Regulating land rights in late nineteenth-century salt: The limits of legal pluralism in Ottoman property law

Abstract

This article examines the relationship between different district-level decision-making bodies in the late nineteenth-century Ottoman context. Using Sharia court records and property registers produced in the rural Syrian district of Salt as well as investigations from the district that reached Istanbul, it explores the roles and personnel of various courts and bureaucratic offices involved in allocating rights to landed property and settling disputes over land. The article aims to add nuance to recent characterizations of the late Ottoman legal system as pluralistic by exploring the complexities of litigant experience, particularly the practice of forum shopping. It finds that while state-sanctioned forum shopping in the realm of property law in Salt was limited, litigants did benefit from the Sharia court's acceptance of debt claims to obtain official mention of mortgages contracted outside the property administration's purview on an extra-state land market. The article argues that this market constituted a challenge to the state's attempts to survey and tax every piece of land in the district rather than state-sanctioned legal pluralism. Forum shopping also occurred in a context of bureaucratic expansion, with litigants' experience of and participation in Ottoman governance becoming more intensive through practices of land surveying, registration and taxation.