ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses experiences of modernity of the Ottoman and Qing émpires in the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries. It focuses on statecraft or practices of governing or ordering social reality. More specifically, the chapter focuses on administrative rulings or law and procedures which ordered and defined property relations on land. The comparison of modern transformations in statecraft in two non-European regions provides important starting point to bring into focus the universality of experience of modernity, beyond the narrow confines of western Europe. As significantly, modern transformation implied that very self-definition of state, its idiom of rule, was no longer that of justice premised on the distribution of claims to revenue and land use in order to accommodate different interests with the objective of maintaining social harmony. Instead, the legitimating principle of the Ottoman state in the nineteenth century was its ability to administer effectively and equitably; it dispensed justice not through distribution but through equitable administration of its demands.
