| Before I proceed to discuss these two types of situation, I wish first to stress a relevant truism, and secondly, to summarise the local inheritance system. First, economic power (a publicly accepted right to a relatively large share of the community's resources) and political power (the ability, publicly accepted or not, to get other people to do what one wants them to do) are closely related. The one generates the other, and no one can hold one without some of the other. In small scale traditional, relatively autonomous communities such as those of much of the rural Middle East, this relation is closer than in a modern western state where economic rights can be enforced by invoking the power of the State, and direct political rights over other people are limited by effectively enforced legal and constitutional restrictions. Inheritance in the villages is always said by informants to follow a simple egalitarian principle - equal division of a man's possessions between his sons. This simple system is not of course in conformity either with the Sharia, which the villages still profess in general terms to follow, nor with the Turkish Civil Code, which is borrowed directly from the Swiss Civil Code. In straightforward cases, the rights of widows and daughters are in fact commonly ignored, and the patrimonial land divided between sons. Where, as is also common, complications and disputes arise, a surviving widow may perhaps take a share, and so may sisters or sisters' children.(8) Even then, the share may be agreed ad hoc, and not as laid down in any code. I am confident that, at the moment, the villagers are moving towards an increasing invocation of formal law, and in particular inheritance by and through women, and away from a traditional state in which land normally passed only to male agnates. But women's formal rights are still, I would say, ignored more often than not. I was at first surprised to be told repeatedly that one did not, or should not expect to acquire land through one's wife, and though these statements were not always disingenuous, they at least reflected a feeling that to marry for land was not a respectable or a sensible gambit. In what follows, I assume an equal division of property between sons. That this does not always happen does not greatly affect the argument, since if other kin sometimes take a share too, the consequences of the division of holdings would be intensified rather than diminished. Type I. Surplus of land In this situation, anyone who is able and who wishes, is permitted to plough village land. He must of course be a member of the village, he must have the necessary time and energy, or someone else to work on his behalf, and he must own or be able to borrow oxen, a plough and seed. The amount of land a man can plough with the traditional equipment in the Anatolian |
| climate is limited. Ploughing takes place, either in the autumn after the rains have begun, and before the frost and snow, or after the thaw and before the end of the cool, wet spring weather. Both periods are apt to be very short, especially the spring period. The villagers say that one man with a good pair of oxen can plough about 20 donum (very roughly 40 decares, 10 acres) a year. Clearly the quality of the ground, the weather, the strength of the oxen, the health and industry of the farmer and the size of the donum all influence the actual amount. But there is an upper limit; a household can only work roughly 20 donum a year for each working male of the household. In fact, the household owns twice this amount of land, because the villages operate a two- year fallow system. Half the village territory is cropped each year, and the other used for pasture for the animals. No man can defy this system, since his crops would be eaten by the animals. A man may leave land for three or five years or longer, either because he lacks labour or resources, or because the land is poor. But the fallow period must be an odd number of years. Nowadays, even the poor households expect to market some of their crops each year to the government buying agency. But in the past they do not seem as a normal practice to have grown cash crops. Transport to town was difficult and slow, and probably, for the small man on his own, dangerous - he would be robbed on the way or cheated when he got there. If the year was good, there would be little or no market in the local towns, which had large agricultural populations of their own, and fertile suburban villages; and if the crop was poor, he would have nothing to market. Some grain was very probably bartered direct with pedlars in the villages, for such things as tools, clothes, sugar and coffee and so on, and according to one informant surpluses could be sold to the tax farmer. Probably only leading figures in a village ever took the trouble themselves to take grain to market to sell for cash on any considerable scale. In these conditions, most villagers almost certainly did not make any great efforts to farm more than enough land to meet their foreseeable requirements. As a household grows with the birth of sons, its needs and its manpower grow also. The household head takes over more land, which his sons plough for him. With more manpower and gun power his household becomes more important. The household income per capita will also increase, partly because the young men have few if any children of their own to support, partly because the co-ordination of several workers and several teams of oxen increases efficiency. The household head can run a guest room, provide hospitality, and acquire supporters. His household reaches a peak of wealth and power. But when he dies and the household's land is divided, each son will receive roughly as much as one man can plough. In most cases, each heir will have to face the period of early married life with young dependent children on his own, and he is unlikely to count for much personally in the village. He will be unable to produce much surplus, nor will he need to do so. Only those who succeed in begetting and bringing up a number of sons will in turn become |
