Conclusion
To conclude, comparing English and Ottoman property rights regimes undercuts the still common association, at least within social science though not among Ottomanists, between a “sultanic,” nonconstitutional regime and the lack of property rights.
Neither property rights in general nor conditionality in particular suffice to explain representation. The comparison establishes how similar the conditional character of property rights was in the two cases, stemming from the common foundation of state control of land. Manifold differences exist, only some of which can be covered in an overview such as this. But on some key dimensions, for instance, alienation, heritability, and court enforcement of rights, Ottoman rights emerged as highly similar, even stronger de jure at points. And tιmars demonstrate the stronger bureaucratic character of the early regime, not its arbitrariness.Further, the comparison of vakιfs to English uses and trusts similarly suggests that their effects were a function of royal power. A book on representative origins in the West cannot cover the full range of factors enabling or inhibiting such legal instruments. But it can suggest that if vakιfs did hamper economic development and thereby possibly
constitutional practices, such effects were endogenous to weak state capacity. Some of the key inefficiencies typically ascribed to “overstretched and authoritarian states”145 resulted from the underlying weakness in enforcing property rights. Vakifs prevailed in the Ottoman Empire because the state lacked the relative power to delimit them. Given their profoundly important social role, of course, it is not clear it would necessarily have wished to. By contrast, the English economic trajectory, though far from smooth, veered in a more “efficient” direction because state action, and especially regulation, prevented extensive loss of jurisdiction over productive assets in the economy. The state was often able to drastically intervene and curtail economic rights where expedient and therefore preserved better its fiscal capacity, as both the Dissolution of the Monasteries and the Enclosures146 suggest. Even during periods of fiscal weakness, it still performed better than the Ottoman state. In any case, during periods of “backsliding” in these dimensions, as especially under the Stuarts, constitutionalism faltered too. As I argue in the Conclusion, if the aristocracy had failed to preserve its power base in the ensuing centuries, voting reform may have even happened earlier. Next, we turn to another non-Western case that displayed similar patterns of conditionality but different political outcomes, Russia.
145
Kuran 2001, 844.
146
See Chapter 9.
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