be claimed “legally unused” and had not entered the regular land market defined by the Land Code and Title Regulation. The limited nature of land registration in this region reflected Ottoman officials’ perception that it was sparsely populated and uncultivated, following a logic of “empty land” similar to that of Oliphant and other Zionist financiers. These regions’ externality to the regular Ottoman land market did not mean they were “untouched” by capitalism—many of these lands had become the object of regional capitalist land acquisitions through court transactions in the preceding decades.Footnote 80 However, regular Ottoman land registration in the terms of codified law would render these lands objects of both taxation and investment for faraway financiers, including those funding early Zionist colonization.
The ban on the auction and sale of interior land in response to Rauf Pasha’s warnings was therefore hotly debated among multiple imperial agencies. These debates were somewhat similar to those in Jerusalem between local men of property and foreign consuls arguing for an open market and Ottoman officials concerned about losing sovereignty in regions that were already registered. In opposition to Rauf Pasha and the Ministry of the Interior, representatives of the Imperial Land Administration and the Ministry of Finance argued for an open land market in order to quickly develop the Syrian interior by attracting foreign capital and a productive population no matter the source of the capital or the identity of the producers. Land Administration officials working in Syrian districts, who tended to have closer relationships with regional capitalists, warned that if land were left unregistered, cultivators in the surrounding regions would begin to extend the boundaries of their cultivation, eventually amassing claims to prescriptive right that would allow them to register the land with minimal fees when the ban was lifted. In that case, the treasury would lose its ability to auction the land to the highest bidder and collect its price.Footnote 81
These arguments over Syrian interior land signaled a fundamental shift in the meaning of state domain. Whereas previously state ownership of land (miri) had denoted the Ottoman government’s legal power to distribute the “bundle” of revenue and usufruct rights over a piece of land, often distributing different rights over the same land to different imperial subjects, the discussions described here point to a new understanding of the state as an exclusive and competitive landowner.Footnote 82 Both sides of the debate over the Syrian interior recognized this shift, fundamental to the construction of land as an object of investment under capitalism—their argument was about whether the state as exclusive landowner should hold vast parcels of land in order to protect them as sovereign territory or sell them for a profit and collect land tax.
The governors of Syria involved in these discussions—Ahmed Hamdi Pasha, Rauf Pasha, and Rauf Pasha’s successor, Osman Nuri Pasha—were all key figures in the re-imagining of the Arab provinces, and their interior regions in particular, as a primary locus of Ottoman sovereignty in the 1880s and 1890s. Michael Christopher Low’s explication of Osman Nuri Pasha’s vision for sovereign development in Hijaz is strikingly similar to that of Ahmed Hamdi Pasha and Rauf Pasha in Syria and Palestine explored here.Footnote 83 All of these officials were committed to capitalist land markets and a developmentalist vision of agrarian prosperity, but as “strong proponent(s) of centralization” they were also highly concerned about the territorial aspects of Ottoman sovereignty and the implications of foreign and non-Muslim land ownership.Footnote 84 Contestations from regional capitalists, lower-level officials in land offices, and foreign consuls shows that their preferred protectionist policies were in no way decisive, but their ideas and the imperial legal infrastructure they created were nevertheless important reference points for later programs of national economy.
The discussions over the status of the Syrian interior continued for a decade, but the Grand Vezir’s office finally sent an order upholding the ban on auction and sale of state land in 1905. It stood for the remainder of the Hamidian period, although as we will see below district officials continued to complete land registrations in defiance.Footnote 85 These restrictions on the land market had counterparts in a similar ban on auctions of unused land in Iraq and in the sultan’s extensive acquisitions of land for the Sultanic Estates Administration across the Eastern Mediterranean.Footnote 86 By keeping land off the open market, these policies did not entail wholesale rejection of capitalist property relations or the triumph of the state in a “zero-sum game between state and capital.”Footnote 87 Rather, they signaled the simultaneous and conflicted commitments of Ottoman officials to the promise of an individuated land market and the maintenance of that market under closely monitored Ottoman territorial sovereignty in an environment of everyday threats they felt organizations like the Rothschild administration, as well as foreign consulates in Palestine, had come to embody.
