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Land Equalization and Factor Scarcities: Holding Size and the Burden of Impositions in Imperial Central Russia and the Late Ottoman Levant

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 March 2009

Ya'akov Firestone
Ya'akov Firestone
Affiliation:
Gaithersburg, Maryland
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Abstract

The origin of the land-equalizing community, the most important system of tenure in the nineteenth-century Levant, has never been explained. The evidence of language and the dynamics of factor relationships concur with the historical record: there was no scarcity of land. On the basis of a systematic comparison with the land-equalizing commune in Russia, the answer to the puzzle looms as the need to equalize a heavy burden of impositions. Indeed, villages whoselocation or political strength helped them resist taxation did not equalize holdings.Equalization was an adaptation to external demands, not a static vestigialinstitution.

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Articles
Information
The Journal of Economic History , Volume 41 , Issue 4 , December 1981 , pp. 813 - 833
Copyright
Copyright © The Economic History Association 1981

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References

1 Boserup, Ester, The Conditions of Agricultural Growth—the Economics of Agrarian Change Under Population Pressure (Chicago, 1965).Google Scholar

2 For a comprehensive exposition see Latron, A., La vie rurale en Syrie et au Liban (Beirut, 1936), pp. 14–18, 182–203, 242–43;Google Scholar for an attempt at historical analysis, Weulersse, Jacques, Paysans de Syrie et du Proche-Orient (Paris, 1946), pp. 99–109;Google Scholar for an authoritative presentation of local aspects, Goadby, F. and Doukhan, M., The Land Law of Palestine (Tel Aviv, 1935), pp. 199–209;Google Scholar for the historically most influential presentation of the problem, Simpson, John Hope, Palestine, Report on Immigration, Land Settlement and Development, Cmd. 3686 (London, 1930), pp. 31–34;Google Scholar for a detailed survey, Granott, A., The Land System in Palestine (London, 1952), pp. 213–43;Google Scholar for pertinent descriptions in the Quarterly Statemen of the Palestine Exploration Fund (henceforth Quarterly Statement), Klein's, F. A. in 1883, pp. 43–44, George E. Post's in 1891, p. 105, Samuel Bergheim's in 1894, pp. 192–95; and Philip G. Baldensperger's in 1906, pp. 192–94;Google Scholarcf. Wilson, C. T., Peasant Life in the Holy Land (London, 1906), pp. 189–90;Google ScholarGrant, Elihu, The People of Palestine (Philadelphia, 1921), pp. 132–33;Google ScholarElazari-Volcani, I., The Fellah's Farm, Bulletin of the Institute of Agriculture and Natural History of the Jewish Agency, No. 10 (Tel Aviv, 1930), pp. 60–64.Google Scholar

3 From kāla, to measure.Google Scholar

4 The word “acre” stems from the Indo-European root agr-acr denoting land and farming.Google Scholar

5 Granott, Cf., The Land System in Palestine, p. 73, citing F. A. Klein.Google Scholar

6 Baldensperger in Quarterly Statement, 1906, pp. 193–94.Google Scholar

7 For ard bidhār-kayl and ard faddān see Firestone, Ya'akov, “Crop-Sharing Economies in Mandatory Palestine,” Part I, Middle Eastern Studies, 11 (01 1975), pp. 8–9 and footnotes.Google Scholar

8 Latron, La vie rurale, pp. 11–17.Google Scholar

9 Ibid., p. 15.

10 Ibid., pp. 16–17.

11 Some of my informants, such as Mr. Muhammad Hasan ‘Alī of’ Arrābeh, pointed out for instance that the output of one plow could be boosted substantially by the use of relief plowmen and animals. In northern Samaria the number of days available for plowing in a year's season was about 30 (see footnote 55).Google Scholar

12 The figures are from Government of Palestine, Report of a Committee on the Economic Condition of Agriculturalists in Palestine and the Fiscal Measures of Government in Relation Thereto (Jerusalem, 1930), p. 21.Google Scholar The 6-acre faddān was the unit at the olive-growing village of Ramain Galilee, whereas the 75-acre unit was the faddān Rūmī, cultivated by definition by two yokes of oxen. For other values of the faddān see Firestone, “Crop-Sharing Economics,” Part I, p. 20, footnote 26.Google Scholar

