Introduction
In July 1908, Ottoman cities celebrated the reinstatement of the constitution with festivities, while Çakırbeyli cultivators in the Aydın district of Western Anatolia released their animals into previously enclosed pastures. The difference between these two methods of marking the return of the constitution went beyond the urban-rural divide: it pointed to the importance of property relations during the late Ottoman period. Less than two years later, however, on 10 March 1910, the same cultivators petitioned the Ministry of Interior to protest a district administrative council order issued the previous week, which mandated the “administrative expulsion (idâreten men’) of cultivators from accessing a pasture.” They wrote in disappointment with the failed promises of the constitutional revolution: “We have been deceived that no force is nobler and more sacred than the law. … With our hearts broken, we witness the orders given by the governor, who is supposed to uphold the provisions of the law. Aren’t we peasants God’s gift to you? … Will you depart this world without seeing that the rights of the peasants who serve the country materially and bodily are being protected?”Footnote 1
The Çakırbeyli villagers, whose population reached four hundred by that year, cultivated Adnan Bey’s çiftlik through sharecropping contracts. In Ottoman land regimes, the çiftlik was a sizable private landholding, which I describe as a plantation-like peasant-laborer settlement.Footnote 2 Long before he was prime minister of Turkey, and long before he was executed in the 1960 coup, Adnan (Menderes) Bey was an eleven-year-old landowner whose property claims were challenged by a peasant revolt. The owners of these plantation-like çiftliks in the late nineteenth century were capitalist entrepreneurs who invested in the land and agricultural business, frequently alongside other profit-making activities. They also used çiftlik lands as collateral to access credit markets and finance their business endeavors.Footnote 3 Adnan Bey was the legal owner of the Çakırbeyli çiftlik, having inherited it from his family. The cultivators claimed that they had previously enjoyed free access to the pasture in question to graze their animals. However, at the end of the nineteenth century, çiftlik owners enclosed the pasture into their landholdings, obtaining title deeds that the cultivators considered “fraudulent.” The cultivators thereafter had to pay pasture fees to access fodder for their herds.
The Çakırbeyli cultivators appropriated the term hürriyet (freedom)—one of the basic slogans of the July 1908 constitutional revolution––to claim liberation from the order that the çiftlik owners had built based on “bondage and oppression.” In the aftermath of the revolution, they occupied çiftlik lands, grazing their animals in the pastures without paying pasture fees to Adnan Bey. Like their counterparts elsewhere in the Ottoman Empire, and in Russia a few years earlier, they refused to recognize both administrative decisions and title deeds issued in the “previous era.” They went to the court of first instance to secure their claim to the pasture, and on 16 October 1908 the court decided to return the pasture to the cultivators.Footnote 4 Young Adnan Bey’s legal guardians attempted to counteract the verdict by seeking assistance from the district administrative council in Aydın. After much back and forth, upon the authority of “administrative expulsion” that had been granted by an imperial order issued in August 1909, the Aydın administrative council decided to reverse the previous decision and return the land “occupied” by the cultivators to Adnan Bey in March 1910. The council also sent a gendarmerie detachment to prevent potential resistance by the cultivators.Footnote 5 With this administrative intervention, enforced by state violence, the cultivators were forced back to their previous situation, which they described as “agriculture by force” (cebren zirâat). The dismayed cultivators thought the council’s intervention to overturn the court verdict “should not be legally permissible at the time of constitutionalism.”Footnote 6
This struggle over land in the Çakırbeyli çiftlik was one of many that occurred in the Izmir-Aydın province and across the empire following the 1908 revolution. “There are encroachments on all the çiftliks within the province,” stated Abdullah Safi, the owner of four çiftliks in the region.Footnote 7 What Abdullah Safi described as “encroachments” was a form of collective action that unfolded after the declaration of constitutionalism: the occupation of çiftliks by cultivators, who, as a result of the dispossession project initiated by the çiftlik owners at the end of the nineteenth century, were deprived of free access to pasture, water, and woodland commons as well as lands they had reclaimed for agriculture around the çiftliks. Abdullah Safi was right about the many land occupations in many çiftliks of the Izmir-Aydin province—including the four that he himself owned. However, his view of the empire-wide scale of the land occupations was limited.
There were land occupations in many parts of the empire beyond Western Anatolia, from the Balkans to Aleppo and from Anatolia to southern Iraq, as the correspondence to the Ministry of Interior reveals.Footnote 8 When the journalist Ahmed Şerif toured Anatolia in 1909, he came across villagers involved in land occupations who expressed their discontent with çiftlik owners, including Galip Bey of Mihaliç and Hilmi Efendi of Beypazarı.Footnote 9 In the eastern provinces, as historian Mehmet Polatel demonstrates, thousands of Armenians attempted to reclaim their land through widespread protests, demanding the return of their properties that were seized during the Hamidian period.Footnote 10 In the Homs district of Syria, for example, cultivators in the Zira’a village refused to pay a part of their harvest to the Sayyadis, a prominent regional family with longstanding revenue rights.Footnote 11 Although the case studies in this article focus on the Izmir region and Albania, land occupation was a repertoire of the dispossessed across the empire.
This article approaches the mass land occupations that unfolded across the vast Ottoman geography as part of what I term the “constitutionalism of the dispossessed.” It further discusses their defeat by a social counter-revolution led by the çiftlik owners. In doing so, this article offers a fresh and radical history of the Ottoman constitutional revolution and counter-revolution. Relatedly, it introduces the element of social protest into a historiography that has frequently speculated about the fates of peasant cultivators after the Land Code of 1858, and what kind of property regime it implemented.Footnote 12 I build on recent work by historians analyzing everyday property relations in the late Ottoman Empire as part of broader patterns of capitalism and capital accumulation.Footnote 13 By examining the late nineteenth century, the 1908 revolution, and the post-revolutionary period from the perspective of the dispossessed, this article shifts the focus to local expressions of structural issues related to the functioning of capital.
Through these interventions, I redirect attention to how the revolution unfolded in agrarian environments. The declaration of constitutionalism on July 23, 1908 was celebrated with enthusiasm by many in the major cities of the Ottoman Empire.Footnote 14 It unfolded in an atmosphere of freedom, suggesting many possibilities for the future.Footnote 15 Muslims, Christians, and Jews demonstrated together, fostering hopes for equal Ottoman citizenship.Footnote 16 Workers in major commercial and industrial cities and on railways went on strike to improve their conditions of work, life, and survival.Footnote 17 Much of the historiography on this era has focused on how many Ottomans from diverse classes and communal backgrounds viewed July 1908 as an opportunity to claim new rights, including equal citizenship, political organization, freedom of the press, and improved working conditions.Footnote 18 I deploy a class-centered and ethnographic approach to archival materials and local histories in the Ottoman, Turkish, and Greek languages to trace the interactions between çiftlik owners and cultivators in five different çiftliks over four decades. Through this “historical fieldwork” I illustrate that the constitutionalism of the dispossessed developed as a response to the pre-existing order of dispossession, which was marked by peasant dispossession, violence, and debt-bondage. This differed from the claim-making movements previously mentioned because the protagonists sought to use the revolutionary moment and constitutionalist framework to reclaim rights they held previously rather than asserting new ones.
