Research Information System
JOURNAL OF PEASANT STUDIES, vol.18, no.3-4, pp.109-184, 1991 (SSCI)
Historiography can no longer sustain the naive self-belief of an unreconstructed empiricism in its capacity to arrive automatically at the one and only possible 'truth' by hoarding and quantitatively aggregating all the bits of information contained in supposedly 'neutral' documents. Instead, it has to be able to make up for textual silences or distortions of various kinds; to deconstruct, with the aid of theoretical perspectives that should themselves not be aprioristic but distilled from broader sets of evidence, the built-in biases and deformations that are inevitably imparted to the documentation by the historical circumstances surrounding their birth and the particular point within the hierarchy of a stratified social formation where they originate. For a very long time, history was written only from above; and because the ruling class records on which it was based were generally accepted at face value, it was thought that it had also always been made from the top down. Thus the reality of peasant life and the oppressive nature of serfdom came to penetrate Western medieval history only in the early twentieth century; as for the raiyyet, the Ottoman dependent cultivator, he/she has still not been able to assume a significant place and role on the vast stage of Ottoman history. Medieval serfs having kept no comparable accounts for their small economies, early pictures of Western feudalism that were over-reliant on inventories drawn up for the largest ecclesiastical estates tended to exaggerate the scope of the lord's economy and particularly of demesne production based on labour services. The bulk of the documentation for the Ottoman Empire, on the other hand, emanates not from private lordship but from the state, and hence constantly defines the peasant and the peasant holding in terms of legal categories invented by that state, that is, as the basic unit of the tax-system. Western medieval history has succeeded in overcoming its lord-centred approach to serfdom to a large extent, but the document-fetishism of Turkish nationalist historiography continues to complement a state-fetishism that makes it impossible to apprehend the spontaneous socio-economic, class-structured modalities of peasant existence.