Land Equalization and Factor Scarcities: Holding Size and the Burden of Impositions in Imperial Central Russia and the Late Ottoman Levant

The origin of the land-equalizing community, the most important system of tenure in the nineteenth-century Levant, has never been explained. The evidence of language and the dynamics of factor relationships concur with the historical record: there was no scarcity of land. On the basis of a systematic comparison with the land-equalizing commune in Russia, the answer to the puzzle looms as the need to equalize a heavy burden of impositions. Indeed, villages whoselocation or political strength helped them resist taxation did not equalize holdings.Equalization was an adaptation to external demands, not a static vestigialinstitution.