The ‘Conquering’ Soldier-Merchants of the Balkans: Colonization, State Interventionism and Separatist Claims in the Danubian Principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia (18th-19th Centuries)
The ‘Conquering’ Soldier-Merchants of the Balkans: Colonization, State Interventionism and Separatist Claims in the Danubian Principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia (18th-19th Centuries)

Summary/Abstract: This article studies the questions of self-rule and state intervention in the Principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia, and the socio-economic life of a late frontier society against the backdrop of the eighteenth-century wave of internal colonization by Ottoman Muslims, mostly of Janissary background. It aims at revealing complex relations between agents on three levels: local ( voivodes , boyar s, commoners), the regional (Janissaries and other soldiery) and the imperial; while also examining the influx of Muslims into the Principalities and its consequences as an interplay between various claims of trading rights, provisionist policies implemented by the imperial centre and the autonomous desires of the native nobility. The paper contends that the tributary status of the Principalities provided a major advantage in protecting the local population against Muslim penetration, as manifested in the ensuing direct intervention of the Porte and consequent trade restrictions. From the mid-eighteenth century onwards, the policy of keeping the Muslim-Ottoman presence and activities in the region at a minimum and obtaining full liberty of trade became an important component in the struggle for economic detachment from the Ottoman orbit, which in the long run contributed to the nation-state formation in Romania.

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