The constitutionalism of the dispossessed disrupted the order of dispossession but did not endure for an extended period and ultimately failed to achieve its aims. This failure was emblematic of a series of setbacks experienced by various repressed groups, including, for instance, enslaved people who sought emancipation following the July Revolution but encountered substantial legal and administrative barriers, as historian Ceyda Karamursel has shown.Footnote 19 While slave owners played a significant role in instituting legal and administrative constraints against emancipation, the failure of the dispossessed resulted from a social counter-revolution orchestrated by çiftlik owners, which subsequently manifested in imperial orders and codified law. Historian Alp Yücel Kaya has shown that the Ottoman state issued imperial orders in 1902 and 1906 in response to escalating disputes over land and property between çiftlik owners and cultivators, including in the çiftliks that I focus on in this article. These imperial orders granted local councils the authority of “administrative expulsion” to extrajudicially resolve such conflicts, often in favor of the çiftlik owners. The post-revolutionary government promulgated an imperial order on 7 August 1909 reaffirming the orders of 1902 and 1906.Footnote 20 On 20 April 1912 the government issued a directive that clarified the implementation of administrative expulsion. Kaya highlights the link between the 1909 order, the directive, and a set of laws enacted in 1913 concerning immovable property.Footnote 21
Building on Kaya’s work, this article further shows that administrative expulsion—which first developed as a practice in the Izmir-Aydın province following an imperial order issued in 1897—was the outcome of a wave of dispossession. Legal and administrative mechanisms established the practices of dispossession as an everyday order that redefined the class relationship between the çiftlik owners and cultivators, disciplining the latter’s labor. This order of dispossession developed as the class project of çiftlik owners to address the crises of the global economy, the empire, and local ecologies in the last quarter of the nineteenth century and aimed to subordinate available labor to the çiftlik economies. Furthermore, the 1909 decision was not a result of mere “disputes” or “disagreement” between çiftlik owners and cultivators over land, houses, or property. Instead, the decision developed as a response to “the great fear” that the çiftlik and large land owners across the empire experienced and successfully instilled in the post-revolutionary government in the face of the massive land occupations.Footnote 22 I examine the 1909 order of administrative expulsion, its implementation, and the subsequent imperial laws as a product of a social counter-revolution. Following the everyday lives of the dispossessed and their interactions with çiftlik owners and imperial actors, I examine this period as encompassing an array of possibilities and contingencies—alongside the potential for many counter-revolutions. Rather than serving as a revolutionary vanguard, the çiftlik owners assumed a counter-revolutionary role against the constitutionalism of the dispossessed and successfully organized their class power within the post-revolutionary government through local administrative councils.Footnote 23
The post-revolutionary decision-makers were invested in restoring the order of dispossession, as required to secure global circuits of commodities and capital dictated by the empire’s uneven relationship with European finance capital. These circuits involved a complex cycle of production, circulation, processing, packing, and exportation of local commodities, including cotton, silk, dried fruits, tobacco, and other products to global markets. The çiftlik economies were integral to these circuits, and land occupations—like workers’ strikes—disrupted the making of global capital in the Ottoman Empire. Concerned with the credibility of the empire in European credit markets for new loans to sustain the empire in fiscal crisis, the post-revolutionary government desired the restoration of the order that the çiftlik owners insisted on, and which the circuits of global capital required.
Ottoman historians have, for the most part, neglected to address post-revolutionary developments in terms of political economy. Therefore, they have missed how Ottoman indebtedness, the crisis of sovereignty, and everyday class relations were interlinked, shaping the development of the post-revolutionary order.Footnote 24 Using a political economy framework, I will demonstrate how the post-revolutionary government hesitated to amend the material and class relations that prevailed before the revolution, which were evident in the order of dispossession. Consequently, it remained dependent on pre-existing class relations, rendering it unable to address the numerous social and political questions inherited from the past, including the Armenian question, which was fundamentally rooted in issues of land, taxation, and dispossession.Footnote 25 The post-revolutionary government’s focus on maintaining the pre-existing order cannot be attributed only to the political inclinations of the leaders of the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), however. Instead, it should be understood as a product of several interrelated factors: capitalist actors’—including çiftlik owners—successful organization of their class power in the state and bureaucracy; the limits that the pathway of global capital imposed on the dispossessed way of making revolution; and, finally, the empire’s fiscal crisis and search for credibility in the eyes of European finance capital.
This Ottoman story was part of the “global wave of constitutional revolutions” that swept Eurasia, including Russia in 1905, Iran in 1906, and later China in 1910, as well as Mexico, in the wake of the twentieth century. These vast territories housed predominantly agrarian empires and economies, often witnessing the same forms of peasant unrest, revolts, and uprisings that constituted the repertoires of rural revolution. As seen, for example, during the great agrarian revolt in Russia in 1905–1906 and during the constitutional revolution in Iran, the refusal to pay taxes and deliver land rents, and petitions for land distribution—together with land occupations—constituted the primary modes of rural revolution.Footnote 26 These histories also underscore a desire for order in post-revolutionary governments. Particularly in Russia and the Ottoman Empire, such governments initiated comprehensive laws and reforms related to land and property in response to the rural discontent that unfolded alongside the constitutional revolutions. This article approaches these parallels as the outcomes of the pre-existing orders that were integral to the development of capitalism in these agrarian empires.
In this sense, this Ottoman story captures broader patterns embedded in the functioning of capital when challenges to property and labor relations disrupt its circuits and accumulation. W.E.B. Du Bois’ term “the counterrevolution of property” opens a fruitful window to reflect on these temporarily and spatially broader patterns of capital. Du Bois describes the restoration of the capital-driven order in the post-abolition plantation landscape of the U.S. South through a sharecropping system at the expense of the previously enslaved people’s revolution and freedom during Reconstruction. This offers striking parallels between the plantation geographies of the post-abolition U.S. South and the Ottoman Empire. The capital order that was restored through debt bondage and racialized subjugation in the post-abolition U.S. South was not dissimilar to the order of dispossession that emerged in Ottoman çiftlik geography in the late nineteenth century and was restored following the 1908 revolution. In response to, and at the expense of, the constitutionalism of the dispossessed, the dispossessed were reinstated as indebted tenants and sharecroppers within çiftlik economies through imperial law, administrative practices, and violence. The analysis of the development, disruption, and restoration of the order of dispossession in five çiftliks in Western Anatolia and Albania in this article, therefore, provides not only an Ottoman history of the global wave of constitutional revolutions but also a history of capital during the revolutionary moments disruptive to pre-existing labor and property relations.
This article is divided into three main sections. First, I visit the çiftliks and discuss the emergence of the order of dispossession in the late nineteenth century. The second section will delve into the land occupations that occurred in 1908 at these çiftliks, analyzing the constitutionalism of the dispossessed. Finally, I will concentrate on the post-revolutionary period to investigate how çiftlik owners organized a social counter-revolution, and address the formulation of imperial law concerning land and property between 1909 and 1913.
