The days when the study of Ottoman economic history consisted primarily in the grinding out of the quantitative data embedded in the early modern period tax registers of the empire are shown in this volume to be behind us. The dedicated labour of earlier scholars has resulted in a body of research that enables its contributors to infuse the economic history of Anatolia with piquant interest for the non-specialist. The content of its nine chapters ranges in time from the thirteenth century to the twentieth.
The book opens with a beguiling poem by a late fourteenth-century rural dervish who conjures up a land of milk and honey which, while it reveals the objects of gastronomic desire at that time, defies the exigencies imposed by reality. And reality was brutal: taxation, the unwarranted demands of officials, the burden of supplying passing troops, the rampage of the disaffected – notably the Celali rebels of the long seventeeth century – banditry, adverse weather and pestilence. This was the environment in which the Anatolian peasantry struggled to work the land and to survive.
Earlier research has shown that grain production dominated agriculture in much of sixteenth-century Anatolia, but we learn in Mehmed Öz's chapter of the perhaps unsurprising significance of animal husbandry in central Anatolia, along with an array of other agricultural produce, late in this century. Öz usefully presents the detailed results of his analysis of the local tax registers with tables and pie-charts, a welcome step that some earlier writers on similar topics often neglected to take. Looking further back in time, to around 1530, Metin Coşgel and Sadullah Yıldırım data-crunch published tax registers for wide swathes of Anatolia with the help of the now-available tools of spatial analysis to reveal the geographic distribution of indicators of economic activity such as tax-paying population, local markets and caravanserais. Their research results in a series of maps that offer the basis for new questions about Anatolia's economy. That both papers are limited to discrete times and spaces underlines the potential of such registers to enhance our deeper understanding of the empire's economy. GIS has opened up unimagined horizons, and the task ahead is both daunting and exciting.
Kate Fleet returns in her chapter to her early interest in Ottoman–Genoese relations. She explores trade in northern Anatolia and across the Black Sea until the perhaps inevitable demise of Genoa's settlements on both coasts following the fall of Constantinople. She traces the vicissitudes of trade over a century and a half, its patterns determined by politics and warfare. Exports from Anatolia included grain, alum, and wine, while imports from the north included fish, leather and hides and, famously, slaves, and from the west, cloth, soap and wine. Alongside grain and slaves, copper mined in northern Anatolia was a dominant trade commodity, being used for coins and in the casting of cannons. These mines were controlled by the İsfendiyaroğulları emirate, which the Ottomans left in place for a while as a tributary state; the mines were worked by slaves, who were also dispersed further afield.
Chapters on copper and cotton follow. Suraiya Faroqhi searches for elusive and hard-to-interpret mentions of copper in the written record, bringing these together with surviving vessels, both original and recycled; she observes that assigning date or provenance is fraught with difficulty. Faroqhi notes that while cannon-casting was the foremost use for copper, individuals were also able to possess copper vessels. She is particularly interested in women's ownership and, although she can point us towards specific, but illuminating, instances of women's agency in regard to possession of copperware, her essay suggests that it is as yet too early for the nuanced understanding of its production, ownership and use that her wide-ranging researches into so many other aspects of women's lifeways have yielded.
Elena Frangakis-Syrett examines the role of cotton in the west Anatolian economy in the late Ottoman period on the basis of French and British archival sources – which begs the question of whether relevant Ottoman sources for the telling of this history exist. She finds that cotton remained competitive despite the turmoil of the times and fluctuations in market behaviour, and demonstrates that local producers and merchants alike were canny and knowledgeable operators in both the home and international markets, diversifying into a variety of other commodities, such as opium, dried fruit, and carpets, as conditions demanded. Unfortunately this chapter lacks visual representations of the crunched data comparable to those gracing the chapters of Öz and Coşgel-Yıldırım, and which so greatly enhance their impact.
It is often thought that meat – lamb – for the Ottoman capital was all but entirely sourced from the Balkans. The chapter by Yonca Köksal and Mehmet Polatel is a salient corrective to this view, and examines the supply of meat to Istanbul between the late eighteenth and late nineteenth centuries by the semi-nomadic, Kurdish, Cihanbeyli tribe, whose pastures were in the province of Ankara. Despite the liberal economic regime heralded by the Treaty of Baltalimanı in 1838, and the ending of meat supplies for Istanbul residents in 1857 (supply to the army and palace continued) as well as the forced sedentarization of Anatolian tribes at mid-century, the Cihanbeyli adapted, and profitably continued to trade under new conditions. The opening of the Istanbul–Ankara–Konya railway in the last years of the nineteenth century barely dented their business, and the Cihanbeyli continued to monopolize the coveted post of tacirbaşı (head trader), namely the officer responsible for the collection and transport of sheep to Istanbul, until its abolition around 1900.
The final two chapters, although full of interest, almost seem to fall outside the promise of the book's title. Ebru Boyar's chapter on the piyango (lottery) in early twentieth-century İzmir teaches us much about the origins and functioning of this means of making, if not a living, perhaps at least a tidy sum. Her narrative proves to be a tale of political skulduggery, whereby a grand vezir manoeuvred long and hard to discredit the governor responsible for Izmir for the purpose of channelling lottery moneys instead to state coffers. Although the charges did not stick, the saga culminated in Sultan Abdülhamid's empire-wide ban on lotteries in 1906. Marc Aymes' concluding chapter draws on close reading of two post-Tanzimat documents to suggest that the supposed order and predictability introduced into Ottoman governance with this reform were a mirage: “uncertainty management” continued to be a necessary skill required of petitioners, as the authorities laboriously worked towards resolution or otherwise of their complaint or enquiry.
This volume compellingly demonstrates the capaciousness of Ottoman economic history today. The contributions it contains enrich our understanding of a field of enquiry where so much remains to be done.
