JANISSARIES AND CONFLICTS OVER RURAL LANDS IN THE VIDIN REGION (1730-1810)
JANISSARIES AND CONFLICTS OVER RURAL LANDS IN THE VIDIN REGION (1730-1810)

Summary/Abstract: The Vidin region has attracted much scholarly attention, particularly due to the bloody uprisings in the area around the middle of the nineteenth century. For a long period, Balkan historians have understood this mid-nineteenth century crisis as an inevitable consequence of a Bulgarian national awakening. Although the recent scholarship challenges the nationalist narrative, it continues to ignore the complexities of the socio-legal structures in the Vidinese hinterland, which had developed in the course of the eighteenth century, and reduces all conflict lines to the duality of interests between peasants and proprietors. Going beyond the dualistic narratives of exploitation, this study aims to historicize the land question in the Balkans by presenting the Janissaries both as actors of the Ottoman military establishment in the Vidin region and as rural investors who enjoyed benefits from and shaped the workings of the area’s land regime thanks to their own networks and the state’s policies. By doing so, it contextualizes the ruptures and continuities in landholding patterns, and also highlights the rural entrepreneurship of the Janissaries, who in Ottoman/Middle Eastern scholarship have generally been portrayed as active historical agents of city-based riots and urban-centered commercial activities.

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