PROCIT is a project backed by an international, multidisciplinary network around the topic of “Local identities in the Mediterranean” and is intended to explore the theme of citizenship from the perspective of property and the rights pertaining thereto. It will focus on the modern era. This project is intended as a contribution to research on processes of social integration and the nature of the socio-economic and legal inequalities that determine the direction of that integration and are, simultaneously, its products. Two decisions in particular characterize this project: the decision to deal with the connected dimensions of citizenship, integration, and inequalities in the longue durée history of Mediterranean societies (from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries); and the decision to situate these themes in a deliberately comparative perspective, on the basis of research carried out in Europe, North Africa, Palestine, Egypt, and the Ottoman Empire. The eighteenth scholars working together on the PROCIT project are from institutions rooted in these different countries. Together, they can already boast a shared experience of work and collaboration. The notion of citizenship considered in this project does not refer to the formal political prerogatives of which nation-state members can avail themselves, but rather to the set of rights to which one has access as a result of acknowledged belonging to a particular place. These rights conferred by belonging, in the societies we wish to analyze, are the point of origin of differential access to resources (such as the market, property, credit, work, charity, etc.), which structure the social scale. The term “citizenship” thus refers to a status where access rights to resources encounter the social recognition of these rights as well as the ability to claim them. Our research is thus focused on the processes that have produced this status in different societies north and south of the Mediterranean. In this project, property has appeared as a fundamental variable shared by different societies. In modern societies, the notion of property refers to a vast semantic field, which cannot be reduced to material wealth alone. Differential access to property rights not only outlines economic hierarchies or symbolic primacies; it also creates prerogatives that occupy individuals more broadly. In a wide range of cases, the condition of “citizen” or subject of a central authority is closely linked to the recognition of one’s capacity to access property or to transmit it. In modern societies of the northern and southern Mediterranean, relations to things create social statuses, relations, and ties, and grant access to rights related to belonging. The ability to exercise property rights traces the outline of local communities, and, as a result, of wider territorial communities. Access to property, in that sense, is an essential phase in every process of social integration. This major investigation into citizenship in the northern and southern Mediterranean requires painstaking comparative analysis. The comparison implemented here avoids culturalism entirely and is based on reasoned, methodologically informed empiricism. It will explore an original method, based on sources. This method must allow us to grasp practice as closely as possible to the documentary systems that shape and show them. This will allow the researchers to build a relevant questionnaire and explanatory framework together. This method requires close coordination among scholars, who will choose among three thematic axes: access to the market; creating trusts (“off-market” goods); and finally, wealth transmission practices. Two historians specialized in each theme in the northern and southern Mediterranean will coordinate each axis and organize the comparative work.