Malikâne was a form of

tax farming Farming or tax-farming is a technique of financial management in which the management of a variable revenue stream is assigned by legal contract to a third party and the holder of the revenue stream receives fixed periodic rents from the contr ...

introduced in the

Ottoman empire The Ottoman Empire (), also called the Turkish Empire, was an empire, imperial realm that controlled much of Southeast Europe, West Asia, and North Africa from the 14th to early 20th centuries; it also controlled parts of southeastern Centr ...

in 1695. It was intended as an improvement on the Iltizam system, in which a tax-farmer was responsible for a single year. Malikâne contracts were for life; this provided more security for the tax farmer (''malikaneci'') and a less exploitative relationship with the peasants; malikanecis might even make investments to improve productivity. However, vested interests - from existing mültezims who benefited from the Iltizam system - prevented wider adoption of malikâne. Also, malikâne could not be converted into vakf - an important distinction from mülk. A malikâne tax-farm, typically for a village or district, would be

auction An auction is usually a process of Trade, buying and selling Good (economics), goods or Service (economics), services by offering them up for Bidding, bids, taking bids, and then selling the item to the highest bidder or buying the item from th ...

ed to the highest bidder; in return for collecting all state taxes ( rüsüm) from that area, the winner of the auction would make a large downpayment called muaccele, and then annual payments called mâl. The auction determined the initial payment - subject to a minimum price set by the treasury. A malikaneci might finance their initial payment by borrowing from a moneylender or sarraf - who would expect to take a cut of the tax revenue; this could even become a second layer of tax-farming. The winner of the auction was given a document called "berat", as proof of their right to the tax-farm. In theory, when the tenant died their tax farm would revert to the state, but a tenant could give the tax-farm to an heir if the treasury agreed (and officials would expect to be paid for their agreement). As the tax-farming market became more competitive, the treasury collected bigger payments, but profitability for tax-farmers decreased. The malikâne system may have been modelled on an earlier system of "double rent" paid by waqfs. From the treasury's perspective, malikâne was a more reliable source of revenue. Auctions of local tax-farming rights had the effect of integrating diverse provincial tax-farmers into the Ottoman state, and also helped build a more modern concept of private landownership.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Malikane Taxation in the Ottoman Empire Land management in the Ottoman Empire Tax farming 1695 establishments in the Ottoman Empire