| heads of important village households, and on their death, these will again divide into small and unimportant ones. Thus there is a tendency for the sons of large and powerful households to start roughly equal with the sons of more modest households. A father's importance is less relevant to the importance of descendants than their own hard work, health, fertility and luck. Clearly, such a model is oversimplified. Many factors influenced the way the system worked; I would like to discuss four obvious ones. First, land is not by any means all of the same value, and valuable land is never a free good. Some village land is likely to be irrigated. How much, is highly variable. Irrigation apart, land near the village is more easily worked, and gets the benefit of manure from ash, refuse and latrines. In persistently prolific lineages, the amount of this good land per household will tend to diminish through fragmentation. On the other hand, in the days before rapid expansion of the population many households and branches of lineages died out, or produced only daughters, who would transfer the land to other households and lineages. Holdings of this more valuable land would therefore vary greatly, and fortuitously; and thus young households do not in fact start equal. Secondly, every village must have contained some men who did not own any oxen, and who could thus work no land, and for the most part probably owned none. Such unfortunates must have had great difficulty in raising credit to acquire the oxen necessary to taking over land for ploughing. They formed the lowest rung of village society, and supplied the watchmen and herdsmen, extra labour at the harvest, and - but this looks forward to my fourth point - extra workers for more successful neighbours. Thirdly, many villagers own sheep, and a few own considerable flocks. But in this area it is impossible for sheep to survive the winter without shelter and fodder. The size of the flock is therefore limited by the amount of straw available for winter feed, and is thus directly related to the annual crop, and thus to the size of the household labour force. The fourth factor is far more disturbing to the model I have set up. Success once achieved breeds success, and economic and political power grow together. A man with a large household can employ labourers from among those without oxen, or from destitute strangers. Some labourers lived entirely in their master's household as servants; others were hired on a short term or even day to day basis. Hired labour enables the employer to increase his holdings of land beyond the capacity of his own sons, and increased holdings allow him to feed more retainers, and to establish direct political control over his co- villagers. He will be in a position to establish direct social relations with townsmen and officials, to market grain, and to mediate between government and less successful co- villagers. Eventually he may extend his influence to villages other than his own. The difficulties in this kind of empire building must have been considerable. In the first |
| place, a man had to have rare good fortune to achieve a large successful household equipped with sons early enough in life to have vigour and time left to increase the empire. Secondly, his fellow villagers and even his own agnates would cease to wish him well at the point at which their own personal interests appeared to be threatened. As for the expansion of influence beyond his village, this would depend on firm control over his own village, enabling him to count on acquiescence and support. Thirdly, other political leaders in the area - officials, large landholders in the local town, successful men in neighbouring villages and so on - would be unwilling to see their own spheres invaded, or their own power threatened. To steer between the opposition in his own village and the hostile suspicion of outside powers must have required great skill and great good fortune. But undoubtedly it did occasionally happen. I knew one man, Karabey of Elbasi, who had actually attained such a position, though in rather unusual circumstances. He was said to have owned over a thousand donum. (Probably in this case a thousand decare, or 250 acres.)(9) Even in Sakaltutan, some twenty miles away, he was said 'to hold the countryside in his hand'. I was told he had been a personal friend of Ataturk, and probably his power dated back to the troubled days of the nineteen-twenties following the War of Independence. Most of the land he owned lay outside the borders of his own village, in a broad irrigated valley, and had formerly belonged to a large Christian village which had been evacuated at the time of the exchange of population with Greece which began in 1923 . He had owned a tractor and a combine harvester long before these things were common in Turkey, and had taken the harvester annually for hire to Adana, south of the Taurus mountains, where the harvest is much earlier than on the plateau. Even men like this usually build their strength on many sons. And as they grow wealthier, they would seek to increase the number of their wives in order to have yet more sons. In 1951 and 1952, the estate of Karabey was in dispute between his heirs; three widows, out of six wives, and eight children and grandchildren were staking claims. No one son could expect to succeed to his position of informal dominance in the village. Thus even when a man broke through the inhibiting factors and established real power and importance, this power died with him personally. Each of his sons would start life in a comparatively modest household of his own. A son might have some advantages of prestige and wealth to give him an initial lead in the race, but he still needed time, luck and skill of his own to win eminence for himself . Type 2 Once a village reaches a point where spare cultivable land is no longer freely available, marginal land ceases to be a free good, and the opportunities for empire building are gone. Yet sons remain an asset. They are still a source of prestige and protection within the village, they can still help on the land, and they can earn by working in the village or by |