Money, Peasant Mobility, Çiftliks, and Local Politics in Salonika: 1740–1820

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.