Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 July 2015
Throughout the Ottoman Empire, land was always the major source of revenue and surplus and thus inevitably a major source of contention. Myriad property-rights disputes were recorded in the registers of the local kadı courts and archives of the various ministries in Istanbul. Conflicts over the agricultural surplus revealed in such documentation demonstrate, for instance, that peasants in the sixteenth century not only contested taxes imposed on them but also opposed the illegal transfer of land titles by the sipahis (İnalcık 1997, p. 72). By the middle of the sixteenth century, the practice of selling state-owned miri lands–which by legal definition could not be bought or sold–had become widespread, sometimes even confirmed by the rulings of the local kadı courts. The stamp of şeriyye implicit in the kadı's ruling meant in effect that the land subject to sale was taken out of the miri land regime and placed in the legal category of freehold mülk lands (İnalcık 1997, p. 112).
The research upon which this paper is based was partially funded by a grant from the MEAwards Research Program in Population and Development, The Population Council, WANA Regional Office in Cairo. I am grateful for their support.
I thank the editors of this journal and the anonymous reader for their helpful comments. Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the International Summer Academy of the Working Group Modernity and Islam, Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, Casablanca, September 1999; Workshop on Legal Transformations: State and Property, the Russian and Ottoman Empires Compared, 18th/19th centuries, supported by the European Science Foundation and the STICERD, LSE, London, December 1999; and Ataturk Institute for Modern Turkish History, Boğaziçi University, Istanbul, December 2000. I thank all the participants for their comments and suggestions.