This construction of the empire’s territory as landed property both in and out of exclusive state domain was a foundational practice of national economy making. Existing studies of Ottoman policies in the history of the Zionist colonization of Palestine have largely pronounced the attempts to enforce the ban on Jewish immigration a failure, since foreign Jewish colonies and landholdings grew steadily throughout the final decades of Ottoman rule.Footnote 88 Beyond the question of their efficacy, internal Ottoman debates around these restrictions, their implementation, and enforcement consolidated a protectionist agrarian policy with an aggressive approach to establishing exclusive state domain across a well-bordered economic space in the wake of the 1870s crises. These debates forced Ottoman officials who advocated a protectionist policy to articulate their position in response not only to foreign consuls and European financiers, but also to regional capitalists and their allies in the bureaucracy who argued for a more liberal and open land market in the name of expanding prosperity. Their protectionist policy was particularly “national” in its construction of Muslim subjects as normative loyal landholders, and it also drew on wider debates and fears about the role of foreign nationals in agrarian development and investment.
The Ottoman debates over Jewish immigration and settlement and early Zionist proposals contrast sharply with simultaneous discussions in Argentina, where Edmond de Rothshild’s contemporary, Maurice de Hirsch, was involved in negotiations to purchase land for larger numbers of Jewish immigrants leaving Russia. While Hirsch and his agents dreamed of a self-governing and autonomous province, negotiations and public debates in Argentina in the early 1890s were more concerned with obtaining the highest price possible for state land from foreign financiers than they were with the idea that a Jewish colony might threaten the country’s territorial sovereignty.Footnote 89 The contrasting circumstances for Ottoman officials in Palestine illustrate the ways in which their attenuated sovereignty forced them to make policy compromises related to both immigration and agrarian law with European consuls and regional capitalists. However, these compromises were made in reference to Ottoman law, reflecting the sovereign control they held in contradistinction to anticolonial nationalists in India and Egypt and laying the groundwork for a territorially rooted national economy based in a transformed notion of state domain and the ideal loyal Muslim landowner. This exclusivist national economy approach to agrarian policy did not single out Jewish landholding: as the Hijaz railroad project took shape, Christian landholding in the Syrian interior became suspect along similar lines.
Land, Religious Identity, and the Hijaz Railway
As foreigners obtain concessions and ownership of significant institutions like railways, they increasingly encroach upon Ottoman territories conquered with the blood of Muslims, gradually rendering them foreign colonies (müstemlekat-i ecnebiyye), and ensuring the means to expel us from Europe and perhaps even from Asia (Anatolia). If, God forbid, we cannot implement Sultan Selim I’s plan (to unify the lands Muslims inhabit) with our own deeds, at least we can begin serious preparations to revive and reestablish the Ottoman Caliphate from the Islamic lands such as Hijaz, Yemen, Iraq and Syria. Let us begin this [Hijaz] railway project immediately.Footnote 90 -İzzet Holo Pasha, 1896
In the first decade of the twentieth century, Ottoman policies regarding land around the newly built and highly strategic railway project running from Damascus to Mecca, itself an important marker of imperial sovereignty and legitimacy, followed a similar trajectory to concerns over land in Palestine and the Syrian interior in the previous decade. Ottoman officials first attempted to extend existing restrictions on foreigners buying land in Hijaz to land around the new railroad all the way to Damascus, then they expanded the restrictions to non-Muslim Ottoman subjects, and they finally attempted to restrict registrations and transactions altogether. As in the case of Palestine, these policies created debates within and outside the bureaucracy that highlighted the tension between promoting capitalist prosperity and maintaining national sovereignty. They ultimately laid the foundation for the creation of land as a commodified object of investment and the simultaneous restriction of the land market, entrenching the exclusive character of state domain.
