Društveni i agrarno-pravni položaj srpskog naroda u niškom pašaluku u prvim decenijama 19. veka
Social And Agrarian–Legal Status Of The Serbian People In The Niš Pashaluk In The Early Decades Of The 19th Century

Summary/Abstract: This paper presents the social and agrarian–legal status of the Serbian people in the Niš Pashaluk (Eyalet) in the first half of the 19th century. The difficult position of the Serbian people in the Niš Pashaluk significantly worsened with the introduction of the chiflik (Çiftlik Sahibi) system in rural areas. In the years following the First Serbian Uprising, peasant land was increasingly disappearing while Serbian peasant were imposed with new taxes and levies. The legal status of peasants was not regulated and depended solely on the will of the Çiftlik Sahibi. The Çiftlik Sahibi land seizure across entire areas was done by force with the use of coercive tactics and brutal clashes between feudal lords and the Christian population. The process of Çiftlik Sahibi disintegrated the customary and traditional social organization of the Serbian people in the historic Old Serbia, destroyed the people’s municipal self-government, and turned all the villages with family inherited land (Serbian “baština”) on former Sipahi estates into chifliks. The Çiftlik Sahibi system degraded the Serbian rural population both socially and in the agrarian-legal sense. This paper is based on the unpublished archival sources and relevant literature.

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