From the Wave to the Order of Dispossession
Through decades of disputes and protests across the five çiftliks examined in this article, including Adnan Bey’s Çakırbeyli çiftlik, it becomes clear that a wave of dispossession began in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. During this period, the çiftlik owners appropriated surrounding lands, pastures, forests, and water commons. The Özbaşı çiftlik on the fertile Söke Plain in Western Anatolia offers a clear case study of the features of the wave of dispossession, which at times intersected with the imperial practices of resettling transhumant pastoralists into the lowlands. The Ottoman government issued an order to resettle “mobile tribes” in the Aydın province in 1884. Accordingly, it distributed land across four previously abandoned villages surrounding the Özbaşı çiftlik to members of this transhumant pastoralist group. Although such groups played a vital role in the imperial economy by providing animal products, transportation, timber, and temporary agricultural labor, by the late 1800s, the Ottoman state had invested in their resettlement, driven by imperial ambitions to boost the agrarian economy amid fiscal pressures.Footnote 27 Often accompanied by imperial violence, resettlement marked the state-led dispossession of transhumant pastoralists from their seasonal grazing lands. The “mobile tribe” in this case, for example, had grazed their animals in the winter in the deserted villages’ pastures and “empty lands” surrounding the Özbaşı çiftlik. After their forced resettlement, they cleared the woodlands and drained the swamps, reclaiming swathes of agricultural land.Footnote 28 The Özbaşı çiftlik’s previous owner, the İlyaszade family, and subsequent owner Hacı Halil Efendi of the Müftüzades, both local Muslim families of capital and power well-connected to Izmir’s financial and commercial and the empire’s political networks, expanded the borders of the çiftlik (tevsi-i hudud) into these lands and acquired new title deeds for them.Footnote 29 An investigation commission charged by the Ministry of Internal Affairs in 1893 following the cultivators’ protest concluded, based on a comparison between old and new title deeds, that the new boundaries of the çiftlik had expanded to include an additional 9,200 hectares of land.Footnote 30
Along with the resettlement order mentioned above, the Ottoman government settled another “nomadic tribe” known as the “Arablı tribe” into three new villages, designating for them 5,100 hectares of “abandoned and empty land” surrounding the Develiköy çiftlik in the southern outskirts of Izmir.Footnote 31 The çiftlik was a dowry (προίκα) to a certain Stella, daughter of a Smyrnan merchant, Evangelis Stavridis. Stella was married to Adam Adamopoulos, a former Hellenic subject with an American passport and a bachelor’s degree from Cornell University. After his return from the U.S., Adam Adamopoulos was involved in an extensive tobacco trade, and his marriage to Stella allowed him to incorporate the çiftlik into his tobacco business.Footnote 32 The Adamopoulos family integrated the surrounding land, pasture, and woodlands freely accessed by the newly settled “Arablı tribe” and the pre-existing Greek cultivators of the çiftlik, transforming the land into a massive tobacco plantation. According to the narrative of the cultivators, by 1908 Adamopoulos controlled approximately 15,000 hectares of land, for which they were provided title deeds. By contrast, the investigations revealed that the deeds for the çiftlik land they had at the time of the land purchase consisted of just 4,500 hectares. In other words, the Adamopoulous family tripled the size of their landholdings, significantly boosting their tobacco business.Footnote 33 In the northern outskirts of Izmir, the Baltazzis, one of the prominent capitalist families of the Ottoman Empire, who were investing in land, industrial, commercial, and financial capital across the Mediterranean, bought the Aliağa çiftlik in 1836.Footnote 34 Starting in the 1870s, the Baltazzis enclosed the pastures and woodlands that the Greek cultivators—constituting about four hundred households by 1908—had free access to and reclaimed the surrounding land for agriculture.Footnote 35
A Greek manuscript, Istoria tou Xoriou (The History of the [Polena] Village), provides us with vivid details of dispossession at the end of the nineteenth century. It was authored by Papa Sotirios, whose father, the village priest Pappa Konstantinos, was a protagonist in the post-July 1908 protests and revolt in Polena village—located in the Ottoman Korytsa/Görüce province in present-day Albania.Footnote 36 Drawing upon “the oral accounts of the village elders,” Papa Sotirios narrated that Polena village had been an independent village “since time immemorial,” rather than a private çiftlik, mentioning that they paid their taxes directly as proof of the claim. This changed starting in 1874 when Hasan Bey and Yusuf Bey, local people of power and capital, invested in the land business, transformed the village “in a very short time” into part of their çiftlik.Footnote 37 The Beys initially had title deeds for 472 dönüms of land (47.2 hectares), including fields, meadows, and a few vineyards in the area bordering Polena.Footnote 38 However, they gradually extended their çiftlik into the uncultivated parts of the plains and then to surrounding fields, vineyards, meadows, houses, churches, forests, pastures, trees, and waters. They registered land and real estate in their names through what the cultivators considered to be “fake deeds (plastá tapıá),” which “were obtained by a trick and deceit, or rather by fraud.”Footnote 39 These moves led the Beys to “double, triple, and quadruple” their holdings and become “complete masters of the village.”Footnote 40
The production of what the cultivators thought of as “fraudulent,” “fake,” or “pseudo” title deeds was a fundamental mechanism by which the çiftlik owners claimed the land as exclusive property at the expense of cultivators’ free access and control.Footnote 41 The cultivators referred to the title deeds as “fraudulent” not because the documents themselves were counterfeit, but rather because—as numerous investigative commissions over the years revealed—the çiftlik owners received title deeds to formerly common lands through their connections with the authorities responsible for issuing those deeds, including land registry offices and administrative councils.Footnote 42 This phenomenon was commented on by contemporaries: in a later discussion in the Chamber of Deputies, a member of parliament stated that “no sin was left undone” in the process of producing such title deeds.Footnote 43 Based on his observations in Anatolia, the journalist Ahmed Şerif wrote that “the land and title deed registry offices are the sources of all kinds of abuses” and people of power and capital used them to “advance and expand” the boundaries of their land “towards their neighbors any moment.”Footnote 44
In the context of addressing land disputes within the Ottoman judicial framework, there was a discernible shift in the late nineteenth century toward the increasing preeminence of written evidence, such as title deeds, over oral testimonies.Footnote 45 By deploying their material and political capital, çiftlik owners accessed title deedsFootnote 46 that allowed them to exercise exclusive rights and control over land, water, and forest before the state and its legal apparatus.Footnote 47 While the title deeds served as “paper technologies” of the order of dispossession, their implementation in everyday life relied upon the use of violence.Footnote 48 Both state violence and non-state violence organized by the çiftlik owners were critical instruments of the order, and stories of corporal violence were central to cultivators’ narratives of these events.Footnote 49
Süleyman Hamdi Bey, an antiquities officer, expressed his shock at the extent of “land grabbing” in Western Anatolia and cited the existence of such usurped lands (arâzi-i mağsube) as a very material reality in the region. “Tens of thousands of hectares of fertile lands were brought into the usurper hands of people of power (müteneffizan),” he concluded in a report about his discoveries in Western Anatolia in 1886.Footnote 50 Ten years later, the provincial administrative council that convened in October 1896 stated that “such land disputes are increasing by degree.” The provincial council did not see the stakes of the dispute as relating to the land grabbing and dispossession of the cultivators, but, instead, as primarily about the cultivators’ undue encroachment (fuzûlî tecâvüzat) into çiftlik owners’ lands, which were viewed as under their ownership because of the title deeds that they possessed.Footnote 51 The cultivators, by contrast, did not hold title deeds, and their access to such lands relied on what they saw as custom protected by the imperial state. From the perspectives of administrative councils, cultivators’ claims were made up of “words without proof.”Footnote 52 The provincial council understood and described cultivators’ protests as “rebellious acts” and paid strict attention to discouraging such acts with each decision they issued on individual cases.Footnote 53 Throughout the 1880s and 1890s, the local administrative councils continuously established the abovementioned çiftlik owners’ claim to the land as exclusive property rights against the cultivators’ protests.Footnote 54
