Villageless: The Lost Women of Legal Pluralism in Revolutionary Europe

As the legally pluralistic world of empire unraveled in nineteenth century Europe, and new centralized political structures took form, what happened to women? Neither subjects, national members, nor citizens in their own right, women held a liminal legal status and often fell between cracks as early legal forms developed and new ideas of political belonging were negotiated on the ground. Drawing upon cases of fugitive and manumitted enslaved women, runaway wives, and women seeking divorce in Ottoman Serbia in the early nineteenth century, this paper explores the ways that women’s legal place became tethered to village and household in the transformation from empire to nationalizing states. It explores how patriarchal systems moved along with households in the twists and turns of legally pluralistic societies, and suggests that we might think of villagelessness – the act of being unclaimed by village or household -- as an early form of statelessness.