Existing literature on the Hijaz Railway has focused on its political and religious character, asserting that its architects, Sultan Abdülhamid II himself first among them, did not have an economic motive in mind.Footnote 91 However, as the quote from the diaries of the Sultan’s close Syrian advisor, Izzet Holo Pasha, from the beginning of this section implies, the railway’s political weight as a symbolic and material conduit of Ottoman sovereignty involved explicit visions of economic development.Footnote 92 While he was often seen in Istanbul as a member of the “Levantine elite” because of his extensive investments in both real estate and European bond markets and his involvement in palace intrigues, Izzet Pasha had deep roots in the intertwined networks of Ottoman administration and propertied wealth in Syria’s interior cities and hinterlands. His father was one of the main architects of Ottoman administrative restructuring after the violence of the late 1850s in Nablus, Hama, and the Baqa’a valley, and served alongside Ahmad Rafiq Pasha Sham ‘azade on the provincial administrative council in the 1880s and 1890s.Footnote 93 The family’s history of investment in livestock and grain markets in Syria likely dates to the early eighteenth century.Footnote 94 Izzet Pasha began his career in the post-1860 civil legal administration in Damascus and Mount Lebanon before serving on a court of first instance and commercial court in Istanbul, eventually obtaining a seat on the Council of State and becoming a close advisor to the sultan.Footnote 95 In the late 1890s and first years of the twentieth century, his main projects included running commissions focused on Ottoman fiscal reform and promoting and planning the Hijaz railway.
Izzet Pasha’s diaries document his mostly failed attempts to revise bilateral commercial agreements toward increasing treasury revenue and to strengthen tax collection efforts, especially on wealthy Ottomans, in order to shield the government from foreign loans. Izzet Pasha believed strongly in the Ottoman reform projects of the mid-nineteenth century and the bureaucratic state order they envisioned, but constantly bemoaned the impossibility of implementing these reforms considering loss of revenue after the Treaty of Berlin both to the Ottoman Public Debt Administration and to Russian war indemnities.Footnote 96 He heaped praise on Fuad Pasha, who he saw as having retained Ottoman sovereignty in Mount Lebanon and Syria in the face of European intervention in 1860 in his childhood.Footnote 97 For Izzet Pasha, the key to Ottoman longevity lay in the effective implementation of those reforms, including empowering the elaborated Ottoman court system to address intercommunal conflicts and violence and force revenue collection.Footnote 98 His vision for the Hijaz Railway was closely related to this aspiration to build a territorially sovereign and fiscally secure Ottoman state that would realize aspirational imperial conditions expressed in existing Ottoman law.
Izzet Pasha perhaps best articulated an emergent vision among Ottoman officials of the Muslim-majority regions surrounding Mecca and Medina as an alternate seat of power for the Empire were Anatolia, and, with it, Istanbul, to fall. It is particularly striking that he articulated this dream in the aftermath of devastating violence in Eastern Anatolia and ongoing efforts to negotiate Ottoman sovereignty in the “six provinces” with aggressive European powers claiming to protect Armenian rights and security. Izzet Pasha viewed the international scrutiny and constant promises of administrative reform in the six provinces as a way to contain the “Armenian question” and its attendant compromises of Ottoman sovereignty. In this view, Eastern Anatolia was a landscape slipping out of effective Ottoman control especially because of his sense that the extensive foreign interference in these regions constrained the empire’s abilities to hold anyone accountable for rural violence in its own judicial forums.Footnote 99 For Izzet Pasha, the Hijaz railway became a way to ensure Ottoman sovereignty over a region that could become the empire’s future while simultaneously encouraging its prosperity.