13 Granott, Land System in Palestine, p. 184, citing G. Schumacher.Google Scholar

14 Grant, People of Palestine, p. 132. Italics mine.Google Scholar

15 Baldensperger in Quarterly Statement, 1906, p. 192. A number of Baldensperger's contemporaries (Bergheim in Quarterly Statement, 1894, p. 193; Grant, People of Palestine, pp. 132–33) stress that only the residents of a village could be granted the right of cultivation there, and I suspect that in a structured village community it might have taken an in-migrant a number of years to achieve resident status. But this could hardly have applied at the margins of settlement. All my evidence points to an active stream of migrants from the hills of Samaria to cultivation possibilities in the Plain of Esdraelon in the last two decades of the nineteenth century.Google Scholar Nor do I believe that one should extrapolate too readily from Tyrwhitt Drake's estimate of 90 percent cultivation in Esdraelon in 1872 (Conder, C. R. and Kitchener, H. H., The Survey of Western Palestine, Memoirs of the Topography, Orography, Hydrography, and Archaeology, vol. 2 (London, 1882), p. 50)—the text itself states that the area under cultivation fluctuated from year to year—or from Oliphant's statement that, in contrast to the situation 20 years before, “almost every acre of the plain of Esdraelon is at this moment in the highest state of cultivation”Google Scholar (Oliphant, Laurence, Haifa or Life in Modern Palestine (London, 1887), p. 59).Google Scholar Needless to say no such claims were made with regard to the Plain of Sharon. Nor are we concerning ourselves, in any case, with the latter part of the nineteenth century when we discuss the onset of land equalization (cf. Goadby and Doukhan, Land Law of Palestine, p. 208).Google Scholar Hence the relevant testimonies are those that attest to the desertion of Esdraelon in former times, e.g., Burckhardt, John Lewis, Travels in Syria and the Holy Land (London, 1812), p. 334.Google Scholar But for the record it should be stated, on the evidence of Hājj Dheeb As'ad Hasan and other old-timers of the village of 'Arrābeh, that the Sursoq landowners and their agents were still doing all they could to attract cultivators to the fertile reaches of Esdraelon at least as late as the turn of the twentieth century. In Upper Egypt also, where at the turn of the nineteenth century land was annually assigned to each according to his means of production, Lancret states that in most places all comers were entitled to it regardless of origin because of the shortage of cultivators (Lancret, Michel-Ange, “Mémoire sur le système d'imposition territoriale et sur l'adrninistration des provinces de l'Egypte…,” in Descripton de l'Egypte (Paris, 1809), pp. 246–47). Cf. footnote 51 below.Google Scholar

16 Latron, La vie rurale, pp. 186–87, cf. p. 190.Google Scholar

17 Elazari-volcani, The Fellah's Farm, p. 60.Google Scholar

18 For instance, camel-drivers' fees for bringing in the crop were a direct function of the distance to the threshing floor, according to Hājj Dheeb As'ad Hasan.Google Scholar

19 Goadby, and Doukhan, Land Law of Palestine, p. 208; Latron, La vie rurale, p. 188; cf. Klein in Quarterly Statement, 1883, pp. 43–44 and Post in Quarterly Statement, 1891, p. 105.Google Scholar

20 Latron, La vie rurale, p. 184 fn.Google Scholar

21 Miller, Alexandre, Essai sur l'histoire des institutions agraires de la Russie centrale du XVIe au XVIIIe siècles (Paris, 1926), pp. 320–21.Google Scholar A further point of striking resemblance to practice in the Levant is that in Russia as under the hamāyil system noted earlier, it was common for the men to divide up into groups who got sections of the land by lot and then allocated the plots to their members (Blum, Jerome, Lord and Peasant in Russia from the Ninth to the Nineteenth Century (Princeton, New Jersey, 1971), p. 527).Google Scholar

22 Confino, Michael, Systèmes agraires et progrès agricole—L'assolement triennal en Russie aux XVIIIe-XIXe siècles (Paris, 1969), p. 101.Google Scholar In central Russia—in contrast to the northern part of the country—this reserve seems to have been mainly under long fallow. Where it was abundant, the seigneurs occasionally allowed peasants to clear plots for themselves without paying taxes, nor were such plots included in the communal redistributions (pp. 102–03).

