Conditionality of landholding has emerged as central to representative emergence across the cases examined in this book so far, from England to Hungary and Poland.

It generated the bottom-up demand that made parliament regular, since it endowed rulers with jurisdiction over dis­putes, as well as the obligation that sustained institutional interaction.

The question does not require a counterfactual to be answered; cases abound, as conditionality was widespread throughout the premodern world. Holding land conditionally from a ruler was typical of most pre­modern regimes - including the Ottoman Empire and Russia, examined in this and the following chapters. This has been obscured because scholars have focused instead on the specific concept of feudalism and have sharply distinguished its Western from its non-Western forms.^[1164] As we have seen, Western feudalism is taken to denote weak central powers, an association observed in the Continental European cases - though not England. So no connection has ever been established between land regimes in East and West. Instead, in the Eastern cases, ruler ownership of land is conceived as symptomatic of absolutism and inimical to the secure property rights believed to underlie the West.

The revision proposed in this book, however, suggests that existing polarities drawn in the literature fail to register some crucial commonal­ities. Focusing on conditionality uncovers some striking parallels between cases traditionally viewed as opposed, namely constitutional England and the “sultanic” Ottoman Empire. Once the powers of the English crown over the land regime are acknowledged, Ottoman property rights appear in a new light: below I argue they resembled English conditional tenure.

The main alternative would be land: some link must connect landed wealth to parliament, turning economic gains into legally protected rights, if the hypothesis holds. This is the approach for instance in North, Wallis, and Weingast’s exploration of the emergence of open political orders, where special attention is devoted to the English land law.^[1165] Their argument, however, also does not explain how these eco­nomic dynamics translated into specific institutions; courts are treated as given and Parliament makes only incidental appearances in their book. An implicit functionalism must serve to explain institutional outcomes.^[1166] If, however, similar property rights are observed in cases without representative institutions, they cannot suffice to explain those outcomes.

To show this, this chapter tackles Ottoman “sultanism” as a classic foil to Western constitutionalism to show fundamental similarities in prop­erty rights with the most constitutional regime in the West. The Ottoman Empire is a “hard case,” as it varies in religion, legal heritage, and cultural contact with the West more than any other case examined. Why, despite similar property rights regimes in England and the Ottoman Empire, institutional outcomes diverged is a question I address in Chapter 13, where the similarities with Russia are also explored.

Ever since Montesquieu, the Ottoman Empire’s apparent “lack” of property rights has made it an exemplary “sultanic” regime in the social scientific literature, the opposite of constitutional polities.^[1167] Sultanism, as Weber defined it, was an extreme form of patrimonialism, claiming not just “full personal powers” for the ruler but an “arbitrary free will free of traditional limitations,” thus leading to “fiscal arbitrariness.”^[1168] For soci­ologist Perry Anderson, its “economic bedrock... was the virtually com­plete absence of private property in land.”⁶ The Ottomanist Halil Inalcik invoked Persian Mirror-for-Princes literature that stipulated that the “land and the peasant belong to the sultan,” exemplifying Marx’s “Asiatic mode of production.”^[1169] The economist Timur Kuran qualified such readings by positing that property rights were not absent, only weak, in the Ottoman case.^[1170] Nonetheless, he still ascribed this weakness to the fact that the sultan could invoke the Islamic principle that “all property belongs to God” to engage in arbitrary confiscation.^[1171] Even in Karen Barkey’s revision­ist study, the lack of land ownership by the military elite prevented any ties between landholders and peasants, thus suppressing civil society.^[1172]

The “sultanic” nature of the Ottoman regime was already challenged in the eighteenth century and is now widely jettisoned as a stereotype by Ottomanists.^[1173] The Ottoman Empire is increasingly placed by a rich his­toriographical tradition in the context of early modern European polities.

In what follows, I first show how Ottoman and English laws involved similar conditional property rights to land by distinguishing between Hanafi and Ottoman law. I then examine a key example of assumed weak Ottoman property rights, the military-administrative land units called tιmars, and compare them with Western fiefs, to show that they are funda­mentally different entities. When comparing more equivalent property rights at the peasant level, we observe striking similarities to English ones. Moreover, both land regimes had common fiscal effects, land endowments that allowed tax evasion, the vakιfs and uses; I argue that their impact on the economy depended on state strength. I then show that property rights were also not more protected in England: in fact, expropriation was more extensive and arbitrary than in the Ottoman Empire.^[1177]

The key to all these divergences, I argue, lay in the English crown’s superior capacity to impose its will, not in its weakness or limits. Comparing an empire with a relatively small kingdom might appear incongruous, but the Ottoman Empire before 1370 was not much larger than England.^[1178] As noted, arguments based on size don’t explain why a political unit could not develop a robust core and expand imperially over greater territory. England eventually did just that.

11.1