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Rural Social Combustibility in Eastern Europe (1880–1914): A Cross-Border Perspective

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 February 2017

IRINA MARIN
IRINA MARIN*
Affiliation:
Research Fellow, Vienna Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies, Rabensteig 3, 1010 Vienna, [email protected]
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Abstract:

This article proposes a comparative, cross-border analysis of the sources of rural combustibility around the complex frontier between Austria-Hungary, Tsarist Russia and the states that emerged out of the fringes of the Ottoman Empire, Romania, Serbia and Bulgaria, at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries. Starting from the major peasant uprising that took place in 1907 in Romania, the article seeks to account for the fledgling country's explosiveness in contrast to its neighbours, given the structural and functional similarities of the systems around the frontier. It argues that, despite these skin-deep similarities, there were vital differences as regards the initial terms of peasant emancipation and the presence of a system of checks and balances, which could curb the impositions of the great landowners onto the peasants.

Type
Research Article
Information
Rural History , Volume 28 , Issue 1 , April 2017 , pp. 93 - 113
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2017 

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References

Notes

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79. More extensive coverage of the effectiveness of state infrastructure in Romania, Tsarist Bessarabia, and the Austro-Hungarian borderlands (Transylvania, the Banat and Bukovina) will be included in my forthcoming book Peasant Violence and Antisemitism in Early Twentieth-Century Eastern Europe, due to be published by Palgrave-Macmillan in 2018.

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