In May 1905, the Baghdad seniye lands commission submitted a 23-page report describing a conspiracy involving tribal shaykhs, merchants from the Tigris city of ‘Amara, and several local officials. According to the testimonies they collected, ‘Abd al-Qadir al-Khudayri, the wealthiest merchant in ‘Amara, had coordinated 6000 lira in bribes to local officials in order to secure the tax farm (iltizam) contract for the Majar al-Saghir mukataa for Sayhud, the paramount shaykh of the Al bu Muhammad. Sayhud, a powerful rebel and sometime-bandit, was not supposed to be given iltizam contracts. In fact, in accordance with the new Ottoman policy for Iraq, iltizams were supposed to be preferentially distributed to local cultivators on the basis of “chain guarantees,” whereby cultivators provided insurance for one another. Instead, the contract was given to Sayhud under a “false name” (nam-i mustear), and secured with a “strong” guarantee (kefalet-i kaviyye) – a mortgage on the property of his guarantor. It later turned out that as in many other cases, the mortgaged property had been wildly overvalued, and the guarantor was one of Sayhud’s underlings. While this case was unusually complicated, the basic pattern was not unusual. In particular, the use of false names and the overvaluation of mortgaged properties were common tactics for tax farmers – often tribal shaykhs – and their guarantors – often urban merchants – to accommodate an Ottoman legal landscape designed to prevent fraud, guarantee revenue, and deliver land to the cultivator. This paper will argue that new regulations around tax farms actually created more opportunities for new kinds of fraud. In addition, they incentivized the creation of financial networks involving shaykhs and merchants. ‘Abd al-Qadir Khudayri had previously acted as a guarantor for Sayhud in another large-scale operation that ended with both men in temporary exile – but before that, Khudayri used their partnership in Sayhud’s tax farms to completely monopolize the Tigris grain trade. That both men returned to ‘Amara and to their former behavior suggests that this kind of fraud remained both possible and profitable over several decades. Focusing on the relationship between Sayhud and Khudayri, this paper argues that Ottoman regulation of tax farm auctions in Basra province created new financial arrangements around land - and new possibilities for wealthy investors to cement their control of agricultural lands and trade.

This paper analyzes the implementation of the Mecelle (Ottoman civil law code) and other codified laws governing tax farming, debt contracts and property relations in Ottoman Nizamiye courts.  The promulgation of these laws and their implementation in new courts embodied Ottoman lawmakers’ attempts to transform expanding rural credit markets into a revenue source and re-organize taxation in the context of the global fiscal crises of the 1870s. The paper conceptualizes the production and implementation of Ottoman law codes as part of a broader economy-making project through which lawmakers tried to more closely monitor and govern the movement of capital within and across the empire’s borders. These attempts occurred in a global crisis context of elite capital accumulation, increasing inequality, and intense interstate competition. Alongside law codes and commentaries, the paper uses civil (hukuki) Nizamiye court records from the Eastern Mediterranean districts of Homs and Kisrawan. It focuses on disputes over rent and credit contracts between cultivators and tax farming investors on the one hand, and disputes over debt contracts between tax farmers and government collection agencies on the other.  The paper compares cases from courts in different administrative jurisdictions (the province of Syria vs. the special district of Mount Lebanon) that adjudicated disputes involving different temporal and ecological patterns of production (interior grain-producing plains vs. coastal horticulture-focused hills).  Disputes in both settings revolved around guarantee requirements for debt, the practices and parameters of charging interest, and the form and verification of contracts. The paper shows how the Nizamiye courts’ practice of referring exclusively to codified Islamic legal categories and requirements for guarantee, interest and contract created a shared language for the empire’s diverse credit ecosystems. At the same time, ongoing and widespread practices of concluding and adjudicating disputes over debt contracts in both Sharia courts and extra-court settings contested this process of standardization. I argue that these contestations contributed to defining the meaning of newly codified and generalized legal categories for governing public and private credit relationships that endured in the twentieth-century contexts of French and national sovereignty in the Eastern Mediterranean. This was partly due to the continued enforcement of Ottoman civil law in Lebanon until the 1930s and in Syria until the late 1940s.  However, it was also related to the foundational moment of Ottoman economy-making in which the terms of diverse regional credit markets became expressed through the language of legal categories standardized across the empire.

This paper examines efforts by the Ottoman state to centralize and institutionalize access to credit in rural areas of the empire, appropriating for a state institution a more substantial role in rural moneylending. In particular, it focuses on the changing legal frameworks that governed the operations of the Ottoman Agricultural Bank during the last decades of the empire and assesses the challenges the bank faced in implementing its policies in rural credit markets. Prior to the creation of the Agricultural Bank in 1888, rural credit had primarily been the purview of private (typically urban) moneylenders. The Agricultural Bank, in contrast, was a state institution with capital derived from a local tax. Albeit conceptualized as an institution that would specialize in loaning to farmers to facilitate more capital-intensive agriculture, the bank’s resources were often diverted to finance a myriad of projects only tangentially related to agricultural production. Collecting the monies allotted for its capital or reconciling its lending policies to local land tenure practices proved challenging. Notably, in lending to rural communities, the Bank confronted the issue of how best to secure and maximize loans that used land or, more precisely, usufruct rights to land as collateral. Chain guarantees offered one option. But land held in shares posed a particular conundrum to administrators seeking to maximize the rights to land that were legible to capital investment. Furthermore, as demand for the bank’s capital outstripped its supply, the government turned to foreign sources for additional funds. Given the rights to land used as collateral and their alienability under the Agricultural Bank’s statutes, these new sources of capital raised questions of sovereignty for the Ottoman government. The historiography has tended to emphasize the Ottoman Empire’s loss of economic sovereignty as a result of the creation of the Public Debt Administration or has focused on the activities of the foreign-capitalized Imperial Ottoman Bank. Examining the evolving statutes regulating the Agricultural Bank and Ottoman archival documents concerning its operations in the provinces of Syria, Aleppo, and Beirut provides another perspective on capital circulation in the empire. I argue that not only was it an institution through which the central state sought to exert greater control over rural credit markets, but also one through which the empire asserted its sovereignty vis-à-vis the encroachments of foreign capital while also experimenting with loan policies aimed at maximizing the legibility of value embedded in existing landholding practices.