23 Blum, Lord and Peasant, p. 512. The capitation also had two advantages over a land tax or a holding tax: it made evasion difficult and it averted the desertion of holdings. Miller, Cf., Des institutions agraires de la Russie cenirale, p. 313.Google Scholar

24 Miller, Des institutions agraires de la Russie centrale, pp. 319–24.Google Scholar

25 Confino, Systèmes agraires, p. 99.Google Scholar

26 Wallace, Donald Mackenzie, Russia (London, 1912), p. 124.Google Scholar

27 Miller, Des institutions agraires de la Russie centrale, p. 324; cf. p. 210.Google Scholar

28 Confino, Systèmes agraires, p. 99.Google Scholar

29 Blum, Lord and Peasant, p. 514. According to Blum, the state also feared the social and political implications of the rise of a landless class.Google Scholar

30 Wallace, Mackenzie, Russia, p. 137. Such cases are also noted by Miller, Des institutions agraires de la Russie centrale, p. 327, and Blum, Lord and Peasant, p. 511. Technically, to have as little land as possible took the form of being assessed as few shares as possible in the village community.Google Scholar

31 Miller, Cf., Des institutions agraires de la Russie centrale, pp. 212–13. Peter's idea had been to make the capitation paid by every subject proportional to his wealth (p. 216).Google Scholar

32 Ibid., p. 218.

33 Blum states that the periodic redistribution of land was the commune's most important function (Lord and Peasant, p. 525).Google Scholar

34 Miller, Des institutions agraires de la Russie centrale, pp. 330–44.Google Scholar

35 Blum, Lord and Peasant, p. 519.Google Scholar

36 Ibid., p. 526.

37 Miller, Des institutions agraires de la Russie centrale, pp. 324–25; Wallace, Mackenzie, Russia, pp. 136–37.Google Scholar

38 Historically the capitation anteceded collective responsibility (Miller, Des institutions agraires de la Russie centrale, p. 218).Google Scholar

39 See footnote 22.Google Scholar

40 The regularized property tax, which does not fall into that category, was a late nineteenth century development in the Ottoman Empire. Young, George, Corps de droit ottoman, vol. 6 (Oxford, 1906), p. 119.Google Scholar

41 al-Nimr, Ihsān, T' rīkh Jabal Nāblus wa'l Balqá, Vol. 2: Ahwāl ‘Ahd al-Iqtā’ (Nablus, 1961), pp. 266, 268.Google Scholar Some Western writers restrict the use of the popular collective name for the state taxes, mīrīi, to the grain tithe. Perhaps this is because their observations were conducted in the lowlands, where there was little taxable non-grain production.

42 Lancret notes that the Ottoman state assigned the state taxes of Egypt to tax farmers for stated amounts as early as the reign of Suleiman the Magnificent; the units were whole villages. Theoretically the amounts paid may have been expected to bear some relation to the villages' wealth and tax-producing capacity. In fact, however, under the original assessment still in force in 1799 the tax farmers sometimes paid ten times as much tax to the state for one village as they did for another with the same stated revenue from the peasants (Lancret, “Le système d'imposition territoriale,” pp. 236–37). This fundamental discontinuity between peasant dues and tax farmer payments may have been one reason for Lancret's feeling that the multazim (tax farmer) could be described more correctly as a seigneur (p. 238). If so, the reasoning is impeccablė. Just as in the West the manorial dues imposed by the lord bore little relation to his own obligations within the feudal system, so in the Ottoman Empire there was no necessary connection between what a tax farmer collected from the peasants and his commitments to the state fiscal system of which he was the base.Google Scholar

