The Ottoman Land Code

The Ottoman Land Code, promulgated on 7 Ramadan 1274 — 21 April 1858 — was part of the Tanzimat reforms. It confirmed the empire’s existing categories of land and the doctrine governing how land could be acquired, and added two things that had not been there before: it required individual ownership to be entered in a register, and it permitted individuals to own very large tracts. Its stated purposes were fiscal and agricultural — to create a new source of tax revenue and to encourage the cultivation of land lying idle.

In Palestine the effects were not what the drafters intended. Registration was administered by a state that peasants had good reason to avoid: the register was the instrument of taxation and, after 1869, of conscription. Villages that had held land collectively under musha’ tenure, redistributing strips among households periodically, often registered their fields in the name of a single clan head, an urban notable, or a merchant who could pay the fees and absorb the tax liability. Cultivators went on cultivating; the name on the deed belonged to someone else.

Combined with the spread of a money economy and a period of strong population growth, the Code produced a concentration of landholding in fewer and richer hands. Large estates accumulated in the coastal plain and the northern valleys, often owned by absentee families in Beirut, Damascus and Jaffa. When Zionist land-purchasing organisations began buying in Palestine from the 1880s, and in earnest under the British Mandate, the estates they bought were frequently bought from those owners, and the tenants who had farmed them for generations had no registered interest to defend. Eviction followed sale.

The Land Code has therefore had long-lasting political and social effects entirely disproportionate to its administrative intent. It converted a customary system into a documentary one, and the document — the tabu register — became the standard by which later authorities, British and then Israeli, judged whose claim to Palestinian land was real. Land that generations had worked but never registered could be declared state land; land that had been registered in a notable’s name could be sold over the heads of the people living on it.

Sources

• Regulating Palestinian Land (1858 – present) — Interactive Encyclopedia of the Palestine Question (PalQuest)
• I. Ottoman Rule — PalQuest