Money, Peasant Mobility, Çiftliks, and Local Politics in Salonika

Abstract

This study explores how the monetization and commercialization of rural economy, peasant mobility, and the changing power of landholders in the countryside affected the nature of Salonikan society throughout the eighteenth century. It analyzes the ways in which the emerging power relations in rural areas altered both the status of different social groups and the contours of local administration in an Ottoman provincial setting. It aims to show that the new rural-urban dynamics not only shaped the political alliances and the workings of state, but also set stage for the Ottoman interventionist policy in Salonika. By writing the rural dynamics into the historical narrative, Kokdas’s article thus provides a new understanding of the link between the town-country relationship and the sociopolitical transformation of provincial society in the early modern Ottoman world.

Land ownership, tax farming and the social structure of local credit markets in the Ottoman Balkans, 1685–1855

“…In the region around Ruse prominent members of the provincial and central elite began to form large estates and consolidate their power in the countryside earlier than their peers in Vidin and Salonika (McGowan 1981, p. 217; İnalcık 1998, pp. 29–30; Kokdas 2014, pp. 139–44).…”

Çiftliks, Landed Elites, and Tax Allocation in Eighteenth-Century Ottoman Veroia

“…From among those who have worked on the eighteenth-century Balkans, Sophia Laiou has shown that çiftliks in western Thessaly were formed legitimately on both private and state land; that in the latter case peasants had to bear the extra burden of making payments not only to the timar holder whom the state had appointed as the rightful recipient of dues but also to the çiftlik holder who occupied a place in between the peasants and the timar holder; and that long-term tax-collection rights could lead to de facto rights of ownership over an area (Laiou 2007: 268-270, 274-276). İrfan Kokdaş has argued that sharecropping, patronage, and credit relations formed a triangle that pervaded urban elite-peasant relations in the context of chiftlicisation; that the protection that landholders could provide against taxation and outlaws was an incentive for peasants to abandon their villages and settle on çiftliks; and that çiftlik-holding translated into political capital (Kokdas 2014). Based on probate inventories from Thessaloniki, Phokion Kotzageorgis and Demetrios Papastamatiou have confirmed that landholding and being owed amounts of money (most likely from moneylending) were two assets which typically were combined in the properties of the wealthy, while Papastamatiou has demonstrated that çiftliks were owned mostly by a military-dominated elite of wealthy Thessalonians, and were low-investment and intensity productive units whose production was nevertheless intended for the market (Kotzageorgis, Papastamatiou 2014: 171-178;Papastamatiou 2014;Papastamatiou 2017: 225-231).…”