In addition to title deeds granted to them, such administrative decisions constituted archives of dispossession at the hand of çiftlik owners, concealing the practices of land grabbing and violence embedded in their production. The çiftlik owners weaponized these paper records before the administrative authorities when confronted with protests from cultivators before and after 1908. As çiftlik owners consistently organized their class interests through the administrative councils, the ad-hoc decision-making authority of local administrative councils in the Izmir-Aydın province was eventually codified in an imperial order. On 23 October 1893, the provincial governor informed all district and sub-district governors and administrative councils that “the encroachment of those who do not hold titles to the land is prohibited, and the lands should be handed over to the title deed holders.”Footnote 55 In 1896, the provincial administrative council asked the Ottoman government to empower it with the authority of “administrative intervention” to resolve land disputes without going through the usual, often prolonged, legal process in regular courts, which were the potential venues for the cultivators to challenge the order of dispossession.Footnote 56 The administrative intervention would rely on the principle that the claims of those who did not hold title deeds or other official proof of rights to the land were not credible. The councils would ensure the property rights of those who held title deeds to the land.Footnote 57 An imperial order issued on 19 May 1897 presented title deeds as the definitive legal conclusion of property rights and authorized the provincial governments to implement the required legal terms and conditions. Accordingly, it authorized the administrative council to investigate and prohibit “those who did not have official title deeds or reliable documents that could be used as evidence of encroachment and seizure on someone else’s properties and land.” Furthermore, the decision empowered local authorities “to arrest and send those who dared to commit such acts to the courthouse.”Footnote 58
The Izmir-Aydın province became a laboratory for implementing the local councils’ authority to exercise administrative expulsion; however, it was not the only region where dispossession mapped onto çiftlik geographies. The offices of the Ministry of Interior and the Ministry of Land Registry regularly received correspondence, reports, and news about land disputes, particularly between çiftlik owners and cultivators across the empire, including but not limited to Manastır, Sivas, Ankara, Yanya, Thessaloniki, Acre, and Adana.Footnote 59 The Ministry of Land Registry requested that the 1897 decision taken in relation to the Izmir-Aydın province serve as a model to “prevent the encroachments that are reported to be happening in other provinces” to ensure “the proper provision of property rights” on the imperial scale. On 31 July 1902, the Ministry of Interior informed all provinces and districts of the decision of the Council of State granting administrative councils the authority to exercise “administrative intervention and expulsion.”Footnote 60
To maintain the jurisdiction of the courts over administrative councils, the Ministry of Justice objected to the order granting the administrative councils such authority, based on the knowledge accumulated through regular court cases about the unreliability of title deeds.Footnote 61 This opposition resulted in disputes between the judicial and civil administrators regarding the implementation of administrative expulsion across the empire.Footnote 62 In response to the opposition of the judiciary, and drawing on demands articulated by “owners of property and land,” the State Council issued a new decision on 22 July 1903 which granted further authority to administrative councils to determine “the validity of the deeds.”Footnote 63 On 4 June 1906, the State Council issued another decision to resolve all doubts about implementing the administrative expulsion decision. It designated the administrative councils as the exclusive authorities to investigate land and property disputes and to carry out expulsions if they determine that the violations lack valid proof of land rights.Footnote 64 The decisions of the State Council between 1902 and 1906 generalized the practice of administrative expulsion in the Izmir-Aydın province, eliminating Ministry of Justice opposition and further empowering local administrative councils. Such decisions and their implementation guaranteed that the means of state violence—the police and gendarmerie forces—would be deployed to enforce the claims of title deed holders as property rights.Footnote 65 Administrative expulsion was pivotal in constituting the order of dispossession, typically leading to the administrative council mediating new contracts between çiftlik owners and dispossessed cultivators. As a result, the social and material relations that emerged from dispossession were redefined in a contractual relationship, under the looming specter of imperial violence.Footnote 66
Crisis of the Çiftlik Economies
The order of dispossession in the last quarter of the nineteenth century developed as a class project of capitalist land entrepreneurs responding to the crisis of the çiftlik economies, which was an outcome of the interlinked crises of the global economy, the empire, and local ecologies. The Long Depression (1873–1896) created challenging economic conditions for the Ottoman Empire. It caused declines in foreign trade growth, worsened external terms of trade, and, together with Ottoman indebtedness, led to European financial control over the Ottoman economy.Footnote 67 Following several years of snowballing debt, the empire stopped servicing its foreign loans in October 1875 and declared bankruptcy in March 1876. This fiscal crisis eventually led to the establishment of the Ottoman Public Debt Administration in 1881, which gave its shareholders unprecedented control over the Empire’s finances and resources. Under the disciplinary power of sovereign debt, aspirations of a balanced government budget transformed the late Ottoman state into a fiscally austere state. When they needed to pay off loans for which their çiftliks served as collateral, çiftlik capitalists found themselves under conditions of fiscal pressure (müzâyaka-i mâliyye) combined with declining agricultural commodity prices in global markets.Footnote 68 They simultaneously grappled with recurrent droughts, disruptive floods, and pest infestations.Footnote 69 As a result of imperial austerity and limited funding, the underdeveloped infrastructure was insufficient to manage the risks of floods or droughts and labor became the primary means to secure cycles of commodity production in the disaster ecology.
Some çiftlik owners went bankrupt and were forced to sell their land, while others withdrew from the business. For the remaining çiftlik owners, a larger and better disciplined labor force of cultivators tied to the land became essential, developing as a deliberate class project to effectively address the pressures stemming from declining agricultural prices, disaster ecology, and imperial austerity. Dispossessed people were, in other words, the preferred solution to the crisis of the çiftlik economy. The çiftlik owners fiercely resisted the distribution of land promised by the state to Muslim refugees from the former Ottoman territories. They wanted the refugees to remain landless in order to employ them as potential sharecroppers and tenants in the çiftliks.Footnote 70 They deliberately bound available bodies and labor more closely to the çiftlik land and economies through sharecropping and tenancy arrangements premised upon dispossession.
Dispossession from pasture and water commons disrupted the cultivators’ survival economies, especially their animal husbandry practices. Access to grazing lands was vital for feeding animals like cattle, sheep, and goats, which provided meat, milk, and tradeable products.Footnote 71 Within this context, the term “forced agriculture” used by Çakırbeyli cultivators takes on a new significance: deprived of free access to the pasture, they were forced to cultivate via sharecropping arrangements.Footnote 72 The cultivators around the Özbaşı çiftlik saw the land seizure as Halil Efendi’s way of responding to their efforts to reclaim land, which threatened to cut off an essential source of labor for him.Footnote 73 Through dispossession, çiftlik owners successfully bound cultivators to the çiftlik economy through sharecropping and tenancy contracts.Footnote 74 In Aliağa, for example, in response to dispossession “those who were deprived of cash means” to pay pasture fees migrated to other places. Some incorporated wage work in the nearby salt marshes into their survival economy. Most, however, were compelled to provide more labor for the çiftlik economy. After the implementation of administrative expulsion, the newly settled cultivators around the Develiköy çiftlik paid a fee to Adamopoulos to graze their animals, and cultivated land through tenancy and sharecropping contracts.Footnote 75
In response to the crisis, the Polena Beys increased rents and demanded higher shares from sharecropping contracts for fruits and grain. Although they experimented with wage labor systems to increase profits, these attempts failed due to being too expensive, and they returned to sharecropping models. All solutions to the crises went hand in hand with land grabbing. By the end of the century, as an outcome of the order of dispossession, some Polena villagers migrated first to different parts of Greece, and, after 1905, also to the United States. Most of the Polena cultivators, however, were tied to the çiftlik economies and cultivated the land as sharecroppers (kollígoi); as put by Papa Sotiris, “the few arable lands that remain in the hands of the cultivators were not sufficient to sustain them.”Footnote 76 The system of contracts with seed distribution, advances, and credit guaranteed the çiftlik owners the labor of the dispossessed for ecological reproduction, as they prepared the land after floods or drought seasons for subsequent cycles of commodity production.Footnote 77 The dispossessed labor, through debt-bondage, managed the disaster ecology and, in doing so, secured both its own survival and the course of global capital. Ultimately, the order of dispossession developed as a class project organized by the çiftlik owners, aiming to discipline and subordinate the available labor to çiftlik economies.