More broadly, the Hijaz railway was an iconic example of national economy building in the Ottoman context because of the government’s insistence that it be self-funded. This insistence was certainly partly related to its reputation among Muslims within and without the empire as an important and distinctly Ottoman addition to the infrastructure supporting the pilgrimage to Mecca. However, the decision to self-fund also built on decades of bitter experiences with foreign concessionaires who built railways that served their own interests and demanded guarantees of profit per kilometer that were eventually extracted from Ottoman tax revenues. The self-funding of the Hijaz Railway was a monumental administrative effort. It involved extensive fundraising among wealthy Muslims within and outside Ottoman territory, but the bulk of the funding came from involuntary contributions from Ottoman subjects, especially in the form of extraordinary taxes and direct deductions from government salaries.Footnote 100
Lower-level officials in Syria also consistently articulated their hopes that the railway, construction of which began in 1900, would transform the landscape of southern Syria and with it the province. Muhammad Arif, a former chair of the Board of Education in Damascus, outlined the economic potential of the project in a treatise defending the railway’s potential as construction began in 1900. Like Izzet Pasha, Muhammad Arif was from an elite Damascus family firmly committed to Ottoman sovereignty and its landowning class in Syria.Footnote 101 He devoted a sizeable section of his treatise to convincing the inhabitants of the regions around the railbed, especially Bedouin in the Syrian interior, of its potential economic benefits. Arif saw the potential for the restoration of villages he described as abandoned, but also an expansion of the existing Bedouin livestock-based economy, especially through sale of their clarified butter (samn), which he claimed was prized from Damascus to Istanbul but had a limited reach because of the high costs of moving it from the Syrian interior to urban markets.
Through his focus on samn especially from the Balqa region (“southern samn/al-samn al-qibli”) that the railway was set to traverse, Muhammad Arif outlined a vision of local specialization and circulation on regional and imperial scales: were the Bedouin of the region to leave tilling behind and focus entirely on raising sheep and goats and producing samn, wool, and hides, they would produce enough of their superior samn to outdo competing regional production centers like Hama, Homs, Aleppo, and Erzurum. With everyone in the region eating and cooking with southern samn, the Bedouin of the Balqa would become rich, and they would spend their money on regionally produced clothing, luxuries, and necessities. They would then produce more samn, enough to satisfy local needs in Syria (bilad al-sham), and the price would go down enough to send the surplus samn to neighboring regions as far as Istanbul. Only then could Istanbul abandon its practice of importing lower-quality, bad-smelling, and religiously suspect samn from Switzerland, and “the wealth of the high state’s regions would remain inside it.”Footnote 102
Like Izzet Pasha, Muhammad Arif’s plan for economic prosperity involved intensifying the existing agrarian order of production and expanding its markets within the boundaries of the Ottoman state, rather than fundamental shifts in the regime of property or labor. Notably, he was one of the only Ottoman officials who advocated for Bedouin increasing their livestock-based production rather than shifting to full-time tilling, celebrating the taste, smell, and quality of their samn and transforming their numerous population (“like locusts whose numbers only God knows”)Footnote 103 into an economic advantage for the Syrian region and the Ottoman economy where it belonged.
Alongside these articulated dreams of regional development, the railway’s potential to destabilize Ottoman territorial claims also became apparent as construction began. Its proximity to British-controlled Egypt and controversies over whether it should include a direct branch to the Red Sea further heightened Ottoman concerns about maintaining control over this valuable new resource.Footnote 104 After some debate, the early Hijaz railway commissions elected to build the railway along the historic pilgrimage route, which largely ran through regions where existing land registration was sparse and the railroad commissions could claim state domain, even if those claims might be contested.Footnote 105
The original orders to begin construction extended the ban on foreign land ownership to the region around the Hijaz railway all the way to Damascus, although questions quickly arose about the applicability of this ban especially in station towns like Haifa on the Dara‘a-Haifa spur, where there were foreign national landholdings. Eventually, a sultanic decree confirmed that the ban would apply within 10 kilometers of the entire railroad.Footnote 106 This regulation seems to have been widely accepted, but as tracks were laid and stations opened between 1901 and 1908, officials in the land registration ministry began corresponding about how to handle and monitor registrations of the land near the railroad, sometimes asking for clarifications from the Grand Vezir’s office.Footnote 107 In 1905, the sultan issued an order prohibiting anyone except Muslim Ottomans to acquire property, engage in mining or cultivation, build housing, or engage in any kind of economic activity near the railroad. This order was legitimated in two ways: so that Muslims would be able to more easily use the railroad to complete their pilgrimage duties, and so that the military could reach the region quickly to head off foreign attack.Footnote 108
