Editing Absentee landlord (section)

== Palestine ==
{{anchor|Absentee landlords in Palestine before 1948}}<!--Old heading name.-->
The Ottoman Empire embarked on a systematic [[land reform]] program in the second half of the 19th century. Two of the new laws were the [[Ottoman Land Code of 1858|1858 land registration law]] and the [[1873 land emancipation act]].

Prior to 1858, land in [[Palestine (region)|Palestine]], then a part of the [[Ottoman Empire]] since 1516, was cultivated or occupied mainly by peasants. Land ownership was regulated by people living on the land according to customs and traditions. Usually, the land was communally owned by village residents, though land could be owned by individuals or families.<ref name="tilsen20060814">[http://www.beki.org/landlaw.html Ottoman Land Registration Law as a Contributing Factor in the Israeli-Arab Conflict] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20080916054748/http://www.beki.org/landlaw.html |date=2008-09-16 }}, Jon-Jay Tilsen, Congregation Beth El–Keser Israel (retrieved August 14, 2006)</ref>

In 1858 the Ottoman Empire introduced ''[[The Ottoman Land Code of 1858]]'', requiring landowners to register ownership. The reasons behind the law were twofold. (1) to increase tax revenue, and (2) to exercise greater state control over the area. Peasants, however, saw no need to register claims, for several reasons:<ref name="tilsen20060814"/>

* landowners were subject to military service in the Ottoman Army
* general opposition to official regulations from the Ottoman Empire
* evasion of taxes and registration fees to the Ottoman Empire

The registration process itself was open to misregistration and manipulation. Land collectively owned by village residents ended up registered to one villager, and merchants and local Ottoman administrators took the opportunity to register large areas of land to their own name. The result was land that became the legal property of people who had never lived on the land, while the peasants, having lived there for generations, retained possession, but became tenants of absentee owners.<ref name="tilsen20060814"/>

The [[1856 Emancipation Reform Decree]] and [[1869 citizenship law]] was interpreted as giving Jews the right to own land in Ottoman Syria under their own name.<ref>{{citation |last=Rodrigue |first=Aron |title=French Jews, Turkish Jews: the Alliance israélite universelle and the politics of Jewish schooling in Turkey, 1860–1925 |publisher=Indiana University Press |year=1990 |page=32 |isbn=0-253-35021-2 }}</ref> The changing of this law (the change occurring at the same time as the [[Emancipation Proclamation|freeing of the Africans in the United States]] and in South America and the [[emancipation of the serfs in Russia]] (held in slavery by the Russian landowning class) was a part of the worldwide 19th-century movement towards emancipation and civil rights for oppressed minorities.  This 1873 secular land reform/civil rights law was popularly confused with religious law and it was held as a "humiliation to Islam that Jews should own a part of the Muslim [[Ummah]]". The confusion between religious and secular law made the laws (ended in 1873) against Jewish ownership of land 'religious laws'. {{Citation needed|date=August 2007}}

Over the course of the next decades land became increasingly concentrated on fewer hands; the peasants continued to work on the land, giving landlords a share of the harvest. This led to both an increased level of [[Palestinian nationalism]] as well as civil unrest.<ref name="tilsen20060814"/><ref name="howlett012001">[http://law.vanderbilt.edu/journals/journal/34-01/howlett.html Palestinian Private Property Rights in Israel and the Occupied Territories] {{webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20140714175245/http://law.vanderbilt.edu/journals/journal/34-01/howlett.html |date=2014-07-14 }} Stacy Howlett, Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law (Volume 34 number 1, January 2001, Retrieved August 14, 2006)</ref> At the same time the area witnessed an increased flow of Jewish immigrants who did not restrict themselves to the cities where their concentration offered some protection from persecution. These new Jews came hoping to create a new future in what they regarded as the homeland of their ancestors. Organizations created to aid the Jewish migration to Palestine also bought land from absentee landowners. Jewish immigrants then settled on the land, sometimes replacing peasants already living there.<ref name="tilsen20060814"/><ref name="howlett012001"/> A steady arrival of Jewish immigrants from 1882 led to several peasant insurgencies, recorded from as early as 1884–1886.