The Production of the Iraqi Family Farmer in the Age of Development

This paper explores the reasoning and effects of the Dujayla Land Settlement Law of 1945, which aimed to produce a class of “individual farmers,” “independent farmers,” or “family farmers” in Iraq. Paying attention to the work that was done through the conflation of these three terms, I show how the law transformed a “dependent” male peasant or nomad into a modern “independent” farmer—and thus into the model Iraqi rural citizen and subject of national development—not only by granting him truly individual title to land but also by producing his authority over a newly defined “family.” The successful applicant had to be male, married, between 18 and 50 years old, the father of at least one child, and free of any criminal record or infectious disease. These rules established the baseline for what kind of rural human could conceivably count as an individual, yet among the conditions of individuality were precisely that he be accompanied by a woman, a child, and some animals. Elders and other extended kin were not banned from Dujayla in the law; their presence was simply not legible in it. And if some were to happen along nonetheless—as in fact thousands would—their illegibility would ensure their economic and legal powerlessness. In contrast to scholarly accounts that see modern law as primarily productive of inclusion and exclusion, humanization and dehumanization, under the premise of the legal equality of citizens, this paper looks at a law in a semicolonial country in the early “age of development” that produced complex hierarchies of human and non-human kinds. This was effected not only through the distribution of rights and property but also through the production of spatial/material grids that made certain kinds of relationships legible so that they could be worked on by technologies of governmentality and development.