Landed Estates, Rural Commons and Collective Agriculture in Ottoman Niş and Leskofçe in the Nineteenth Century

In contesting claims of private ownership of landed estates in mid-nineteenth-century Niş and Leskofçe, peasants argued that they cultivated and possessed the land ‘jointly and commonly’. It was a claim that questioned existing property relations, based on tenancy and sharecropping in landed estates (çiftliks) owned by urban landholders. This article attempts to reconstruct the social organisation of production in the estates by exploring forms of land use and labour which were embedded in forms of collective peasant organisation and practice. It is argued that the co-existence of multiple land use and labour forms under a dominant framework of estate agriculture generated social tensions with long-term consequences.