The Council of State, tasked with drafting a law to this effect, raised concerns: What was the status of land registration around the railroad in Syria and Hijaz? How much land should the railroad take over? Were there already non-Muslim villages near the railbed, and how much land did non-Muslims own and where? After the Council of Ministers deliberated, the Grand Vezir’s office communicated this order to the governor of Syria, Şukri Pasha, in October 1905, and commissioned him to prepare a report on non-Muslim holdings near the railbed the following spring.Footnote 109 Şukri Pasha’s report listed numerous clusters of villages of non-Muslim inhabitants on the railway route between Damascus and Ma‘an, but also instances of local officials of the Imperial Registration Ministry registering large parcels of “empty and unused” state land near the railroad to individuals, in violation of the 1893 ban.Footnote 110
Ultimately, like in the case of Jewish land transactions in Palestine, contestations and challenges implementing the regulation on foreign and non-Muslim land ownership around the railbed precipitated attempts at more stringent regulations. In March 1906, Istanbul issued an order that no land transactions whatsoever should occur without prior permission from Istanbul within 10 kilometers of the railway north of Ma‘an, and no transactions “near or far” from the railbed should occur in the region south of Ma‘an. Implementation seems to have begun a year later, when the governors of Syria and Beirut telegraphed direct orders to the district and county-level offices of the Imperial Land Administration all over these two provinces that encompassed the northern part of the Hijaz route and its spur to Haifa. Throughout 1907 and into 1908, complaints poured into the provincial-level Land Administration office in Damascus, which begged the Council of State and Grand Vezir’s office for clarification on aspects of the regulation.Footnote 111
To an extent, these complaints and queries followed two general trends depending, like in Palestine, on whether land registration had already proceeded prior to the new ban. In Ma‘an, the southernmost station within the province of Syria, Land Administration officials complained that an order impeding work to establish a Land Administration office and complete new registrations would leave them unable to “protect” the land around the railway, very little of which was registered (although individuals held land inside the town, likely with deeds issued by district courts).Footnote 112 Concerns in regions where land registration had proceeded in the decades prior to railroad construction were somewhat different. Officials wrote that in the districts of Dara‘a and Busra al-Harir, most of the villages were within 10 kilometers of the railbed, and the requirement to get permission from Istanbul for transactions would upend local economic life.Footnote 113 Officials from the district of Nazareth, on the Haifa spur in Beirut province, asked repeatedly whether local property holders could continue taking loans with property as collateral from the Agricultural Bank and other lenders under the new restriction.Footnote 114 Nablus officials were particularly worried about the Marj bin ‘Amr region of Jenin district, where they said transactions between local people in carefully parceled plots of highly valuable agricultural land near the railway were common and constant.Footnote 115
From settings like these around Ottoman Syria and Palestine, a shared refrain began to emerge from land registry officials that recalls the issues related to banning registrations of “unused” land in the 1890s: if the requirement for permission for every transaction from Istanbul, which caused interminable delays, were not lifted, the Land Administration offices would lose their already precarious grip on the local land market. Land Administration officials observed local people “going back” to “old” practices like completing land sales with certificates (hujjas) from district courts, a practice officially banned since Land Administration offices were established across Syria and Beirut provinces in the preceding decades, or in private venues with “normal deeds.”Footnote 116 The Land Administration officials complained that all their work creating a state-controlled land market in the Eastern Mediterranean, a process only just underway around the station town of Ma‘an, could be quickly undone by such a restriction. This practice of using deeds issued by district courts to complete property transactions banned in Land Administration offices was reported across a wide geography, stretching from the coastal town of Haifa to the agricultural regions of Marj bin ‘Amr to Dara‘a near the northern terminus of the railway’s route.Footnote 117
