Muslim Land, Christian Labor ─ Transforming Ottoman Imperial Subjects into Bulgarian National Citizens, 1878-1939

This book describes how former Ottoman Empire Muslims were transformed into citizens of Balkan nation-states and became national minorities, focusing on southern Bulgaria (the former Eastern Rumelia) and the effects of changes in land use and ownership, which created new economic, social, political, and cultural relationships that changed Ottoman Muslims into Bulgaria’s Turkish national minority by the middle of the 20th century. It shows how Muslim lands generated capital for the national economy, how Bulgarian Christians produced the capital, and how the lands had to take in landless, poor, or refugee Bulgarian Christians who settled in places Turkish Muslims had left upon emigration and whose presence was intended to secure Bulgaria’s ethnically and religiously mixed southern borderlands. It explores changes among individual Muslims and Muslim pious-charitable endowments, as the status of Turkish Muslim landholders was threatened and decreased due to modifications in taxation, measures related to the ownership of lands abandoned during war and emigration, economic hardship, and the settlement of Bulgarian Christian refugees or peasants. It describes the 19th-century international and Ottoman domestic political contexts; how Bulgarian Christians used administrative and legal measures to dismantle Ottoman land tenure to control Muslim postwar repatriation and defy Ottoman sovereignty; how the problems with repatriation and the introduction of the land tax spurred Muslim emigration and enabled Bulgarian Christians to establish national power; how Muslim land ownership was threatened by the modernization of agriculture; how Bulgarian Christian peasants were encouraged to mechanize and increase profit from their labor to foster industrial development; the rebuilding of Bulgaria in the aftermath of the Balkan Wars and World War I, how Bulgarian Christian refugees increased in southern Bulgaria, and how Turkish Muslims faced loss of land and pressure to emigrate; and the conflicts among Bulgarian Turkish Muslims over Turkey’s nation-building project. Annotation ©2017 Ringgold, Inc., Portland, OR (protoview.com)