State, Law, and Revolution: Agrarian Power and the National State in Albania, 1850-1945.

Abstract

Prevailing approaches in the comparative historical study of peasant mobilization assume the relationship between peasants and state institutions to be inherently antagonistic. By contrast, this dissertation argues that locally embedded legal cultures are crucial in mediating and delimiting the institutional role of the state in agrarian social life. Using the case of national state building in post-Ottoman Albania, the dissertation shows that establishing national control over regionally-based socio-legal institutions was a crucial challenge faced by Ottoman successor states. Relying on official Albanian state documents only recently made available to international scholars, the dissertation shows that efforts by national bureaucratic elites to transform traditional socio-legal arrangements were a contentious process with direct impact on local state capacities and peasant politics. The dissertation demonstrates the divergent impact of legal centralization on peasant politicization by comparing two agrarian regions: (1) the çiftlik agrarian class system in Albania’s fertile lowland regions and (2) the smallholding and self-governing communities of Albania’s rugged highlands. In the lowlands, the state successfully established national administration over local political and juridical authorities, but the consequence of this was the increasing politicization of agrarian class relations. The nationalization and reform of lowland socio-legal institutions resulted in the disintegration of Ottoman-era legal protections of peasant subsistence rights, leading to intensified social conflict between peasants and landowners. Peasants engaged in public acts of politicization of agrarian relations which involved the state both as an actor as well as a legal institutional arena. As a result, during the revolutionary mobilization in the 1940s, lowland peasants responded sympathetically to the radical agrarian platform of the Albanian communist movement. In the highlands, efforts to assert national authority over local communal organization and traditions of customary law resulted in a different type of peasant resistance. From once guaranteeing local communal autonomy, the state moved to delegitimize communal peasant law and socio-legal practices. Highland peasant communities responded by directly challenging the state’s administrative practices via acts of subversion and became more accepting of conservative politics. The dissertation underscores the link between legal cultures, peasant politics and the historical variability of state capacities.