The title of this interesting book is somewhat misleading. The complex process of the transformation of Ottoman subjects into citizens of the Principality and later Kingdom of Bulgaria involving education, military service, and public engagement with other state processes receives little attention here. Instead, the author focuses on the judicial issues concerning land holdings and transference during the period of the revived Bulgarian state, especially in the ephemeral region of Eastern Rumelia, which is now the southern area of Bulgaria. As a part of the issues of land ownership transference, the author also examines the wider consequences of the emigration of the Turkish and other Muslim minorities of Bulgaria to Turkey.

The Great Powers established the autonomous Ottoman province of Eastern Rumelia at the Congress of Berlin in 1878 as a means to limit the nationalist and territorial ambitions of the new Principality of Bulgaria and its Russian patron. A Christian governor general based in Plovdiv administered the province for the Ottoman sultan. The real value of Anna Mirkova's work is its focus on the issues of land tenure for the Turkish, Bulgarian, and Pomak (Bulgarian-speaking Muslim) populations during the transition from Ottoman rule to the state authorities in Eastern Rumelia and, after its unification with the Principality of Bulgaria in 1885, to the national government in Sofia. The author uses Ottoman and Bulgarian archival materials as well as Bulgarian and modern Turkish sources to great effect to examine the efforts of the authorities in Plovdiv and Sofia to establish control over the legal aspects of land transference. She is careful to relate this material to the various incarnations of Bulgarian governments after 1885. The Eastern Rumelian and Bulgarian authorities adopted and modified Ottoman structures for Bulgarian purposes in their regulation of land transference, especially from Turks emigrating from Eastern Rumelia and Bulgaria to the Ottoman Empire after the end of direct Ottoman rule in 1878. Three types of Ottoman land ownership that continued into the Bulgarian era receive particular attention here. These were state-owned land, freehold land, and land endowed for charitable purposes (vakifs). Mirkova's narrative establishes the basis by which the Eastern Rumelian authorities and later the Bulgarian government attempted to control the transference of land from the old, elite Ottoman owners to the much more egalitarian Bulgarian ones. The Bulgarian government perceived in this transference the process of modernization in discarding the old Ottoman forms of land ownership and adopting standards based upon western European law. She continues this narrative into the twentieth century up until the eve of the Second World War. Many of the legal issues that began in the late nineteenth century persisted well into the twentieth. This time frame also allows her to address the efforts of the Agrarian Stamboliiski government in Bulgaria to settle refugees from the war era on the land. Mirkova also considers the impact of the Ataturk regime in post-Ottoman Turkey on the Muslim populations of Bulgaria. The transition to the Latin script decreed by the Ankara government aroused some concerns across the frontier in Bulgaria among the conservative elements of the remaining Muslim population.

One opportunity the author misses is an examination of the policies of the government of Vasil Radoslavov in Bulgaria towards the Muslim populations of the Thracian lands conquered by the Bulgarians during the First Balkan War of 1912–13 by confirming Ottoman privileges. Radoslavov did this to ease the loyalties of these Muslims to Constantinople and to secure their votes for the Radoslavov government in the 1914 parliamentary elections. Also overlooked here, perhaps because of the paucity of cases, are questions of land tenure involving the Greek minority of Eastern Rumelia.

This is an excellent study for those who wish to understand the legal processes by which the Bulgarian nationalist order replaced the imperial Ottoman establishment in the agricultural economy. Overall Mirkova demonstrates the determination of the revived Bulgarian state to maintain its authority over a system of land ownership based upon law and to use this authority to develop or modernize the agricultural segment of the economy, even if this law was not always exercised fairly to Bulgaria's Muslim minorities.