One group seemed consistently unsatisfied with the strategy of moving to unofficial or liminal venues to complete property transactions: local capitalists who had hoped to profit from owning land and buildings near the railroad, especially in station towns. These were the only Ottoman men of property consistently writing directly to provincial governors and the Grand Vezir’s office asking for exceptions and encouraging them to lift the new restrictions on the land market. In Dara‘a, Sulayman bin Amin had initiated a transaction to buy a plot near the Dara‘a station and had begun building a hane there. However, after the new regulations came into effect he found he could not finalize his title and petitioned the local land registry and eventually the governor for assistance. The official commentary on his letter articulated the problem: locally produced deeds did not provide the “security” (temin) that capitalists like Amin required on their investments. In Haifa, Mustafa al-Jalil and twelve of his colleagues wrote a telegram to the Grand Vezir’s office claiming that local commerce was completely stalled because of the ban on official property transactions:
After the order establishing the Haifa branch of the Hijaz Railway, prosperity (mamur ve abadan) and commercial transactions in the town were expected to expand and increase, along with the comfort and happiness (refahet ve sa‘adet) of the loyal subjects. However, we recently received the order banning exchanges (ferağ ve intikal) of land and property (arazi ve emlak) within 10 kilometers of the rail line. These acquisitions and sales are connected to general commercial transactions (mu‘amelat-i umumiye-i ticariye)—they are concomitant (lazım-ı melzum). It is as if the means of making a living in our town are lost—food, clothing, and maintenance materials have all become expensive beyond limit. This ban has meant a material and moral halt to life in our town, as transacting in land and property was the means of living we all relied on.Footnote 118
Al-Jalil and his colleagues advanced an argument for the commodification of property and free trade, claiming that restricting property transactions had an adverse effect on the entire town’s prosperity. In this their arguments recall those of the Ottoman Jewish men of property in Jerusalem, who argued that registered property was the axis of wealth. However, Al-Jalil’s repeated invocation elsewhere in his telegram of “loyal subjects” in a context of sharp contestations over the loyalties of foreigners and non-Muslims in Palestine and Syria invites questions around the ideal actors he envisioned participating in such a market. His complaints also underlined what Sulayman bin Amin experienced in Dara‘a: it was the Land Administration office’s deeds and state-sanctioned transactions, not deeds produced in private homes and sharia courts, that rendered land an object of investment and the basis of economic life, at least from the perspective of a privileged town-based community of men of property.
In February 1908, a few months before the constitutional revolution, the Grand Vezir’s office communicated a final ruling from the Council of State ratified by the sultan: the requirement for permission from Istanbul for individual land transactions around the railroad would only apply south of Ma‘an, but non-Muslims, like foreigners, would not be able to register or buy land anywhere near the railroad. Between Ma‘an and Damascus, transactions among Muslim Ottomans could proceed.Footnote 119 This modification constituted an attempt to create a distinct outcome: a highly regulated and monitored process of land registration and exchange that rendered parcelized plots around the rail line and in station towns objects of investment exclusively for Muslim Ottoman landowners.
This ruling, concluded in an environment without extensive foreign land ownership and outside the purview of the consulates in Palestine, articulated the goals of Ottoman officials to secure the land around the Hijaz railway and closely regulate its allocation to loyal Muslim subjects, plot by plot. Such efforts constituted the territorial basis for an Ottoman national economy defined by increasing production and prosperity among normative Muslim Ottoman landholders. As envisioned by Izzet Pasha and Muhammad Arif, securing such an economy would involve entrenching and expanding an existing agrarian power structure dominated by regional families with deep roots in Ottoman administration and fiscal systems. It is crucial to recognize that in the interior regions surrounding the Hijaz Railway, the most trenchant critiques to the protectionist land regime fundamental to the national economy approach came not only from foreign consuls wishing to support their protégés, but from rising men of property whose wealth was expanding like Mustafa Jalil and Sulayman Amin. For these men, a strong and secure Ottoman property regime, but one without restrictions on transactions in property as “the axis of wealth,” was the clear goal. However, and especially in the wider context of deepening Ottoman exclusion, they also articulated their economic participation in terms of their identities as loyal Muslim Ottoman subjects.
Conclusion
In the Anglophone colonial and postcolonial literature on Ottoman agrarian policy through the end of the twentieth century, two interrelated narratives became dominant: that Ottoman land policy was haphazard and ineffective, and that the Land Code was not implemented because peasants were afraid to register the lands they cultivated due to perceived linkages between registration, taxation, and conscription.Footnote 120 Combined with a tendency to study individual provinces and districts, these quite sticky narratives have obscured the interlinked and wide-ranging nature of the protectionist restrictions of the Hamidian period, and rendered it difficult to think through their legacies.
