Quotations about agricultural revolution

Tarım döneminde Osmanlı gücünü tımar ekonomi sistemine borçluydu

Underlying all the institutional transformations, however, landownership remained the basic factor throughout Ottoman and early Republican social and political history. The rakaba (property title) belonged to the state while tasarruf, the use of the lands known as arazi-i miri or memleket, was governed entirely by a set of secular regulations. Although the mtilk (private) and vakif (pious foundation) lands were subject to the §eriat (religious law) and thus theoretically immune to state confiscation, the state was free to regulate the status and use of the miri lands, which comprised about 80 percent of all cultivable lands from the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries. Because the state, including the sultan, the government and all the dignitaries, derived most of its income from the produce of the miri lands, those beneficiaries naturally sought the utmost revenue from them. In fact, the early Ottoman state was a massive apparatus established to supervise the cultivation of the land by tenants and the collection of o§ur (tithe), of other taxes generally known as avanz and of fees related to land transactions. The tenants were called ray a, or producers of food, and regardless of their faith or ethnic origin they could keep the land in their family under specific conditions and the payment of tapu (fee) when the land passed to heirs. They could not, however, sell or mortgage the land and in some cases had to cultivate specific crops and sell them to the state at predetermined prices. 19 The need of the state and its sustaining bureaucracy for land revenues forced continuous change in the land administration. First the large feudal holdings of the Uf beys (lords of the marches) were transformed in the fifteenth century into timars (fiefs) administered by sipahis appointed from the center. Then, in the late sixteenth century the state began to turn the timar lands into malikhanes and fiftliks (estates or farms). Throughout these same centuries the modes of cultivation, land distribution and tax collection changed constantly as the government searched for more revenue. Meanwhile, there was little change in the concept that the property of the miri lands belonged in perpetuity to the state while the tenants had only cultivation rights, but there was constant tension among the government, the land administrators and the tenants over demands to commercialize agriculture and the desire of each party to increase its share of land revenue. 20 on The tensions in the agricultural sector that were the constant features of the Ottoman state became the key forces for reform in the second half of the nineteenth century. Ultimately the land issue pitted the government and its bureaucracy against both the local-provincial administrators of the land and the tenants who actually worked the land. The government, by nearly sanctifying its property rights to the land, created a statist culture that impregnated every aspect of social life. Supplemented by an emphasis on communal solidarity, unity of faith and absolute obedience to the sultan (the shadow of God on earth), this statist culture prevented the clash of interests among the state, the land cultivators and the administrators from coming into the open. It did not, however, prevent the land administrators, who were the local notables from achieving actual control of the land in the period 1770-1815. The administrators forced the government to turn their control of the land into a dejure right through the Sened-i Ittifak (Pact of Alliance) of 1808 between the government and the qyans, or country notables, meaning land administrators and tax collectors now were supported by their respective communities. The Pact recognized the notables as owners of the state lands that they formerly had controlled as appointed administrators. The Ottoman government cancelled the Pact and began a systematic liquidation of the ay am in 1815 but never regained full control of the land. The Land Code passed in

Karpat, K. H. (2002). Studies on Ottoman Social and Political History :  Selected Articles and Essays (pp. 14-15). Leiden, NLD:  Brill, N. H. E. J., N. V. Koninklijke, Boekhandel en Drukkerij. Retrieved September 4, 2010 from http: //site. ebrary. com/lib/tcmb/Doc?id=10090604&ppg=27

 

