From the 1880s onwards, emlâk-i hümayûn became a legal category that designated the lands Sultan Abdülhamid II (r. 1876-1909) acquired as his personal private property under the Privy Purse. Although the concept of emlâk-i hümayûn predated enthronement of Sultan Abdülhamid II, Hamidian officials relied on this legal category to build an imperial policy across Ottoman domains and establish administrative institutions. This property regime associated with emlâk-i hümayûn sought to protect Ottoman sovereignty and to provide revenue for the Privy Purse -- among other reasons. While scholars of the Ottoman Empire produced extensive scholarship on the legal text of the 1858 Land Code and its implementation in the provinces, studies on the legal framework of Abdülhamid II’s property ownership or the administration of these properties remain very limited. This paper will first explore the kinds of properties that the category of emlâk-i hümayûn encompassed by focusing on the revenues registered in the Privy Purse budgets in the Hamidian period. Thereby, I will shed light on the meaning of this legal category through which Abdülhamid II built a property regime. Second, I will demonstrate that Abdülhamid II not only sought to collect revenues from landed estates with agrarian production, but the Sultan, in his capacity as a private entrepreneur, also aimed to empower himself from mineral extraction, animal breeding, and even industrial production. Furthermore, no scholar to date fully explored the financial repercussions of this property regime. To shed light on this invisible income that Abdülhamid II accrued under the Privy Purse, this paper will present a study of budgets of the Privy Purse. I will discuss the revenues that Abdülhamid II accrued from emlâk-i hümayûn for financial years between 1880/1881 and 1905/1906, which are absent from state budgets. Through a comparison of state and emlâk-i hümayûn revenues during the Hamidian period, I will demonstrate that this property regime associated with Sultan Abdülhamid II was the cornerstone of Hamidian rule.

In 1947, Paul de Lesseps, the son of the French developer behind the Suez Canal, was sentenced to prison time for a sensational allegation: that he had offered an agricultural estate in Turkey to the Nazis for use as an airbase in the Eastern Mediterranean. Among the bizarre details of the story was the very notion that he held any claim to the land in the first place; it had only briefly fallen under French rule during the short-lived occupation of Cilicia decades earlier. But in fact, the fallen aristocrat was simply trying to recover losses of a business venture that had begun during the late Ottoman period, when the Committee of Union and Progress granted him a decades-long lease for the estate in the Çukurova lowlands. Before that, the land had belonged to an even more prestigious owner: the recently deposed Ottoman Sultan Abdulhamid II himself. The circumstances by which Abdulhamid and his successors came into possession of this estate can only be understood within the context of an environmental imaginary linking cultivation and progress that prevailed during the late 19th century, sometimes sparking state intervention in the countryside of places like Çukurova. This paper situates the history of the Çukurova Imperial Farm from the late Ottoman period onward within the larger context of the empire’s environmental transformation. The uncultivated lowlands in the Province of Adana emerged as a center of capitalist development and cotton export during the latter half of the 19th century. Yet in contrast with most of the large farms in the region during that period, the Çukurova Imperial Farm was not created with a solely market-driven mentality. Rather, it was the prospect of the very transformation of the land itself--and by extension the people--that initially inspired the creation of this large government estate that nearly became a French colonial plantation. In this paper, I examine the history of the Çukurova Imperial Farm as a vessel for the environmental imaginaries of state and commercial actors over many decades, and I attempt to identify what if any tangible relationship these imaginaries had with what played out on its fertile, swampy ground.

During the nineteenth century, Abdulhamid II targeted the Iraqi provinces for extensive agrarian development projects -- a development informed by an environmental imaginary of undoing the region's supposed ecological decline over several centuries and promoting agrarian development. The Privy Purse Ministry oversaw many of these projects, since much of the land in the Iraqi provinces belonged to Abdulhamid II’s landed estate. The sultan put these lands under the care of the Privy Purse Ministry to prevent them from being taken over by foreign governments, particularly Britain. It is thus a curious fact that the Ottoman government began relying heavily on French hydraulic engineers to carry out these projects. Even more curious is the fact that it did so at a time when the Ottoman government began relying on its own technocrats for several modernization projects across the empire. This paper, thus, examines the hitherto unexplored role of French influence in Iraq during the late nineteenth century and examines what this development reveals about the late Hamidian period, French informal empire, Ottoman environmental imaginaries of Iraq, and the geopolitical factors shaping Hamidian policy in the Iraq region.

In the nineteenth century, the Ottoman Empire contended with a myriad of challenges to its fiscal sovereignty and solvency, including encroachments on various financial assets, territorial losses, and unfavorable trade policies. To mitigate these challenges, the empire sought ways to carve out spheres of financial sovereignty and sources of revenue that would be independent of obligations to foreign powers while simultaneously mediating or preventing attempts by foreign concerns to intrude on Ottoman resources. The Sultan’s Privy Purse was one of the institutions that attempted to fulfill this objective. After suppressing the first Ottoman constitution in 1878, in 1879 Abdülhamid turned to substantially expanding the holdings of his Privy Purse, established initially in the 1850s to maintain the sultan’s properties. Often involving resources whose development required considerable capital outlay and a capacity to sustain losses, but promised substantial revenues if these efforts were successful, those who agreed to exploit these properties received special concessions, while substantial sums were lavished on making them productive using the latest technologies. In Aleppo, one of the main resources incorporated into the Privy Purse were lands in the province’s east and southeast that lay in areas along the fluctuating boundary between cultivated and pasture lands. In the aftermath of territorial losses in the Balkans, it seems likely such resources were viewed as crucial to making up lost revenue. This paper focuses on the acquisition and administration of these lands. By examining the socioeconomic and ecological ramifications of these efforts to shore up imperial finances, the paper argues that in addition to expanding the Privy Purse’s resources, acquiring these lands provided a means for the state to appropriate a source of provincial elite capital accumulation, while transforming the desert borderlands with the assistance of rural communities. The paper also considers the repercussions of the reversion of these lands to state control after the CUP revolution. Lands with a similar status in Egypt, such as Khedive Isma‘il’s Daira Sanieh, have been extensively studied, but work on such properties in the empire’s European and Asian provinces are only now beginning to emerge. Using documents from the Privy Purse’s administration in the Ottoman archives, the paper examines the role of this property regime in Aleppo and its contribution to Ottoman efforts to carve out spheres of fiscal independence even as it also provided a mechanism to disrupt elite capital accumulation and intervene in rural communities and borderland environments.