The Constitutionalism of the Dispossessed
The burden of heavy taxes, combined with cycles of indebtedness and harvest failures due to recurring ecological disasters, marked the everyday reality in the rural Ottoman Empire prior to the 1908 Revolution.Footnote 78 These conditions led to tax protests in 1906 and 1907, which historian Aykut Kansu described as a manifestation of “the massive unrest” of the Ottoman rural society and rural base of the 1908 revolution.Footnote 79 Rural tax protests became even more widespread during the summer of 1908. The declaration of constitutionalism in July 1908 was followed by the harvest season, and, as the British consul of Smyrna reported, it became impossible to collect taxes after the declaration.Footnote 80 Later, on 13 January 1909, Grand Vizier Kamil Paşa referred to the post-July tax protests as fomented by people who felt that “they were also free not to pay taxes to the state.” He explained that, due to disruptions in tax collection, a fund of 800,000 lira had been transferred to provincial treasuries from the central treasury, an amount that indicates just how disruptive these post-July tax protests were.Footnote 81 In the çiftlik geography particularly, the dispossessed made their own revolution, seriously disrupting local çiftlik economies and, hence, the circuits of global capital in the Ottoman Empire. Cultivators in the empire’s çiftlik geography, like the Çakırbeyli cultivators, did not recognize title deeds, released their animals into çiftlik pastures or engaged with what was defined as “illegal pasturing” in the Russian revolutionary context, and harvested crops without delivering any of what they deemed “unnecessary fees” (bedel-i fuzuli).Footnote 82
For the dispossessed, the acts of re-commoning of pastures and forests were driven by the combination of their sense of violated rights and the material impact of the order of dispossession on their lives in the midst of crises of the global economy, empire, and local ecologies.Footnote 83 Materiality is often expressed in moral terms, but the moral codes in their minds intersected with the legal rights they assumed they had or should have, as the petition that opened this article indicates. The articulation of a moral economy that existed “since time immemorial” and guaranteed cultivators’ rights to land and commons—manifesting in the expression of shock to its disruption in their petitions or during legal and administrative proceedings—constituted a performative and symbolic act to secure rights before the Ottoman state, whose property law emphasized the continuous use of the land.Footnote 84
Dispossession was, for them, a moral and legal violation shaping the conditions of their survival. It tied the cultivators more closely to the çiftlik economies, at the center of which lay a debt relationship. In addition to the distribution of seeds, loans provided to cultivators for purchasing oxen, agricultural tools, daily needs, disaster relief, and hiring laborers—especially during harvest time—led to a cycle of debt among the contracted cultivators. This cycle established “bonds of obligation” that defined the shape of the çiftlik economy, facilitating the absorption of labor into global capital.Footnote 85 What accompanied the land occupations was the refusal to pay pasture fees, to deliver harvest shares, and to pay the accumulated debts from previous years. Thus, land occupations throughout the empire disrupted the imperatives of the order of dispossession, inaugurating a saga of rural revolution and counter-revolution. In this revolutionary context, cultivators reclaimed the jurisdiction of regular courts against previous administrative expulsions as venues to reestablish their violated rights to land and pastures from which they had been dispossessed. Therefore, they appeared collectively in the courts of first instance to file land lawsuits. All these repertoires of protest, like their counterparts during the global wave of constitutional revolution, constituted the constitutionalism of the dispossessed.Footnote 86 They sought “liberty” (hürriyet) from the order that the çiftlik economies depended on, hoping to mobilize the constitutional government to address what they considered violations inherent in that order.Footnote 87
Immediately after the declaration of constitutionalism, for example, cultivators in and around the Özbaşı çiftlik collectively erected tents, releasing their animals into the çiftlik lands. They refused to pay pasture fees, rent for land, and previous debts to the çiftlik owner, Halil Bey of the Müftüzades. When the local authorities communicated to the cultivators that this act of land occupation infringed on the rights of the çiftlik owner to the land—rights that were based on title deeds, court orders, and administrative decisions—the cultivators responded: “The deeds were given to the çiftlik owner in the sinister former era, and they will have no importance in this beloved era of freedom.” They instead called for their “termination.”Footnote 88
The cultivators in the Baltazzis’ Aliağa çiftlik collectively (müteahhidan) occupied the çiftlik lands and used them, as the provincial authorities put it, “as they wished.” The farmers did not conform to (riâyet), the deeds produced for the çiftlik owner, or the contracts they signed “by force and unwillingly” and “under pressure” in 1906, nor did they obey (itâat) local administrative orders. They released their animals into the pastures reserved for the Baltazzis’ animals, and they redistributed (taksim) 3,000 hectares of arable land amongst themselves.Footnote 89 In the Develiköy çiftlik of Adamopoulos, the Greek and Muslim cultivators in and around the çiftlik did not recognize the title deeds; for them it was “not clear how they were granted” to the Adamopoulos family. They stopped paying fees and debts and freely grazed their animals in the çiftlik pastures.Footnote 90
Following the pages of The History of the [Polena] Village, it becomes clear that what was considered in the Ottoman archives as a dispute between the cultivators and the trio of Beys over houses, was, in fact, part of the saga of the “uprising of the cultivators.”Footnote 91 The manuscript articulates the class conflict as an ethno-religious issue between Greek Orthodox cultivators and the Muslim beys. Rather than being a misarticulation or “false consciousness,” this way of expression reflects the structures in which the ethno-religious difference and accumulation were intertwined, akin to racial capitalist social formations; if we take race and differentiation in a broader context, according to Cedric Robinson, the modes of differentiation both reinforced the process of capital accumulation and became key components of how class identities were imagined.Footnote 92 When cultivators and çiftlik owners divided along ethnoreligious lines—as in Polena—the çiftlik owners utilized ethnoreligious differentiation to legitimize the appropriation of land and material resources, facilitating processes of accumulation, which in turn informed how the cultivators interpreted the social conflict.
After the declaration of constitutionalism, the cultivators’ representatives, including Papa Konstantinos, met with the Beys. In this meeting, the cultivators stated that they would not pay a fee called xavagiét for the houses they built at their own expense; nor would they provide the salaries for stewards, field guards, and headmen that they had been forced to pay previously. They stated that they would elect the village headman themselves. Finally, they maintained that neither they nor their animals would provide the Beys with any form of forced labor. The Beys responded to the village representatives in a threatening tone. Papa Konstantinos addressed the Beys to underscore the cultivators’ position that they would no longer deliver fees, which they had paid “unjustly and out of fear.” Upon their return, they detailed the meeting with the Beys to the cultivators, and the cultivators all agreed “not to recognize the Beys anymore.”Footnote 93 At that moment, the cultivators’ protest became a full-scale revolt and land occupation. Having heard news of the proclamation of the constitution, Polena cultivators who had immigrated to the United States and founded a charity association called “Beneficial Brotherhood of the Village of Polena” in Worcester, MA, on 28 August 1908 decided to collect money for the cultivators to initiate a lawsuit to establish their rights to the village.Footnote 94 Ethno-religious solidarity, facilitating the class act of the dispossessed, took a trans-regional form.
