Legitimizing Private Land Ownership in the Ottoman Empire: State Policy vs Economic Thought

Sule Gunduz and M. Erdem Ozgur
Additional contact information
Sule Gunduz: Dokuz Eylul University, Faculty of Business, Department of Economics, Izmir, Turkey
M. Erdem Ozgur: Dokuz Eylul University, Faculty of Business, Department of Economics, Izmir, Turkey

Economic Alternatives, 2023, issue 1, 70-88

Abstract: In the second half of the nineteenth century, the ideas of both the liberals and the German Historical School (laissez-faire vs. protectionism) began to find an increasingly receptive audience in the Ottoman Empire. This was accompanied by a radical change in the approach to the concept of private land ownership. This article aims at discovering traces of this change in the economic literature produced by Ottoman political economists and social thinkers of the second half of the nineteenth century. The otherwise contrasting approaches of liberal writers, such as Serandi Arsizen (Sarantis Archigenes), Sak?zl? Ohannes Efendi and Mehmet Cavid Bey, on the one hand, and of the protectionist writers, such as Ahmet Mithat Efendi and Musa Akyigitzade, who were inspired more by the German Historical School (and by Friedrich List, in particular), on the other, are examined in order to display similar perceptions of private land ownership in Ottoman economic thought. State-induced private propertization of land received strong support from Ottoman intellectuals from different schools of thought, and the inviolability of property rights in land is considered sine qua non for economic development.

Keywords: economic development; property; 19th century; the Ottoman Empire; land (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: B19 N53 N55 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.unwe.bg/doi/eajournal/2023.1/EA.2023.1.04.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nwe:eajour:y:2023:i:1:p:70-88

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Economic Alternatives from University of National and World Economy, Sofia, Bulgaria Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Vanya Lazarova ().