This chapter concentrates on the last resort of the peasantry in the face of the high cost of living and exploitation and coercion by local state agents and dominants. Although direct confrontation was generally avoided, the peasants, when faced with no other alternative, did not hesitate to violate their oppressors. Although historians considered the Anatolian countryside calm and passive due to the rarity of open and massive peasant movements, rural unrest manifested itself through fighting for scarce resources, theft of crops and livestock, attacks on oppressive individuals and the wave of banditry that swept all of Anatolia during the period. This chapter argues that in contrast to the literature, rural crimes and banditry as the most explicit form of rural crimes were predominantly a component of peasants' struggle for survival and their resistance to social injustice rather than a tool of Kurdish nationalist groups or tribal reactions.

This chapter examines how the peasants who were discontented with the state policies, taxes, monopolies, local exploitation and oppression expressed their criticism and made their voices heard through letters to the press, petitions to official authorities, placards, rumors and folk culture. It traces the peasants’ complaints about agricultural prices, agricultural loans, interest rates, landlessness, taxes, monopolies, enclosure of forests and grazing lands, bureaucratic malfeasance, exploitation and oppression by large landowners, village headmen and gendarmes. It also evaluates how popular demands and complaints influenced the state’s decision-making.