Great Fear and Counter-Revolution
The land occupations, imagined and organized as a class and/or ethnoreligious solidarity act, challenged the fundamental principles of the order of dispossession, fomenting great fear among the çiftlik owners. Immediate responses varied, with some çiftlik owners responding with escalating violence. On 11 September 1908, for example, Halil Efendi, along with his children, relatives, and business partners, made the surrounding villages “a site of the politics of terror” according to the cultivators’ detailed account.Footnote 95 In some cases, the çiftlik owners compromised. Through the mediation of the local administrative council, Edward Baltazzi, for example, offered to rent 300 hectares of arable land to cultivators for their animals needing grasslands and water for an annual fee of fifty Ottoman liras.Footnote 96 Prompted by anxiety generated by the “uprising of the cultivators” that put their property rights “definitively in jeopardy,” the Beys in Polena offered the cultivators new agricultural contracts.Footnote 97
At this initial stage, the future remained open to many possibilities. The çiftlik owners did not simply refrain from their property claims, and the cultivators often insisted on protest.Footnote 98 “We want to graze our animals as in the past,” the Aliağa cultivators asserted in response to Baltazzi’s proposal.Footnote 99 In the face of the insistence on land occupations, çiftlik owners sought the assistance of the administrative councils to issue administrative expulsion decisions and return the cultivators to pre-existing contracts despite ongoing legal disputes and court verdicts favorable to the cultivators, as in Çakırbeyli.Footnote 100 In Polena, administrative intervention included the punishment of the leaders of the revolt with the eviction of four families from houses where they, like other cultivators, had refused to pay rent.Footnote 101 On 24 November 1908, a military detachment of twenty-three police and two horsemen, led by Captain Kazım Efendi, evicted Papa Konstantinos and three others, including the local teacher and two church trustees and their families. “People, animals, wheat, corn, furniture, straw and fodder out in the open, at the mercy of the winds and snow,” wrote Papa Sotiris describing the eviction.Footnote 102 On 15 January 1909, the Beys managed to get the council to issue another order for the evicted families to leave the village completely.Footnote 103
The cultivators often disobeyed (ısgâ) administrative decisions after the police and gendarmerie forces departed. They continued what the çiftlik owners described as “collective and forceful land occupation”Footnote 104 While waiting for the court verdict, the cultivators bombarded the government with petitions complaining about the initial administrative interventions. These continuous protests casted doubt within the provincial governments across the empire regarding whether the execution of administrative expulsion at the expense of the jurisdiction of the courts was appropriate in the era of the Constitution. Their protest resonated particularly with the Ministry of Justice, a long-time opponent of the practice of administrative expulsion.Footnote 105 The Ministry of Justice issued a memorandum on 24 January 1909 requesting “the termination of administrative intervention in disputed property and land.”Footnote 106 This opened a new phase in the conflict as the question of whether the administrative councils should be granted the authority of expulsion remained ambiguous.Footnote 107 Empowered by the Ministry of Justice’s stance, the cultivators insisted on further protests. In Polena, a committee was established to lead the new phase of the revolt. Having received monetary support from their co-cultivators in the United States, they hired top attorneys and sent representatives to Istanbul, Korytsa, and Manastır to initiate a new legal dispute.Footnote 108
Land occupations were “increasing day by day and spreading to all the çiftliks in the [Aydın] province,” according to Abdullah Safi. Abdullah Safi shared other çiftlik capitalists’ anxieties about the disobedient cultivators and their insistence on land occupations. He tried to sow this anxiety within the post-revolutionary government at the expense of the Ministry of Justice’s opposition to resecuring the pre-existing order. Abdullah Safi maintained that if the government “did not eliminate and prohibit such acts [of the cultivators] as fast as possible, there would be no desire and enthusiasm among the people of capital and çiftlik owners to exert effort for development and increasing production.” He concluded his manifesto-like petition—which, he said, was made “in the name of public safety”—writing that, “it would be very beneficial for the country to settle and conclude these disputes as quickly as possible.”Footnote 109 For a capitalist land entrepreneur such as Abdullah Safi, public safety, economic development, and maintenance of order were all tied to the state’s guarantee to the people of capital to safeguard their property claims.Footnote 110 This approach was yet to be institutionalized in the post-revolutionary government.Footnote 111 Ultimately, they successfully organized their fear about property and land business in the government by speaking to the growing anxiety of disorder associated with ordinary people’s “misinterpretation of the constitution.”
As historian Bedross Der Matossian demonstrates, the idea of freedom became both a central concept in the Revolution’s language and a source of significant ambiguity.Footnote 112 This ambiguity is reflected in the various and contentious meanings associated with liberty. For the cultivators, it meant “liberty” (hürriyet) from the pre-existing order of dispossession.Footnote 113 Abdullah Safi, on the other hand, expressed that “the cultivators dared to encroach the çiftlik lands by misinterpreting the freedom granted by the constitution.”Footnote 114 The commissions appointed by the local councils to investigate and report on the disputes condemned the cultivators’ refusal to abide by deeds, fees, and debts as an “utterly nonsensical interpretation that had nothing to do with law and logic.” The report on the Özbaşı land occupation concluded that “ignorant peasants misunderstood the meaning of constitutionalism.”Footnote 115 In Russia as well as the Ottoman Empire, the articulation of rural protest as “misinterpretation” was not merely a discursive manipulation or ideological misrepresentation; instead, it was the expression of anxiety about disorder and the calls for violence that the restoration of order necessitated. This capitalist anxiety about disorder resonated strongly with the worldview of post-revolutionary Ottoman decision-makers.Footnote 116 For example, Kazim Efendi, a deputy for Ankara, suggested granting authority to the Ministry of Interior to use executive power, accompanied by gendarmerie and police forces, to “prevent unlawful actions against the Government of those who, because of their ignorance, do not understand the true meaning of freedom.” “Government is Freedom,” stated Kayseri’s deputy when he expressed his support for Kazim Efendi’s proposal in response to the criticisms raised by some other deputies.Footnote 117
Although opposition existed in the parliament and the Ministry of Justice to administrative expulsion, çiftlik owners successfully organized their class power to spread this Hegelian understanding of the state and order expressed by the Kayseri deputy across the vast Ottoman çiftlik geography. On 11 February 1909, the deputy from Edirne, Talat [Pasha], along with the deputies of Gümülcüne, Tekirdağ, Kırkkilise, and Dedeağaç, proposed a draft law article to be added to the Title Deed Regulation, which would grant the authority of expulsion to the administrative councils.Footnote 118 Two weeks later, Ali Cenani of Aleppo, supporting the proposal of Talat and his fellow deputies from the Thrace region, suggested drafting a law article to be added to the Penal Code to severely punish those who “unnecessarily encroach upon the property and land of another person under title deed.”Footnote 119 Many çiftlik owners expressed the need for severe punishment for those “who persisted in and continued the act of encroachments” in their petitions and via the administrative councils.Footnote 120 Ali Cenani articulated this demand in the parliament by proposing “to secure thousands of lira worth of properties.” Despite some doubts about the use of administrative intervention at the expense of the judiciary, Ali Cenani’s proposal was strongly supported by the deputies, including Şefik Bey of Karesi, who stated that “a strong, sound, authentic, and valid law sufficient to ensure (property) rights is needed.”Footnote 121
