Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
are listed also under the names of kürek ¡ i
or orta ¡ . Once recorded as čeltük ¡ i in the
surveys, neither these labourers nor their
offspring could change their status. They
are also included under similar groups
which served in the mines, in the salt-beds
or as guardians of the mountain passes in
return for exemption from certain taxes,
principally the awāri-i dīwāniyya or extra-
ordinary impositions. In other words, they
constituted a labour force under the direct
control of the state. In the province of
Anatolia alone, one-seventh of the popu-
lation was included in this tax-exempt
category. The condition of a čeltük ¡ i was
quite onerous, since apart from the hard-
ships borne by him in irrigating and culti-
vating the rice, he had to surrender half of
his production to the state treasury. The
seed was supplied by the state and taken
back at the time of harvest. State propri-
etorship of water channels was considered
to be the justification for the exploitation
of their labour. This organisation seems
to have reached its final form in a later
period in the Ottoman empire, since in
the early records labourers in rice culti-
vation were often state-owned slaves, the
āa orta ¡ . In the eastern provinces,
forced labour was imposed upon the reāyā
household to work in the rice fields and
repair canals for a fixed number of days
every year (usually three or four days).
This practice, apparently retained from
pre-Ottoman times, caused widespread
discontent among the reāyā , free peas-
ants. Upon the complaint of the Chris-
tian reāyā in the province of Trebizond
and in other places against such corvées
( sal un ), the Ottomans introduced the
system of registered čeltük ¡ i or kürek ¡ i as
described above. In need of labour forces
for extended rice fields in the marginal
lands, as in Cicilia or in the lowlands of
the Aegean or Pamphylian plains, the
state also tried to use the labour of tribal
so that the real object of possession or
assignment was not so much the land but
rather the use of the water. In the surveys,
the possession or assignment of the ar
> ar or nahr , the channel for irrigation,
was granted by the government to indi-
viduals as mulk or tīmār . Often the pos-
session of a ar determined who would
possess a certain land. Since the water
was distributed in limited quantities, the
government strictly regulated the amount
of rice seed to be planted, and it recorded
in the survey topics the amount for each
ar . Many channels for the irrigation
of rice paddies, anhār-i čeltük ( čeltik ), were
named either after the person responsible
for their opening or after their possessors.
Because of the unusually large consump-
tion of rice, the Ottomans encouraged
from the beginning the extension of rice
growing, either by establishing direct gov-
ernment control over watercourses, or by
granting possession or proprietorship of
waste ( mawāt ) lands, particularly in the
flooded areas.
Rice-growing was introduced or
extended in the lands conquered by sub-
sequent Ottoman sultans. In his efforts
to expand state revenues, Meemmed II
greatly extended rice cultivation in the
Balkans and took under the direct con-
trol of the central treasury most of the
rice-growing lands in Rumeli as well as
in Anatolia. Despite his general policy of
returning lands seized under his father,
Bāyazīd II did not completely relinquish
state control over such rice-growing lands.
In extending the area of rice cultivation,
which involved primarily the construction
of irrigation works, there were two main
methods: state enterprise and private ini-
tiative. In order to create state rice fields,
the government assigned a group of ordi-
nary reāyā to a permanent status as āa
čeltük ¡ i ( čeltik ¡ i ), labourers of the sultan on
the state's rice fields. In the surveys, they
Search WWH ::




Custom Search