In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

The horizons of the “peasant” | 41 chapter two The Horizons of the “Peasant”: Circuits of Labor and Insurgency In the mid-nineteenth century, Karl Marx famously explained the inaction of France’s peasants to act in their own interests by referring to the nation as “formed by simple addition of homologous magnitudes, much as potatoes in a sack form a sack of potatoes” (Marx 1963: 124). In the 1930s, R. H. Tawney pictured the prototypical fatalistic peasant as “standing permanently up to the neck in water, so that even a ripple might drown him” (cited in Scott 1976: vii), while Calvin Hoover wrote of Russian peasants’ “reserve of Asiatic resignation to the inscrutable decrees of fate” (cited in Engerman 2003: 171). In their presumed passivity and conservatism, then, peasants have inspired memorable turns of phrase. For many theorists and policy makers, especially in neighboring countries, the Ottoman Empire’s Orthodox Christian peasantry—the stolid figures in the fields driving wooden plows pulled by water buffaloes, or occupying wattle huts in lowland villages close by malarial swamps—fit this stereotype. Slumped in what Edward Banfield, a scholar far from Marxian in outlook, would later dub “amoral familism” (Banfield 1958), paralyzed from forming any meaningful connections beyond the household, atomistic without being individualistic, the peasants of Ottoman Macedonia have been widely viewed as passive victims of fate, awaiting salvation from outside intervention, whether divine or European. This view was shared by multiple constituencies at the time. Foreign diplomats , with their own imperial baggage and (at least in the case of the British) clear notions of class, bore witness to the “chronic destitution of the peasantry ” (fo 195/2182/16: McGregor to Graves, January 4, 1904) and observed that many of the rural population enjoyed “no real security or feeling of confidence in the future” (fo 195/2156/74: Fontana to Biliotti, January 20, 1903). They concluded that improvement was unlikely and that the “frame of mind of the peasants in general can hardly be described as one of enthusiasm, indeed their intellectual level seems . . . too low to admit of such a feeling” 42 | loyal unto death (195/2182/88: McGregor to Graves, February 10, 1904). Wretchedness was writ plain to see in the shantytowns at the edges of imperial cities, the inhabitants ’ perceived indifference to health and hygiene, stories of injustice and victimization, and the pathetic faith in foreign intervention. All are described in ways that resonate with accounts of beaten-down peasants in other times and other places, such as those offered of Russia’s peasants during the Cold War (Engerman 2003). Many of the journalists and humanitarian workers who visited the province reached similar conclusions, especially those who came in the immediate aftermath of the uprising, when Ottoman reprisals had left more than 70,000 civilians homeless and, together with the demands of the organization, had created severe food shortages. Borrowing a metaphor from his native London, Allen Upward dubbed the province the “East End of Europe” (Upward 1908), while Brailsford diagnosed “Eastern fatalism” and Edith Durham described “a sort of bovine stolidity, heavy, apathetic, interested chiefly in petty quarrels, and seeing that they got as much ‘relief’ as the people next door” (Brailsford 1906: 70–1; Durham 1905: 133).1 This impression of a backward, isolated, and supine people also appealed to the propagandists of the new states. Officials in both Greece and Bulgaria, rivals for control of the region, presented its rural Christian population as inert, incapable of autonomous action, and awaiting leadership from outside. In these nationalist narratives, although the peasantry knew who they were, deep down (Greeks or Bulgarians, respectively), they lacked the ability to speak for themselves, and these two nation-states were thus compelled to act on their behalf. Bulgarian authors emphasized the role of Bulgarian-educated elites in forming the organization and leading the Ilinden Uprising, while Greek sources stressed the lack of wider, indigenous Macedonian support for either. A similar view of the limited horizons and capacities of Macedonia’s rural population is also accepted and propagated in some of the most significant publications on late Ottoman Macedonia. Writing in the 1960s and drawing primarily on Greek-language sources, Douglas Dakin considered that the numbers of insurgents reported by Brailsford, relying on mro sources, were laughably exaggerated (Dakin 1966: 99n). Duncan Perry, writing in the 1980s, treated Bulgarian and Macedonian claims regarding the scale of the uprising more seriously. He was nevertheless skeptical of accounts of widespread rural Project MUSE (2024-04...

Share