Peasantry in a Well-protected Domain: Wallachian Peasantry and Muslim Çiftlik/Kışlaks under the Ottoman Rule

Focusing on the relationship between the Porte, Wallachian peasants and the Danubian military notables, this study explores the nature of large-estate formation in Wallachia during the eighteenth century, and the aggressive policies pursued by the Ottoman imperial centre in the Danube region to halt the spread of animal farms (kışlaks) and large estates (çiftliks). In Balkan scholarship, there is a widely shared assumption that the Porte acted as a passive spectator of the agrarian changes in the eighteenth century as a result of its declining power and had no other option than to allow military magnates to establish large landholdings. This study, however, argues that the Porte was not a passive spectator of çiftlik politics in the eighteenth-century Balkans as regards the formation of large animal farms. It also suggests that the position of Ottoman rulers, peasants and military large-estate owners in the eighteenth-century Wallachian crisis resembles those that dominated the strategies and discourses centeed on the nineteenth-century çiftlik crisis. From this perspective, this study claims that the complex relationships between çiftlik holders and peasants, as well as the strategies of the Ottoman administration in Wallachia around the mid-eighteenth century, were the precursors of the nineteenth-century agrarian question in the Balkans.