43 For a discussion of the role of these, and the possible close link between overlordship and equalization, see Firestone, “The Land-Equalizing“Mushā” Village and the Socio-Economic Evolution of the Levant in Late Ottoman and Mandatory Times” (Paper delivered at the 1974 meeting of the Middle East Studies Association, New York), pp. 21–27.Google Scholar

44 For the texts of a representative document describing the remittance of a payment of mīrī for a block of Samarian villages by a local overlord to the governor of Jerusalem and Nablus in 1708, and another investing a tax farmer with the revenues of a village against a fixed annual payment in 1826, see Nimr, , Tárīkh Jabal Nāblus wál Balqá, vol. 2, pp. 233–35.Google Scholar

45 Nimr, , Tárīkh Jabal Nāblus wál Balqá, vol. 2, pp. 184, 220;Google ScholarInalcik, cf. H., “L'empire ottoman” in Association internationale d'éetudes du Sud-Est européen, ler Congrès international des études balkaniques et sud-est européennes, Les peuples de l'Europe du Sud-Est et leur role dans l'histoire (Sofia, 1966), pp. 44–45.Google Scholar

46 Wilson, Peasant Life in the Holy Land, pp. 291–92. Bergheim's description of the tithing of crops in the Sharon plain (Quarterly Statement, 1894, pp. 197–98), implying that the title farmer dealt individually with some peasants and also that he may have collected different amounts from them, illustrates the late nineteenth-century trend toward the personalization of property and taxes.Google Scholar In Egypt, collective village responsibility for the payment of taxes endured until 1855 (Baer, Gabriel, “The Dissolution of the Egyptian Village Community” reprinted in his Studies in the Social History of Modern Egypt (Chicago, 1969), pp. (17–25).Google Scholar The periodical redistribution of lands in Upper Egypt also continued at least through 1855 (idem, p. 22).Google Scholar

47 Wilson, Peasant Life in the Holy Land, p. 292).Google Scholar

48 Bergheim in Quarterly Statement, 1894, p. 198.Google Scholar

49 See Canaan, T., “The Saqr Bedouin of Bisān,” Journal of the Palestine Oriental Society, 16 (1936), p. 25, for the Sultan's lands in the Beisan Valley; Firestone, “Crop-Sharing Economics,” Part I, p. 12 and fn. 48, for conditions on the Sursoq lands; Firestone, “Land-Equalizing ‘Mushā'’ Village,” pp. 23ff., for overlord part-title to village lands. Cf. Elazari-Volcani, The Fellali's Farm, p. 61. The reader will note that in several places in the present discussion, notably here and in footnote 15 above, I do not distinguish between peasant-owned and land-owned mushā' land. This is not merely because the origins of land equalization, which represent the main subject of this study, antedated the registration of title to land and hence the onset of landlordship proper, but mainly because the drawing of such a distinction can only obscure the features of the mushā' and its historical development. From the legal as from the structural point of view, a land-equalizing community “on landlord land” is nothing but a mushā' of shareholders whose lots are cultivated by tenants; from the point of view of farm economics—focused on the operator—it is like any other mushā' except that the operator pays rent in addition to any other charges he must meet for the use of resources. In footnote 15, therefore, we discussed the faddān qua faddān and the opportunities for acquiring it as a right of cultivation, quite irrespective of registered title; here we treat the rent, where it occurs, as an operating expense for the cultivator. For a fuller discussion see Firestone, “Land-Equalizing ‘Mushā'’ Village.”Google Scholar

50 Cited in Gibb, H. A. R. and Owen, Harold, Islamic Society and the West, Vol. 1, Islamic Society in the Eighteenth Century, Part I (London, 1970), p. 270 fn.Google ScholarMiller, Cf., Des institutions agraires de la Russie centrale, p. 208.Google Scholar

