Original scientific paper
THE PEASANT QUESTION IN DALMATIA DURING THE 1848-1849 REVOLUTIONARY PERIOD
Stijepo Obad
Abstract
The movement in Dalmatian villages during the 1848-1849 revolutionary period is closely linked with the trends of social development before 1848. The unscrupulous behaviour of officials and tax collectors, particularly during the years of meager harest and famine, as well as the introduction of taxation in southern Dalmatia, caused arbitrary revoking of tithe payments to the state and stipulated payments to the landowners, the peasants availing themselves of the constitutional rights proclaimed in 1848. Cases of resistance occurred in various places of Dalmatia, e. g. on Pag Island, in the Neretva River valley, on the Island of Korčula, in the Konavli Valley, at Grbalj in the Bay of Kotor, and on the Island of Olib.
During the first stae, i. e. in the spring and summer of 1848, the disturbances were more numerous and violent, while during the second stage – when the Serfdom Abolition Act had been published in September 1848 – the disturbances declined and drew narrower limits, particularly in 1849. The peasants were repeatedly called to preserve peace and order and to comply with their tax duties. Since they remained stubborn, they were threatened with an armed intervention, which then took place on the Island of Pag, in the Neretva River valley, in the Konavli Valley, particularly at Grbalj where the resistance became a revolt with revolutionary characteristics of self-government. The civil and military authorities succeeded in suppressing the rebellion; they yielded to a certain degree, but the existing basic conditions were not changed. It was only decreed that the September Act cannot be applied to agrarian relations in Dalmatia. Owing to arbitrariness of the Austrian bureaucracy, however, the peasant question in Dalmatia remained unsolved, and it was left to the colons and serfs to solve it in the future – either in a peaceful or in a violent way. Thus Dalmatia was the only Croatian region where the agrarian conditions remained unsolved in the course of the 1848 -1849 revolutionary period.
Keywords
Hrčak ID:
161691
URI
Publication date:
24.12.1980.
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