Osmanlı tımar sistemi ile komünizmin benzerlikleri

4. Land Property, and Control of Production in the Ottoman State

The chief form of property in the Ottoman state as mentioned before was land ownership. In the Balkans, Anatolia, Syria and Iraq, state ownership and control of land predominated, whereas elsewhere in the Middle East and Africa the existing patterns of communal and estate ownership, though modified, were generally preserved. Anyway the iqta system prevailing in the Arabic speaking provinces, especially Egypt and Iraq, was not much different from the timar. The institution which gave the state a key role in land ownership and control of agricultural production was the fiftlik, or as it is better known the timar-system. This was a piece of land whose title, rakaba, belonged in perpetuity to the state. It was cultivated on the basis of a lifetime tapu, a lease which was renewable to the heirs in case of the tenant’s death. The supervisor of the land was the sipahi, a cavalryman, appointed by the government for a given period of time. The tenant could lose his lease if he failed to cultivate the land for three years without acceptable reasons. The ultimate purpose of this land system, which probably included about fifty percent of all cultivable lands, was to procure men and supplies for the sultan in case of war, and to provide agricultural commodities at fixed prices for the urban population and the guilds. A vast system of supply and price fixing dealing with the agricultural production complemented the land tenure. The supply system was based on the one hand on free procurement of goods by merchants licensed by the state, who purchased goods at fixed prices from producers, and on the other on the sale of finished products and prices fixed by the state. All this shows also that agriculture produced a surplus of commodities that could be bought and sold on the market. To the merchants and craftsmen was recognized a percentage over the buying price of the agricultural commodities not as profit but as compensation for labour, although in practice the merchants could speculate and make huge profits. Private land ownership supplemented and complemented this timar system, but its overall impact on the economy was limited since the marketable agricultural commodities came mainly from state owned lands. 9 It must be emphasized that the stability and smooth functioning of this economic system depended on state authority and not on self balancing internal mechanisms.

Karpat, K. H. (2002). Studies on Ottoman Social and Political History :  Selected Articles and Essays (pp. 298-299). Leiden, NLD:  Brill, N. H. E. J., N. V. Koninklijke, Boekhandel en Drukkerij. Retrieved September 4, 2010 from http: //site. ebrary. com/lib/tcmb/Doc?id=10090604&ppg=27

 

Osmanlı sanayi devrimi esnasında özel toprak mülkiyetine geçti, ancak bu sanayileşmeye yol açmadı

