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Thus Ibn Hadhdhal of I’niza bedouin tribe acquired gardens and land on the Upper Euphrates, Farhan of the Shammar Jarba was granted a tapu sanad (property title) on part of the tribal dirah of Shammar at Shirgat, the Sheikh of Cha’ab was granted land on the Shatt-al-Arab. In Muntafig, Madhat Pasha authorized Nasir Pasha al-Sa’dun, his nominee chieftain of the tribal confederation of al-Muntafig, whom he had appointed as liwa governor (Mutasarrif) of the district to have the major part of the tribal land of the Muntafig Confederation registered in his name and in the names of various members of his family; and granted large estates to his Christian clerk Naoum Serkis, to his Jewish banker Mr.

27 The eastern part of Iraqi Kurdistan had to wait until around the 1830s for the Ottoman-Persian wars to end in order that its land structure take its final shape. But even before that, tribal ties assured that Aghas (Kurdish chiefs of tribes) would subjugate their tribe members or non-tribal Kurds to semi-serf conditions. Clauclius Rich cites a Mahmoud Agha from the war-tom Sulaimaniyya province as saying: “The want of security in our possession is the sole ruin of the country. While we tribesmen are not sure of holding our estates, we never will addict ourselves to agriculture; and until we do, the country can never prosper.

It seems that this form, which could be conceivably viewed as largeestate formation par excellence, only held in relatively secure areas. Thus in the case of Damascus and its valley region a number of families received several villages as ma/ikane and held them for several generations (Gerber 1987: 54). But apart from Damascus, landlordism was an entrenched’phenomenon in the Hamah region north of Damascus even in the early nineteenth century. In 1834, the Russian traveler Peotr Lvov described Syrian peasants as “semi-slaves” who had to pay landowners most of their produce in exchange for the right to use the land (Lvov 1993: 288).