Land inequality in Ottoman Crete at the turn of the eighteenth century
This paper examines land distribution in selected districts of Ottoman Crete using a novel dataset of tax surveys from 1670, i.e., eleven years after the Ottoman takeover from the Venetians, and 1704-5, by which time the Ottoman rule on the island had become well established. In their mainland territories, the Ottomans had originally introduced a feudal ‘state land’ system that limited full ownership rights. Even though this system was increasingly commercialized over time in all parts of the empire, Crete was exceptional in that the Ottomans recognized private property rights here from the start. Therefore, the Cretan regime offers a unique opportunity to explore the role of private tenure as opposed to legal state control in shaping land inequality in the Ottoman case. In this preliminary paper, we produce the standard descriptive measures, and examine change in terms of the components of inequality by the identity of the owners (religion and gender), agricultural specialization, and geography.
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This page was last updated on 14 March 2025
