Making property of a marsh: environment, property, and politics in nineteenth-century Ottoman Ioannina

Abstract

This article discusses the contested character of property rights with respect to reclaimed land from marshes in the Ottoman Empire through the reclamation project for Lake Lapsista in Ottoman Ioannina starting from 1886. By the end of the nineteenth century, many marshes, lakes, and rivers in the Ottoman territories were planned to be cleaned and reclaimed for various purposes. However, as a result of reclamation projects, the possession of reclaimed land, and the way such lands were defined, became a vexed issue in which various actors became involved and struggled over controlling them. Focusing on struggles and negotiations the reclamation project created, the article aims to uncover how the ownership of reclaimed marshy regions were defined at the local level. Drawing on archival materials on the land dispute over the reclaimed Lake Lapsista from 1886 to 1909, the article shows that the struggle over control of the reclaimed land manifested itself in the attempts of both central and local actors to circumvent legal boundaries or manipulate legal regulation and codes at the local level, challenging approaches that only focus on legal texts and codes.