| Summary: | This thesis is a study on the changing property relations in rural Anatolia in the late nineteenth century. The contention underpinning it is that the transformation that took place during the course of the nineteenth century, in the countryside, in the Ottoman society and in the nature of state power, fundamentally altered the property relations on land, and consequently, changed the nature of land conflicts and claims in Ottoman Anatolia. The claims and counter-claims put forth by the nomadic groups, refugees from the wars in the Balkans, landowners, and peasantcultivators centred around the very definition of property on land. The pressure on land resulting from large-scale population movements into the empire and the settlement of nomads had impinged, in a fundamental manner, on the existing patterns of land use and forms of ownership, and rendered critical the delineation and enforcement of land boundaries, as well as the protection of existing land rights. At the same time, these rights were being redefined by the central state, which had begun codification of a generalized and unified legal framework for land ownership in the empire, and registration of land rights according to the categories of the new property regime. These modern administrative practices were aimed at transforming use rights on land into exclusionary ownership rights, and were hotly contested both by those who were adversely affected by privatised land rights and by the nomads whose custom was increasingly being criminalised. At the turn of the twentieth century, when the multi-ethnic Ottoman empire was disintegrating into many nation-states, and in an atmosphere of worsening intercommunal relations, this contestation rapidly led to the framing of land claims in an ethnically and religiously oppositional language. Claims to land, as a result, were channelled to the arena of ethnic politics, to the realm of nationalism
|
|---|
