Keith Brown.Loyal unto Death

Keith Brown's new book aims to demonstrate that the supposedly passive and “fatalistic peasants” of Ottoman Macedonia were in fact capable of sustained political mobilization. He takes as his central problem the question of how at the start of the twentieth century the Secret Macedonian-Adrianople Revolutionary Organization (MRO) was able to grow so rapidly from a tiny band of conspirators to an organization capable of fielding some 20,000 participants in the Ilinden uprising of 1903. His attention is particularly directed toward the nature of the surviving archival remains which he scours closely and attentively, often reading against the grain, for clues to this conundrum. Other scholars have traversed some of this territory before. Duncan M. Perry's The Politics of Terror: The Macedonian Liberation Movements, 1893–1903 (1988) provides the classic account of the evolution of the revolutionary movement itself, especially the leadership's navigation of the frequent internecine struggles and schisms that bedeviled it. Vasilis Gounaris has demonstrated the usefulness of the Greek archives in attempting to understand the fluidity of peasant loyalties and Brown's fellow anthropologist, Anastasia Karakasidou, effected something similar through a historical ethnography of one small market town. Most recently, İpek Yosmaoğlu, in Blood Ties: Religion, Violence and the Politics of Nationhood in Ottoman Macedonia, 1878–1908 (2013), has utilized both Ottoman and European archives to demonstrate the ways in which national categories were imposed upon an agrarian society. Brown's purpose is subtly different: he is less concerned about national allegiances—in a sense he takes these for granted—than about reclaiming a story of peasant agency and defiance. He enlists two sets of archives. One is the reports of British consuls and their agents in the region, which describe in often graphic detail the endemic violence that spread rapidly across Macedonia at the start of the twentieth century. The other is very different: a series of pension applications made to the Yugoslav Macedonian government between 1948 and 1954 by elderly men and women who had been members of MRO in the period of the Ilinden uprising. These applications say little about the episodes of violence upon which the consuls lay such store; but they provide often illuminating detail about the way in which MRO operated as an organization.

Agrarian society · Ancient history · Macedonian · Peasant · Political science · Politics · African history and culture analysis · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies