The Ottoman Balkans, 1750-1830

by Frederick F Anscombe (Editor)

Overview

The decades after 1750 saw the Ottoman empire undergo tremendous stresses that culminated in the first stirrings of nationalism among Christian subjects and an irrevocable commitment to reform by the Muslim state. By 1830, Serbs and Greeks had fought successfully for autonomy or independence, and Sultan Mahmud II had prepared the way for the Tanzimat by abolishing the Janissary Corps and other discredited institutions. In spite of the importance of this era for both Ottoman and Balkan history, marking as it does the transition from the pre-modern to the modern, scholars have shown remarkably little interest in the factors triggering such important developments. While historians of the Balkans usually slight pre-national history, Ottomanists either dismiss the eighteenth century as a period of hopeless decadence, or alternatively attack the idea of “decline,” thus minimizing the turmoil endured after the 1750s. The contributors to this volume examine instances of problems affecting the Balkans and of state efforts to fix them. Issues considered include law and justice, centralization and provincial autonomy, taxation and land disputes, and the stresses of war. The cases studied here should give both the specialist and the general reader a clearer picture of the forces of change at work in the most important region of the empire during this era of transition.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781558763821
Publisher:	Wiener, Markus Publishers, Incorporated
Publication date:	11/27/2019
Edition description:	UK ed.
Pages:	182
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.56(d)

About the Author

Frederick F. Anscombe, Birkbeck College, University of London, is the author of The Ottoman Gulf: The Creation of Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar.

Table of Contents

Map of the Ottoman Balkans ca. 1800

Frederick F. Anscombe

Introduction

Antonis Anastasopoulos

Crisis and State Intervention in Late Eighteenth-Century Karaferye (mod. Veroia)

Michael R. Hickok

Homicide in Ottoman Bosnia

Virginia H. Aksan

Whose Territory and Whose Peasants? Ottoman Boundaries on the Danube in the 1760s

Frederick F. Anscombe

Albanians and “Mountain Bandits”

Rossitsa Gradeva

Osman Pasvantogulu of Vidin: Between Old and New