The original Ottoman timar system came to an end early in the seventeenth century, largely because of the demise of the ciftlik and the sipahi. The peasantry in Anatolia, that is, the food producing estate, was dislocated by a series of revolts in 1596-1650, which destroyed in good measure the established order but did not affect the state title to the land. But the revolts did undermine the effectiveness of the control systems established early in the fifteenth century by putting an end to the ciftlik system. The peasantry participating in the revolt did not act as a homogeneous group, did not display class solidarity and had no organization. In fact, the revolts were often led by local chieftains, religious leaders who did not seek a new status for land or for themselves but a return to the relative stability, order and security prevailing previously when state control of land was intact. However, the state was not able to reestablish the status quo as far as control of production was concerned. In fact, I believe that the state was not interested in reestablishing the status quo for it was seeking new methods of operation which could facilitate the flow of revenue towards the centre by eliminating the share of the sipahis and allowing the state to finance the growing central army and bureaucracy. By this time the use of fire arms depending on foot soldiers lessened the importance of the cavalry represented chiefly by the provincial army of sipahis. The Ottoman government sought for the next two hundred years, roughly until the beginning of the nineteenth century, ways to increase the volume of agricultural production which would augment the tax revenue without giving up its property title or relinquishing fully its control over land cultivation. For instance, it appointed the kul (officers of the central army) as land administrators, and then, introduced the malikhane system, that is landed estates given to high officials, usually during their service period and occasionally for a lifetime but without the right of inheritance. Eventually the state was forced to delegate additional authority to appointed communal leaders in towns and villages to supervise the distribution of land to villagers and collect taxes. Indeed, the sheer necessity of assuring revenue rather than seeking a basic change in the land regime compelled the government to expand the functions of the local notables as tax collectors and make them managers of state lands. The tenants continued to cultivate the land on the basis of a contract but did not acquire title to the land. The tax farming system induced many enterprising people to auction at high price the position of tax collector and eventually joined the ranks of the qyan, the new group of wealthy communal leaders that rose to preeminence in the eighteenth century. There were in this period illegal acquisitions of land by private individuals but the abuse seems to have been limited because the state could— through recourse to ancient land registers— prove that it possessed the title to property. Besides the title ayan and the authority that went with it were bestowed by the government, despite the fact that many individuals became de facto qyans and were recognized as such by their associates because of their wealth and leadership position achieved in their respective communities. 10 The key factor which spurred the rise for the qyam was the increased demand for agricultural commodities. This in turn, was the consequence of diminished revenue from the transit trade with the East, the growing need for agricultural commodities in the interior, and later the increase in general trade with Europe based among other things on the exchange of agricultural products. (The basis for taxes on which government expenditure depended was the o§ur or the tithe which varied in accordance with the volume of production. ) All this altered the land tenure system in such a way as to answer the increased demand for agricultural goods. It is important to note that the private landowners were free to transfer ownership to new entrepreneurs and to adapt the cultivation of land to market demand, but these formed a relatively small segment of the population. The need for a flexible land tenure and production system to respond to market needs was obvious. This flexibility could be achieved by lessening the state control of land and ultimately expanding the scope of private property. The bulk of the land belonged to the state which still controlled trade through a rather intricate system of restrictions imposed on exports and even on trade between provinces. The state was also committed to the traditional system of estates which in more than one way guaranteed its own existence. The attempts by ayans to free landed property from government ownership and control, aided by a series of political events, culminated in a sort of a revolution in 1808. The qyans secured from the newly installed sultan, Mahmud II (1808-39) a Sened-i Ittifak (Pact of Alliance) whereby they recognized the general authority of the Sultan in exchange for respect for their own authority over their domains and the right of their heirs to inherit their property. This was, however, a short-lived victory because the Sultan taking advantage of his military power liquidated the ayans in 1815, confiscated their property and reasserted the government’s title and control over state lands as in the past. In essence, the developments described above were part of a broader process of socio-economic change which produced a clash between an emerging primitive capitalist system and a conglomeration of ancient estates which were surviving thanks to the state and its control over landed property and agricultural production. The old structures, as mentioned before, can coexist with the new ones since they are often generically interrelated. In the Ottoman state, the emerging structures found themselves pitched against the state which had the power and authority to prevent the new groups from acquiring property rights and achieving control over land. The government regarded the new structures also as a form of estates and tried unsuccessfully to allocate them roles and functions in a hierarchical order, despite the fact that the economic forces creating the new structures were fundamentally different from those that gave birth to the ancient estates. The interest of the new groups in acquiring land, in increasing production and obtaining some freedom of trade made them interest-oriented groups but not a class, since they lacked the characteristics sought in a class. The new groups had a definite tendency to supersede the traditional estates as well as the political order which had sustained them for centuries. In summary, the structural situation of the Ottoman state at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries, consisted of a heterogeneous amalgam of ancient political structures at the top in control of authority, and of a series of new economic groups and relics of the traditional estates at the bottom. All groups continued to legitimize their position and function according to the criteria prevailing in the old estates rather than relying on power including economic power, even though the land-owning and commercial groups owed their social position to their wealth. The two tables below indicate rather well the structural change in the Ottoman state. The first table shows the original estates. The second table shows a rather interesting structural differentiation, namely, the tendency of the non-Muslims to engage in new types of economic professions, especially commercial occupations which depended on an exchange of agricultural commodities against manufactured goods. The fact is that Christians, because of their geographical location and status and their relations with Europe, became exposed to and accepted capitalist forms of enterprise much before the Muslims. The Christians had broken away from the estate system and its legitimizing bases rooted in Islam, long before the Muslims. Their organization reflected better the economic forces shaping the Empire’s structure. How r ever, events in the nineteenth century further changed Ottoman social structure and involved the Muslims in a process of social stratification in which economic factors played a leading part.

