Read Online The Balkans: A Short History by Mark Mazower - Free Book Online

with markets in central Europe, France and farther afield. As the crisis of government deepened, the need for urgent reforms, intermittently tried since the early eighteenth century, became obvious to the Porte. For nearly a century, the power of the Sultan’s household had been undermined by its inability to control the janissary corps, the court militia that had once been an integral part of the Ottoman machinery of conquest. Over time the janissaries evolved from an elite, loyal military cohort into a badly paid, independent and unruly interest group that on occasion even deposed sultans. By the eighteenth century, their defense of their privileges posed a far greater threat to the empire’s own inhabitants than the corps did to its enemies. They were feared by their Christian neighbors, whom they attacked with impunity in the streets, by their fellow Muslims and by the Porte itself. After the defeat of Napoleon and the rise of the breakaway Mehmet Ali in Egypt, the central Ottoman state reasserted its authority in a bid to modernize its military and restore its own prestige: in 1826 the janissary corps in the capital was massacred and replaced by a professional army. Shortly afterward, British pressure compelled the Porte to liberalize trade and to promise equality before the law for all subjects of the empire. In the 1850s it finally became possible—at least in theory—to buy and sell land (a change not very much later, it should be noted, than that occurring in the Hungarian countryside). All this meant a weakening of the old intrusive regulatory imperial economy and permitted the expansion of commercial agriculture—cotton and tobacco, Serbian pigs and Romanian wheat—within an international market. Foreign capital, goods and investors followed.
    Most peasants remained self-sufficient and mistrustful of money—with good reason, since they were probably worse off for capitalism’s triumph. They faced now a centralized imperial state that was trying to collect taxes more efficiently, giving more legal power to landlords and whittling away customary peasant rights to land and produce. Capitalism was forcing change upon the Ottoman empire—the most threatening solvent of that sense of customary fairness that underpinned the Balkan peasantry’s sense of the natural order. Over time, this led peasants toward what Stoianovich concisely describes as “a strategy of demanding the abolition both of the landlords and of the state that refused to abolish the landlords.” Capitalism, in other words, and the modernization of the Ottoman state had political consequences. In the Turkish empire—as in Austria-Hungary and Tsarist Russia—the coming of a money economy and the modern state disrupted older patterns of social relations and helped pave the way for political changes as well. 37
    Only in the light of this dramatic economic and societal disruption can one understand the emergence of mass nationalism in the nineteenth-century Balkans. Nationalism as a mass movement inevitably involved the peasants, yet for them what counted was not the Nation or other abstract political concepts, but their rights to land, livelihood and fair taxes. As farming was monetized and traditional dues were replaced by cash obligations, class tensions increased in the countryside. The 1875 Hercegovina revolt, which triggered off a major collapse of Ottoman power in the Balkans, was provoked by harvest failure and the subsequent maltreatment of peasants by soldiers accompanying the tax farmers. It began, wrote the French consul in Sarajevo, “with protests of subjects of all religions against excessive tax demands.” Another eyewitness was even clearer: “It is mainly an agrarian war . . . in its origin Agrarian rather than Political.” Class antagonism and nationalism emerged together. 38
    The peasants were basically right: political independence favored them by creating conditions of relative tranquillity and security of property.