Sustaining the Empire: Transformation of Property Regime in the Late Ottoman Empire, 1876-1913
Open AccessSustaining the Empire: Transformation of Property Regime in the Late Ottoman Empire, 1876-1913This dissertation is a socioeconomic and legal history of the Ottoman Empire from 1876 to 1913. It traces the sometimes self-referential ways through which one claimant, Sultan Abdülhamid II (r. 1876-1909), leveraged the Ottoman legal system to become the largest landowner in the empire’s domains in the late nineteenth century. Besides landed properties, he personally held specific concessions under his Privy Purse, which he split from the state treasury in the 1880s and supplemented its finances with the revenues from his expanding properties. This dissertation critically examines this policy under the Privy Purse from the perspective of the Ottoman legal system: I investigate the nature of these claims, why he made such claims, and how these claims were conceived and legitimized within the Ottoman legal system, in order to shed light on the political and financial implications for the Ottoman Empire of his decision to act on such claims. As the individual in question was the Ottoman Sultan, this dissertation is also a study of the making, assertion, and limits of power of the Ottoman monarch at the turn of the twentieth century. This work helps us understand the interplay of law and capitalism in Ottoman empire-building and discusses inequalities that differentially emerged in its different regions and among its different communities. Part I argues that Sultan Abdülhamid II should be understood as a private entrepreneur who ran a large private enterprise through his Privy Purse, separate from the state treasury. It investigates the role of property laws and imperial decrees in constituting Abdülhamid II’s financial enterprise —a crucial part of which was his private property acquisitions— and the differential redistribution of the capital in ways to reinforce his rule and Ottoman sovereignty. Part II details the institutional structure established under the Privy Purse towards administering his private properties and studies the legal instruments used in his properties’ governance, including property maps, title-deeds, deeds, regulations, and legal orders as paper technologies of capitalism. It thereby sheds light on the jurisdictional hierarchies of the Adminsitration of Emlāk-ı Hümāyūn, which was informed by regional differences, that existed alongside the Ottoman state institutions. Part II further zooms in on the administration of properties in the province of Basra as a case study. I analyze Sultan’s properties’ revenue registers, expenditure registers, two kinds of debt registers, and tax-farm auction books, kept by Basra (later renamed ‘Amāra) Emlāk-ı Hümāyūn Commission, in my discussion of regional patterns of revenue collection, redistribution, and indebtedness. This case study quantitatively shows the extent of the Sultan’s profit-making through his property ownership in Basra: by tying the province of Basra to the imperial level, I illustrate the scales on which law and capital operates. Part III investigates the dismantlement of the Hamidian enterprise under the Privy Purse after the reinstitution of the 1876 Ottoman Constitution. Through the scrutiny of parliamentary discussions, memoirs, and laws, this section shows that the limitations on Sultanic authority after the 1908 connstitutional revolution should be understood in light of the undercutting of the Sultan’s financial base, which then facilitated further curtailing of Ottoman Sultan’s authority. It argues that making of the Ottoman constitutional monarchy was intertwined with dismantlement of the Sultan’s dominium, including reordering of its contentious constituents such as its administrative structure and outstanding debt.
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