As their class interests started to be voiced in the parliament, the çiftlik owners, through provincial councils, demanded an end to the disagreements (su-i tefehhüm) between the civil administrators and judiciary officials. They called for decisively granting the councils the executive authority of expulsion to “provide the property rights.”Footnote 122 In Polena, the Korytsa administrative council evicted seven more families from their houses, prompting the cultivators to send a flurry of telegrams to their representative in Istanbul, Sotiri, instructing him to petition the government.Footnote 123 The Manastır province found any decision given on behalf of the cultivators—including the return of those evicted from their homes as the Ministry of Justice had ordered—inappropriate, as these decisions would have a negative impact on other provinces (diğer vilayetlere de sui sirayeti).Footnote 124 Therefore, the provincial authorities insisted on the implementation of administrative expulsion. This reflects how successfully the Beys organized their interests as a class project. This class project, articulated and organized by the çiftlik and land estate owners across the empire through the local councils and parliamentary, led the Ministry of Interior to dispute the Ministry of Justice’s opposition and become more vocal in its insistence on administrative intervention for the fast execution of property rights based on title deeds the Council of State ultimately gathered to discuss the issue in June 1909.Footnote 125
Restoring the Order of Dispossession
On 7 August 1909, an imperial order based on a memorandum of the State Council was issued, putting an end to the confusion. The order granted the authority of administrative expulsion based on the practice first piloted in Western Anatolia with the imperial order of 1897 and articulated in the State Council decisions of 1902, 1903, and 1906.Footnote 126 The imperial order was issued just ten days after the parliament passed a law banning workers’ strikes.Footnote 127 The connections between the two are not only a matter of temporality. Workers’ strikes were considered, in Grand Vizier Kamil Pasha’s words, “a danger to economic life,” as they disrupted the journey of local commodities from the land to processing factories, warehouses, and, finally, ports, where they were exported to global markets.Footnote 128 As the British ambassador reported, transportation and loading operations stopped during the busiest period of the season due to the strikes.Footnote 129 Sympathizing with the workers, O Ergatis (The Worker), Izmir’s new Greek newspaper, mentioned the rotting of tons of figs stored in the stations because of the latest railway strike. The British consul of Smyrna wrote to the Grand Vizier that if the strike was not stopped, “it will cause greater damage to the credit of the country.”Footnote 130
Like workers’ strikes, land occupations were not considered a mere misdemeanor (âdî kabahat). Rather, they were a crucial problem that would cause “irreparable losses” for the çiftlik owners and “damage agriculture and commerce.” Therefore, the State Council authorized the provincial government and councils to take severe measures without hesitation, and to initiate legal proceedings that would discourage the cultivators from encroaching upon properties claimed by çiftlik owners via title deeds.Footnote 131 The disorder caused by workers’ strikes and land occupations was a threat to the circuits of global capital in the Ottoman Empire, which relied upon and reinforced the uneven relationship between the Ottoman Empire and European finance capital. The order of dispossession needed to be secured, as articulated by Kamil Pasha, who appeared deeply concerned after reading the British consul’s telegram: the empire’s “national reputation” in the European credit markets to guarantee new loans, which the post-revolutionary government needed, was at stake.Footnote 132 Çiftlik owners’ successful organization of their great fear within the state and the dictates of global capital in the Ottoman Empire came together, limiting the range of possibilities that had existed previously. In this context, the issuance of the August 1909 imperial order represented a decisive moment in the çiftlik owners’ counter-revolution and restoration of the order of dispossession.
This imperial order evaded opposition from the Ministry of Justice and its local officials, and local administrative councils intervened in the disputes decisively. For the local administrative councils, there was nothing worth discussing. On one side, there were the çiftlik owners, whose property rights were clearly supported by official documents. On the other side, there were the cultivators, whose claims to the land did not have a basis in any legally accepted source (mâhiyet-i kānûniyye). The documents that the cultivators had decried as “fraudulent titles” themselves became the basis of restoring order in the çiftlik geography.Footnote 133 Returning to the story this article opened with, the Aydın governor informed the Ministry of Interior on 17 April 1910 that those who had violated Adnan Bey’s rights were expelled from encroachment via the deployment of gendarmerie forces. This decision was based on the administrative council’s assessment of the cultivators’ occupation of the land as what the governor called “a violation and offense against the title deed.”Footnote 134
Disobedience and resistance to administrative expulsion were now considered as an act “against the ultimate power of the government,” justifying further the use of violence in response.Footnote 135 State violence played a fundamental role in the creation of the order of dispossession as well as in its restoration. As reported by the Özbaşı cultivators, administrative expulsion was implemented with the help of “cavalry soldiers who attacked (their) lands and animals, leading to the death of four cattle and 30 sheep.”Footnote 136 On a rainy fall day in 1909, cultivators’ animals in and around the Develi çiftlik were evacuated from the pasture by “police force.”Footnote 137 In the face of cultivators’ resistance, the Ministry of Interior decided that if the police force was insufficient, local authorities could resort to military force.Footnote 138 In Baltazzis’ Aliağa çiftlik, the provincial council instituted a military committee. It was reported that cultivators, predominantly women, resisted the evacuation of their animals from pastures. The commission dispatched a military force to the çiftlik in response. After suppressing the resistance, the soldiers arrested many cultivators and sent them to the military tribunal in Ayvalık. The commission mediated a new contract between cultivators and çiftlik owners, while erecting a “temporary” police station staffed by five gendarmes in the çiftlik to prevent the cultivators from “occupying” the pastures again.Footnote 139 The police station, located in the lower corner of Baltazzis’ mansion, remained a permanent fixture in Aliağa and in the memories of the cultivators decades after their displacement.Footnote 140
The trajectory of the Polena case diverged from the other cases analyzed here. Despite the material support the cultivators received from emigrant Polenians, the continuous orders issued by the provincial councils to implement administrative expulsion, evictions, violence, and the Beys’ capacity to influence the courts, ultimately exhausted the cultivators.Footnote 141 Because of this exhaustion, even before the 1909 imperial memorandum, the cultivators asked the government for empty land sufficient for their subsistence in the Korytsa/Görüce district to build a new village, as was the policy for newly-arrived refugees.Footnote 142 The evicted families remained homeless by the fall of 1909.Footnote 143 The cultivators’ continuous resistance and disobedience also exhausted the Beys, who offered to buy the land from the cultivators, using the Metropolitan of Korytsa as an intermediary. After much negotiation and bargaining—and despite the assertions by some cultivators that they would not buy lands that already belonged to them—on 12 April 1910 at the home of Vahid Bey and in the presence of the administrative council of Korytsa, a contract was signed between Christos Elias Kaltso, a merchant of Korysta and the representative of the cultivators, and the deed holders from the Beys’ families. The sale involved the Beys’ “property in Polena, consisting of fields, vineyards, meadows, forests, pastures, trees, rocks, hills, houses, springs, rivers, streams, etc.” for the sum of 6,000 liras, which was gathered through the network of emigrant Polenians in the United States. The Beys’ compromise (symvivasmós) in the face of well-organized legal struggles was only possible because of the imperial order, which secured their “property rights.” Therefore, the Polenians celebrated it as a “partial victory.”Footnote 144
