Imagined Empires by Zeinab Abul-Magd

Author:Zeinab Abul-Magd
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780520275522
Publisher: University of California Press

PRIVATE PROPERTY, LOSING PROPERTY

The second pillar of the alleged market modernity that Qina Province encountered was the reformed law of private property in agricultural land. The advent of these modern codes in the province only helped elites to win property rights, while peasants lost them. The codes expanded the propertied class in Qina to include Turkish and native government bureaucrats, Europeans, Coptic agents of European consuls, village notables, and shari‘a law scholars. These beneficiaries accumulated vast plantations at the expense of thousands of dispossessed peasants, who were in the process turned into seasonal laborers on these plantations. The village of Salimiyya, where the 1864 revolt later erupted, fell under the grip of many prominent members of the growing propertied class.

Sa‘id Pasha promulgated the new land code of 1858, presenting it as a great step toward the country’s modernization. Before this law, the lands of all villages were theoretically the property of the state. After Muhammad ‘Ali died, and under the idle, decentralized regime of his grandson ‘Abbas Pasha, provincial bureaucrats seized state-owned lands from peasants and grew as a new class of large landowners.24 Sa‘id’s law, known as al-La’iha al-Sa‘idiyya, was the product of internal pressures by provincial bureaucrats and village notables to consolidate and legalize their properties, coupled with the empire’s advocacy of private property as a sign of modernity.25 In drafting the new law, Sa‘id Pasha, in fact, consulted with the governors of Upper and Lower Egypt and with high-ranking bureaucrats, who were mainly interested in consolidating their new properties. The law was finally issued, regulating ownership of three main categories of land: kharajiya, or common peasants’ land; ab‘adiyya plantations, or the previously uncultivated state-owned land leased to government officials for reclamation at a reduced tax rate; and ‘uhda plantations, or land that the state confiscated from runaway peasants who had fled after failing to pay taxes or to escape corvée labor.

The new legal code finally granted the bureaucrats absolute property rights to the ab‘adiyya plantations. It also opened the door for sales of more of those plantations to government officials, Europeans, and whoever could reclaim them and pay taxes on them. Public auctions were held all year in Qina Province to lease or sell ab‘adiyya plantations, and bureaucrats won thousands of acres by outbidding peasants. In one auction in the village of Salimiyya, the governor of Qina won a plantation of about two hundred acres. Some peasants in the village bid against him, claiming that this land was originally theirs, but they lost the auction to the influential governor.26 More important, the new law gave bureaucrats and village shaykhs property rights to the ‘uhda state-owned plantations seized from runaway peasants. It decreed that if a peasant was proved absent from his land for three years, he would lose his property rights, and whoever held and cultivated it for five years would gain the right to keep it. Peasants returned to their villages to find their lands confiscated and registered under other people’s names, usually state officials. Whole

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