Karpat, K. H. (2002). Studies on Ottoman Social and Political History :  Selected Articles and Essays (pp. 299-302). Leiden, NLD:  Brill, N. H. E. J., N. V. Koninklijke, Boekhandel en Drukkerij. Retrieved September 4, 2010 from http: //site. ebrary. com/lib/tcmb/Doc?id=10090604&ppg=27

 

Tarım döneminde Çin ekonomi sistemi

Expansion of the ownership system

Given that private land ownership, which made the formation and perpetuation of a landholding peasantry possible, prevailed in premodern China prior to 200 BC, the most important feature of economic system in the following Qin Period was undoubtedly the institutionalisation of this ownership as the fundamental institution of the Chinese agrarian economy (Su J. 1985: 481– 92; Chao 1986:2). By Qin law, private land and other assets were strictly protected. For instance, (1) lost domestic animals were to be returned to the owner so long as the owner was able to prove the marks and ages of the animals; (2) the county magistrate was responsible for arbitration if a civil dispute occurred; and (3) severe penalties were applied to theft (Su J. 1985: 481– 92). This system continued virtually unchanged for more than two millennia although the Qin itself was a very short regime.

In post-Qin China, owning land was at the very centre of economic life for the ordinary Chinese, which can be defined as the Chinese ‘land ownership fetishism’. This makes a lot of sense because to an ordinary Chinese to lose land often meant bankruptcy. As a result of a lasting development, in the eighteenth century as much as 92 per cent of registered land was privately owned, which left a narrow margin of only 8 per cent for state ownership (Feuerwerker 1984:313). Among these property owners, smallholders were the majority. In the Qing dynasty, for example, the average farm size was 20– 30 mu (1 Qing mu = 0.67 ha) in the north and 12– 15 mu in the south, and ‘there were few large agricultural holdings comparable to the great estates of Europe and other parts of Asia, to the latifundia of South America, or the

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The traditional freehold ownership type later mutated to a dual ownership which was characterised by the coexistence of freeholding and permanent leaseholding in the same property. This type of ownership was increasingly popular in the Ming-Qing Period, when the empire faced shortages of new land. Dual ownership was characterised by the division between the freeholding rights and leaseholding rights (or the rights to till the soil) between the owner and the tenant and, further, the subdivision of the leaseholding rights among tenants. It is worth noting that the same trend occurred in India even after independence. As Byres points out, the landlord class were not necessarily freehold owners; rather, they owned the property rights in the soil, which were superior over property rights in land per se. These soil property rights allowed this class to extract agricultural surplus from farmers (Byres 1974:230).

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Impacts of the ownership system

‘Pan-private land ownership’

Chinese non-feudal individual/family land ownership led to a peculiar result: what can be called ‘pan-private land ownership’, with most people in Chinese society possessing land properties. There is good reason to believe that this majority consisted of around 70 per cent of the Chinese population. On Professor Fei Hsiao-t’ung’s account, in the densely populated Jiangsu Province during the first half of the twentieth century few did not own land at some stage of their life (1939:177).

Extensive and intensive expansions of farming under land ownership

As for the accessibility of arable land, a condition necessary for the sustainable expansion of the Chinese landholding and landowning peasant economy, this ongoing replicating of the peasantry, with its population growth, was to reach a point where the average size of a farm became too small to support a family without a technological breakthrough (in terms of new tillage methods, new crop species and so forth). To avoid this land shortage crisis, the society had to find new land to cater for and cope with the constant replication of small landholding and landowning farms. This task was successfully fulfilled by the Chinese state through a steady, systematic and ruthless internal colonisation on the East Asian mainland. Without exception, most new territories soon became ‘agrarianised’, until the empire reached its geo-ecological limits for premodern farming. In contrast, during the nineteenth century, Indian peasants practised subdivision of family land among sons while India had little room to expand its territory. The result was a decline in labour productivity which was partly responsible for the widespread poverty of that time (Rothermund 1993:48– 9). The pattern of agriculture-related territorial expansion raises an intriguing issue: just how alienated was the Chinese state from the interests of the general public? Even if the state was not for the people, it certainly had mutual interests with the people and thus cooperated and compromised with them. In other words, it was a ‘giver-and-taker’ state. It fed the peasantry with new land and in return demanded revenue. The Chinese peasantry, on the other hand, were a class of ‘takers-and-givers’. They received land with the territorial expansion and paid tax for the benefit.

