Abstract Following the proclamation of constitutionalism on 23 July 1908, villagers throughout the Ottoman Empire occupied and reclaimed çiftlik (plantation) lands from which they had previously been dispossessed. This article approaches the Ottoman 1908 Revolution as part of the “global wave of constitutional revolutions” by shifting the historiographical focus of the 1908 revolution from urban to agrarian spaces. It investigates a series of land occupations that emerged across the Ottoman çiftlik geography, conceptualizing them as the “constitutionalism of the dispossessed.” I argue that this constitutionalism of the dispossessed was a response to what I call the “order of dispossession” that emerged in the late nineteenth century: a class project of çiftlik owners reacting to global economic, imperial fiscal, and local ecological crises that aimed to subordinate labor to the circuits of global capital. Furthermore, this article discusses the failure of the constitutionalism of the dispossessed in the face of a social counter-revolution by çiftlik owners, which culminated in the codification of imperial property law. It demonstrates that the post-revolutionary government—having been concerned with the credibility of the empire in European credit markets for new loans to sustain the empire in fiscal crisis—desired the restoration of the order that the çiftlik owners insisted upon, and which the circuits of global capital required. This article ultimately offers a fresh and radical history of the Ottoman 1908 revolution and counter-revolution, suggesting a novel perspective to understand the modes of protest of the dispossessed in response to the imperatives of global capital.
Önder Eren Akgül (Fri,) studied this question.