The Property of Empire: Islamic Law and Russian Agrarian Policy in Transcaucasia and Turkestan (Essay)

At the center of this essay is an analysis of the implementation of discourses on "Islam and property" in Russian colonial policy in Transcaucasia and Central Asia. The essay seeks to analyze how the common (European) language for describing property rights (the language of Roman law) was applied to landholding in the Islamic world, and whether that "translation" influenced Russian land policy in its borderlands. Briefly, my hypothesis is that Russia's policy on property in its southern borderlands in the 1870s-80s invoked a vision of a "normal" (European liberal) model of absolute private property. Against the background of that model, the "Islamic model" of landholding was perceived as a deviation. At the same time, however, the perceived specificity of indigenous laws provided an opportunity for local colonial administrators to circumvent "European" norms of property relations: Russian colonial administrators, following the views of certain Orientalists, interpreted the "Islamic model" of property in accordance with the administration's goals in the region and used this interpretation to enlarge the state domain. This policy of enlarging the state domain by limiting the rights of settled tenants, however, was ultimately rejected by the government as a politically and economically ineffective method of advancing Russia's colonizing goals in its borderlands. Therefore, as I try to prove, the Russian government deliberately refused to accept the model of patrimonial state property in its colonies. This article, while focusing on specific episodes of Russia's colonial land policy, addresses a number of broader questions in the history of Russian and European colonialism and law: the problem of legal pluralism, (1) continuity and succession of rule after the conquest; and the problem of taxonomy, classification and translation of legal notions and principles. I also emphasize the role of colonial experience in shaping basic concepts for the empire--that is, the concepts of property (private and state) and possession. Russia's agrarian policy on its borderlands mirrored the specificity of Russian civil law and revealed stunning contradictions between the European legal framework inbuilt in the legislation and the reality of Russia's politics of property.