Land and Legal Texts in the Early Modern Ottoman Empire

Rezensionen / Stimmen

This book's analysis of legal texts, harmonization of Islamic and Ottoman laws, and the sultan's sovereignty surely contributes to our deep understanding of Islamic finance and land systems in the modern era. * Turcica * In Land and Legal Texts, the reader finds a sophisticated example of next-generation research in Ottoman legal history on a well-defined topic. * Journal of Islamic Studies * A mind-blowing and innovative study of the supposedly dry subject of Ottoman land law, gracefully written and designed to overturn all your stereotypes of Islamic law, sultanic power, and Ottoman decline. Taylor is to be congratulated on her deeply original take on obscure but vitally important aspects of imperial legal modernization. * Linda T. Darling, Professor, University of Arizona, USA * This book shows how three centuries of legislation and legal interpretation, instead of a European model, underlay the Ottoman land code of 1858. Deeply researched and cogently argued, it upends much that we thought we knew about Ottoman history from the age of Sueleyman to the Tanzimat era. * Kenneth M. Cuno, Professor, University of Illinois, USA * Taylor boldly reinterprets the foundational relationship among land/property rights, law/legal authorities and sovereignty in the Ottoman Empire. This ambitious, lucid and compact study recasts peasant cultivators as holding a "bundle of property rights" that slowly "trickled up" to model property rights among the highest-ranking property holders in the empire by the eighteenth century, enduring through land law reforms in the nineteenth. Whether accepted or challenged, Taylor's reconceptualization of the Ottoman agrarian state and society offers a fulcrum for rethinking the entire history of the empire. * Amy Singer, Professor, Brandeis University, USA *