RuralDispossession investigates Ottoman privately-owned landed estates (çiftliks) in the late 18th and late 19th century. These estates were crucial to the Ottoman (and post-Ottoman) transition from a pre-modern economy to an industrial one. While debates on the nature and function of these estates constitute one of the fundamental historiographical issues for Ottomanists, they have remained dormant in past decades. More importantly, historians remain in the dark regarding the phenomenon's complexity and regional differentiation.The project traces the history of the Balkan çiftlik in relation to the transformation of rural society, peasant dispossession, labor regimes, and the textiles sector. It focuses on the district of Manastır (modern North Macedonia), a region crucial to the çiftlik phenomenon, characterized by a complex network of relations between the estates, villages, and centers of textile production. It wıll analyze the patterns of population change to determine the extent of labor mobility between settlements -especially instances of movement from villages into çiftliks and rural textile centers- to identify short- and long-term labor migration patterns. The overall project objective is to investigate the relationship between peasant dispossession, çiftlik formation, and textile production. Archival sources include Ottoman tax and property registers, population surveys, and court registers, will be combined and analyzed via GIS tools to make it possible to investigate the rural history of the district, establish a comparative framework with other regions, and contribute to the literature on the dynamics of the economic history of the Ottoman as well as post-Ottoman Balkan world. These methods will shed new light upon the çiftlik debate, given that Ottoman tax and property surveys have been under-utilized in historiography, and contain a wealth of information that promises much richer and more detailed understanding of the significance of the phenomenon.