51 Revealing in this context is Weulersse's remark that it was the large landowners who opposed the partition of mushā' lands in the Ghab under the French Mandate (Paysans de Syrie et du Proche-Orient, p. 107).Google Scholar Gabriel Baer senses a connection between the origin of the mushā' and the tax burden (Population and Society in the Arab East (London, 1964), pp. 148–49). Albert Hourani concurs in the hypothesis formulated here with respect to Palestine but adds: “My only doubt is whether it would apply equally to all situations in which we find this system… In Upper Egypt I would tend to explain it… by the fact that the Nile flood varied every year and therefore the land area which could be cultivated each year was different … in order to survive the peasants had to have some kind of an arrangement by which the land available in any one year could be divided among them in a more or less equitable way…” (Personal communication, April 3, 1974). This may not square with Lancret's stress on the shortage of cultivators (see footnote 15); but then Lancret wrote at a particularly difficult time when population may well have hit a low.Google Scholar

52 The villagers of ' Arrābeh recount with pride that they were a hard nut to crack for tax collectors. Wilson, Cf., Peasant Life in the Holy Land, p. 293. Incidentally, successful resistance to external exactions did not mean equity within the village. The powerful local clans or families around which the resistance crystallized in 'Arrābeh later progressively restricted landholding within the village to their allies and retainers; some of their political opponents, forced to shift for themselves, then moved to satellite land-equalizing settlements where impositions were controlled by the powerful families of the dominant village; others were expelled from the area.Google Scholar

53 Barth, Cf. Fredrik, Nomads of South Persia: The Basseri Tribe of the Khamseh Confederacy (London, 1961), pp. 108–09.Google Scholar

54 Volney, , Voyage en Egypte et en Syrie (Paris, 1959 edition), pp. 54–55;Google ScholarTresse, R., Le pélerinage syrien aux villes saintes de l'Islam (Paris, 1937), pp. 95–96.Google Scholar

55 See Nimr, , Tárīkh Jabal Nāblus wál Balqá, vol. 2, p. 75.Google Scholar The information was checked for northern Samaria with Hājj Muhajj Qā sem Hājj Muhammad Qāsem 'Abdul Hājj of Nablus. Balden-sperger has 28 plowing days (Quarterly Statement, 1906, p. 194). The valuable table of operational labor requirements in Elazari-Volcani, (The Fellah's Farm, p. 19) bears out the number of days for the plowing proper—to cover the seeds at sowing time—but shows that an additional day or so per hectare was required earlier in the season for the opening of furrows to take in the rain. Since the furrows were 20 centimeters apart (p. 17) the amount of time needed would seem to be more like two days per hectare; but as the operation took place before the heavy rains, (in November-December) it would normally have been carried out prior to the 30 days available after the first heavy rain. Similar considerations apply to the plowing and preparation of the land for summer crops.Google Scholar

56 For yield ratios in ‘Arrābeh under the Mandate, see Firestone, , “Crop-Sharing Economics,” Part II, Middle Eastern Studies, 11 (05 1975), pp. 179–81.Google Scholar

57 In his calculations along these lines, Chayanov estimates that Russian peasant children consumed 0.3 as much as male adults from the ages of 2 through 7, and 0.5 as much from ages 8 through 13 (Chayanov, A. V., The Theory of Peasant Economy, eds. Thorner, , Kerblay, , and Smith, (Homewood, Illinois, 1966), p. 58).Google Scholar For the normal surplus see Chap. 4 of Allan, W., The African Husbandman (London, 1965),Google Scholar reprinted in Dalton, George, ed., Economic Development and Social Change: The Modernization of Village Communities (Garden City, New York, 1971), pp. 88–98.Google Scholar

58 This schematic illustration is intended to bring out the bias of the dhukūr method; allocations are not likely to have assumed such extreme proportions in reality, because of the patent waste and inequity involved and the lack of any relation between taxes and the actual product. Land allocations as well as exactions were of course a practical matter not likely to fit perfectly into rigid schedules.Google Scholar

59 Cf. the list of such villages for the Tulkarm Sub-District under the Mandate in Granott, The Land System in Palestine, p. 227.Google Scholar