The clearest legacy of the Hamidian national economy project and its protectionist agrarian policy was the maintenance of a geographically wide-ranging, legally strengthened, and exclusive state domain. Colonial and postcolonial states inherited this notion of commoditized land in state hands and in some it continues to the present. The state land dynamic has been especially important in the interior regions of Jordan and Syria east of the pilgrimage route, with a continuing “informal” market in land certificates resembling those historically issued by Ottoman courts.Footnote 121 The Ottoman policies I outline here rendered state domain exclusive, with the government acting as a landowner rather than an allocator of revenue, and explicitly limited individual land registrations whether on the part of cultivating peasants or men of property. The maintenance of an exclusive state domain made it much easier for post-Ottoman governments to claim prerogative over forests, deserts, and other regions imagined as external to zones of intensive cultivation.Footnote 122
Another legacy that remains to be fully articulated involves the ways in which Ottoman protectionism during the Hamidian period limited widespread experiences of dispossession and proletarianization in the Arab provinces. In this sense, these policies may have been structural conditions for the “long peace” of the post-1860s period, simultaneously elevating the normative loyal Muslim landowner.Footnote 123 A reading of the intense Ottoman imperial focus on how to uphold restrictions on the land market in Palestine under consistent pressure from European consuls suggests that these restrictions significantly slowed and shaped the geography of Zionist settler colonization in Palestine. But as I have shown, these restrictions also widened to limit all registrations of “empty and unused” land or halt the trade in property in railroad station towns, influencing markets across the Arab provinces. In this sense, imperial policy in the Arab provinces constituted a double movement: the simultaneous creation of the conditions for a market in commoditized land and restrictions on that market that maintained and fundamentally shaped the construction of state domain.Footnote 124
On a global scale, articulating this protectionist agrarian policy provokes a rethinking of the Ottoman position in the wider landscape of imperial capitalism framing the turn of the twentieth century. Scholars have rightly highlighted the important role of the World War II-era British-coordinated Middle East Supply Center (MESC) in the formation of interventionist Keynesian national economy policies in the postcolonial states of the region.Footnote 125 However, as Elizabeth Williams argues, the focus on MESC officials has obscured late Ottoman technocrats’ and their anticolonial nationalist successors’ arguments for similar interventions stretching decades before World War II.Footnote 126 Like in Goswami’s observations for late imperial India, we should look for the roots of the interventionism associated with national economy thinking in the Middle East in late Ottoman responses to imperial capitalism and aggressive colonial expansion.Footnote 127
Agrarian policy is only one aspect of national economy building, and it has largely been sidelined in List-inspired discussions of trade, customs, and import substitution. In the Ottoman context, agrarian policy was crucial because of the particularly urgent way Ottoman officials responded to questions of landed property-as-territory in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. For men like Izzet Pasha, securing a territory on which to build a strong and independent polity of loyal, prosperous subjects was by no means a foregone conclusion, even within the boundaries of an existing Ottoman sovereign territory being eaten from within and without by agreements like the Berlin Treaty. These practices, defining and defending a secure bounded territory and encouraging market-based prosperity for loyal Muslim Ottoman subjects on that territory, defined the Ottoman national economy project in the age of imperial capitalism.
Acknowledgements
I thank the Ottoman Political Economies working group for their valuable feedback on an earlier draft of this article, especially Önder Akgül, Murat Bozluolcay, Lâle Can, Omar Cheta, Camille Cole, Metin Çoşgel, Aviv Derri, Sam Dolbee, Vladimir Hamed-Troyansky, Choon Hwee Koh, Peter Hill, Nada Moumtaz, Dimitris Stergiopolous, Daniel Stoltz, and Naz Yücel. I also thank Rowan Dorin, Hilary Falb Kalisman, Pedro Regalado, and Partha Pratim Shil for their suggestions and edits, and Şehnaz İyibaş for research assistance. The suggestions of anonymous CSSH peer reviewers also fundamentally strengthened this piece. Mistakes are entirely my own.
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