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All the officials were salaried government employees, selected from the population, and the careers of the bureaucrats (meritocrats, to be more precise) depended on their merits, not their social position at birth, in order to prevent special-interest groups from monopolis-ing state power. Accordingly, administrative positions were not inheritable by the descendants of bureaucrats. State budgets were financed by regular taxes (either in kind or in labour) collected at fixed rates from free citizens. A standing army was organised on the basis of conscription from all registered households, and the defence walls of separate kingdoms along the northern frontier were linked up to make a complete line, known as the Great Wall, against barbarian invasions (Zhou B. 1981:67– 8; Yu 1986; Guisso et al. 1989: 88– 9).

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The Chinese centralised state and standing army were ready to capture new land in East Asia for the landholding and land-owning peasantry. It was no accident that the Chinese Empire expanded only overland: throughout history, the Chinese systematically carried out land colonisation until in all directions they reached the point where the land was no longer suitable for agricultural settlement: in the north there is the Gobi Desert; in the south, tropical jungles; to the east, the sea; and to the west, the Himalayas.

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 The Chinese land-ownership system and the free peasantry thus laid the foundation of a non-class-based official-civilian relationship, the officials being selected from the vast base of the general public. This is evidently shown from the family backgrounds of all the ‘Imperial Examination Champions’

Impact on law

Chinese law in premodern times was designed to protect landowners. The best example is shown by the provisions of ‘inheritance by daughters’, ‘inheritance by the near relation’ and ‘inheritance through the adoption of a son as an inheritor’. Generally, if a family did not have a male descendant, female descendants were entitled to inherit the family property. If a family did not have any descendant, male or female, the near relation was entitled to inherit.

To take the end of the Qing Dynasty as an example, although China was in a series of severe crises, the income level differentiation between the upper and lower strata has been estimated at only 14:1 (Chang 1955:447– 50, 475– 7), while under the ‘most equal society’ of Stalin’s or Mao’s communism such a gap is easily over 10:1 (Lardy 1983:163– 72). Needless to say, the Chinese equal inheritance system reflects nothing but equality in spite of the fact that it was meant for internal property division. Comparatively, Leveson and Schurmann point out (1969:92), ‘Feudal primogeniture perpetuates inequality, since land is left concentrated in individual hands. For this reason…dynasts on the Han model favoured constant pressure for the fragmentation of landholdings to counteract any proto-feudal, anti-central private aggrandizements.’                                                            

Fourth, Chinese land ownership bonded the peasantry ‘voluntarily’ to land, although most farmers were legally free from personal bondage. In comparison, under the feudal tenancy arrangement, peasants appeared bonded to land but were in effect bound to their feudal master. The outcomes were very different. Historically, once feudal classes— aristocrats and peasants alike— were free from dependence on their old professional paths, they took the opportunity to enter non-agricultural sectors, although they probably immediately depended on the market. It was a trade-off. So, in feudal Eur-ope/Japan, once the personal bondage was removed (either by force or peaceful means), peasants left the land. In China, unless force (either political or economic) was used, the peasantry adhered to land. In other words, the Chinese landholding and landowning peasant was willing to be bound to the land through his private land ownership. In this context, the opportunity cost for a feudal peasant to leave agriculture was lower than that for a landholding and landowning free farmer. Fairbank thus points out that private individual land ownership in premodern China gave the peasantry the incentive to perpetuate the keeping of agriculture in their own hands, separation of land from the peasantry being extremely difficult (Fairbank 1965:237).

with the West). Thus, unlike feudal Europe and Japan, which left leeway for the rural population to work in the industrial sector, a compound of private land ownership and free citizen status formed a colossal barrier in China to the transformation of an agrarian economy to an industrialised one.

Deng, G. (1999). Premodern Chinese economy : Structural equilibrium and capitalist sterility, (pp. 49-72). London: Routledge. Retrieved September 4, 2010 from http://site.ebrary.com/lib/tcmb/Doc?id=10054838&ppg=64