ABSTRACT
The history of non-European societies has, for a long time, been set in opposition to that of Europe. European history, written as the privileged domain of commercial classes, of bourgeois revolutions and of liberal constitutional states, is pitted against a non-European history of stagnant agrarian economies, stunted commercial development and absent revolutions. According to Islamoglu, in the early modern Ottoman empire, institutions represented particularistic settlements; negotiated between the ruler and his various representatives: and different groups or individuals. These institutions aimed towards distributing among different groups or individuals a wide range of resources, including the land-use, revenues; and titles to land, as; well as trading privileges, exemptions from taxes and from military service. Islamoglu also points to the negotiated character of land registration accounting for its incomplete: character in the nineteenth century and, especially, for the failure to achieve extensive cadastral mapping, which was expected to define precise boundaries for individually owned plots.
