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Landowners and peasants in the Greek Revolution (1821-1828)

Item

Title

Landowners and peasants in the Greek Revolution (1821-1828)

Date

15 June 2022

Abstract

On the eve of the Greek Revolution, several of the most powerful local notables in areas of the Peloponnese and Central Greece owned significant tracts of land, which they had acquired through the well-known ways of acquiring land in the Ottoman regime to members of the upper classes, mostly Muslims but also Christians. Despite the efforts of the revolutionary administration to defend, as far as the conditions and the means at its disposal allowed, the rights of the Greek landowners over their estates, in several cases these were challenged by the cultivators. At the same time, during the revolution, members of other social groups with money and political power also claimed a share of the former Muslim and now “national” land, mainly through their participation in the disputed legitimacy of the sale of national lands by the revolutionary government in 1826. Throughout the period, from the beginning of the struggle to the years of the rule of the country by the Governor Ioannis Kapodistrias, the large estates in the revolutionary territory often became a place of confrontation between the landowners and their peasants, sometimes intense, which left few but interesting archival traces. Drawing on data from unpublished and published primary sources, this paper attempts to investigate these conflicts during the years of the Revolution, both those concerning the lands whose origins date back to the pre-revolutionary years, and those created in the heat of the war conflicts.

(Edited and translated abstract from organiser’s website)

Type specialization

Format

Text

Language

Number Of Pages - Duration

00:20:00

Rights

BY-NC-SA Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike

Position: 9307 (17 views)