Overall, the imperial order of 1909 and its implementation marked a moment of failure for the constitutionalism of the dispossessed. Protesting administrative expulsion, the Develiköy cultivators, for instance, expressed that administrative expulsion was “a violation of the independence of the judicial power,” and the use of military force to implement it was “something not compatible with the justice that should be in effect during the beloved era of the constitutional monarchy.”Footnote 145 Such expressions set the tone for other petitions as well.Footnote 146 These petitions—all written after the implementation of administrative expulsion—relied upon the distinction that the cultivators made between the local administrative councils as the guardians of the pre-existing order of dispossession and the government as the guardian of constitutionalism. Based on this perceived distinction, petitioning operated as an act to organize the constitutionalism of the dispossessed in the post-revolutionary state. Yet, their distinction between the local and central governing bodies did not exist in practice. For the çiftlik owners, the local councils were the venues where they organized their class power in the state.Footnote 147 As described by historian Burton Richard Miller, in Russia, estate owners’ activism evolved into their domination in the zemstovs at the expanse of liberal opposition.Footnote 148 Similar to how their Russian equivalent of provincial zemstvos operated in response to the peasant revolt, the local councils became “the bastion of order” that the post-revolutionary government desired to secure the regional and global flow of commodities and capital.Footnote 149
Law and Order at the End of the Empire
Particularly after the imperial order in August 1909, çiftlik owners, provincial councils, deputies, and especially the Ministries of Interior, Land Registry, and Finance, as well as foreign consuls, and banks articulated the need for—as the Grand Vizier Hüseyin Hilmi Pasha put it—a “comprehensive law” regarding the issues of land, property, and their use.Footnote 150 By June 1910 the Presidency of the Parliamentary Assembly already tasked the Ministries of Interior, Justice, and the Land Registry with forming a commission consisting of notable officials to propose a comprehensive law to be discussed in the Council of State.Footnote 151 This initiative, as Alp Yücel Kaya pointed out, evolved into a “government directive” issued in April 1912 and, a year later, a set of property laws, including the Provisional Law on the Disposal of Immovable Properties, in April 1913.Footnote 152
The connections between the 1909 imperial order and the property laws made at the end of the empire were clear to contemporary decision-makers and lawmakers. Sarkis Karakoç, a significant late Ottoman jurist and compiler of legislation, published the 1913 Provisional Law on Immovable Properties in the Series on New Laws. The subtitle of the compilation indicated that the edition included all amendments made until 1 November 1919. However, the compilation starts with the 1909 imperial order of administrative expulsion, followed by the 1912 directive.Footnote 153 The imperial law on property relied upon the parameters of the 1909 order, at the center of which were three major principles: establishing title deeds as the ultimate source of land and property rights regardless of how these deeds were originally granted; empowering the local councils in the management of property rights; and the use of state violence to enforce these terms. In Russia, the most comprehensive law in response to the peasant revolt in 1905–1906 came with the Stolypin land reform between 1906 and 1911. This included the Imperial edict of November 9, 1906, and laws of June 1910 and May 1911, which aimed at establishing “individual ownership of land and enclosure” at the expense of what was known as commune. Footnote 154 As shown by historian Judith Pallot, the main leitmotif of the Stolypin land reform was “a desire to impose order on the ‘chaos’ of the countryside.”Footnote 155 Regardless of their content, similarities, and differences, property law-making in both Russia and the Ottoman Empire, in their respective ways, developed as a response to the rural revolts that took place during the constitutional revolutions. Property lawmaking, in both cases, aimed at maintaining the order in response to massive rural discontent.
Responding to the issues raised during the administrative expulsion process, the government issued a directive in sixteen articles on 20 April 1912 to explain the implementation of the 1909 imperial order, which clarified and strengthened the rule of title deeds, the sole authority of administrative councils, and the use of state violence.Footnote 156 These parameters were articulated first into the Provincial Law on the Demarcation and Registration of Immovable Properties issued on 13 February 1913, and ultimately into a comprehensive Law on the Disposal of Immovable Properties issued on 12 April 1913.Footnote 157
According to Emmanuil Emmanulidis, an Ottoman Greek deputy of Aydın, the Immovable Properties law was one of the most critical laws enacted by the CUP, and was the product of diligent work by Ottoman Finance Minister Mehmed Cavid Bey, who wanted to prove to Europe that advanced steps were being taken in the empire in relation to property ownership.Footnote 158 Emmanulidis was indeed correct about Cavid Bey’s role in making the law. For a year, Cavid Bey had lobbied for the draft law daily with other deputies and CUP leaders, including Talat Pasha. He debated personally with those who had doubts about the law and got frustrated at its delays in various commissions. Cavid Bey responded to the pressures of people like the Ottoman Bank director.Footnote 159 As he expressed to Hayri Bey, who accused Cavid of interfering “in a somewhat bitter and harsh tone” in everything, including the law, “the issue of property is not a legal issue but rather a matter of economy and politics.”Footnote 160 For Cavid Bey, in other words, property law was a matter of Ottoman political economy. The law was not merely a show put on by Cavid Bey for the Europeans as Emmanulidis viewed it; what truly mattered to Cavid Bey was the preservation of order to facilitate the flow of global capital. This, in turn, would grant the empire access to the loans it desperately required—often negotiated by Cavid Bey himself.
In a speech in April 1912 in Thessaloniki, Cavid Bey referred to the presence of workers’ associations and strikes, stressed the importance of safeguarding the interests of the capitalists, and pledged to take action against anyone who disrupted public order or posed a threat to the country’s economic stability.Footnote 161 For Cavid Bey and other imperial decision-makers, order also needed to be maintained in property and land. Çiflik owners had been articulating the demand for a comprehensive law through local administrative councils and the parliament, and institutions such as the Ottoman Bank pressured Cavid Bey through its directors.Footnote 162 The Ottoman Bank had invested a significant proportion of its capital in immovable properties throughout the empire and asked for a guarantee of the property order. At the same time, a comprehensive law for the bank was also necessary to secure debt relations in which land and property were put forward as collateral for loans. Driven by the great fear and lasting trauma of disorder generated by the constitutionalism of the dispossessed, which had disrupted the path of global capital in the Ottoman Empire, the 1913 Law in twenty articles ultimately codified the parameters of the imperial order issued in August 1909. New property law at the end of the empire, ultimately, developed as part of a social counter-revolution that aimed to restore the pre-existing order of dispossession and hence guard the circuits of global capital in the Ottoman Empire, including its integrity in European credit markets. The successful social counter-revolution, in other words, not only restored the pre-existing class order but also restructured it, embedding it within imperial legal frameworks.
Conclusion
This article has argued for the fundamental connections between the order of dispossession, which emerged as a product of class initiative of çiftlik owners in response to the crises of the global economy, empire, and local ecologies, and the flow of global capital and the reliance of the empire’s economy on European loans. Consequently, this dependence underscored imperial investment in sustaining these connections, resulting in the development of new imperial property law on the eve of World War I and the empire’s end. By centering the experiences and acts of the dispossessed at the center of its narrative, this article proposes a new perspective on the 1908 revolution and its connection to the global wave of constitutional revolution through cross-readings with events in Russia. I have proposed the concept of “constitutionalism of the dispossessed” to analyze similar repertoires of rural revolution, as well as the parallels in the anxiety over disorder and the desire for order deployed by post-revolutionary governments during the global wave of constitutional revolutions and counter-revolutions.
Acknowledgements
This article could not have reached its current form without the intellectual support of many colleagues and friends. I thank Mustafa Aksakal, Anıl Aşkın, Nora Barakat, Camille Cole, Kate Dannies, Begüm Özden Fırat, Chris Gratien, Alp Yücel Kaya, and Uğur Peçe for their valuable comments, critiques, and feedback on earlier drafts. The Ottoman Political Economies working group, whose members discussed the very first draft of this article, deserves special acknowledgment. I am also grateful to Jatin Dua, CSSH editor, and the anonymous reviewers for their suggestions and contributions, which greatly enhanced this article.
Open access
