Ottoman Historiography and the Seventeenth Century Crisis, or

Where is the Ottoman Empire in the Great Divergence Debate?

Christopher Rose
HIS 381, Spring 2014
When I originally sat down to write this essay, my intention was to situate the Ottoman Empire

within the speculative narratives of the so-called “Great Divergence” of early modernity. Authors such as

Kenneth Pomeranz, Prassanan Parthasarati, Andre Gunder Frank and others have sought to explain the

question of why Great Britain alone was able to achieve industrialization despite the fact that, in the pre-

modern era, it shared demographic, economic, and many ecological factors with a number of regions

around the world (the Yangtze Delta, Japan, and parts of South Asia being the usual suspects).1 If

searching for a potential candidate, it seems as though the Ottoman state, which Charles Issawi boldly

asserted was “probably the best-governed state in the world” at the dawn of the 17th century, must surely

be a contender.2 Indeed, the Ottoman Empire may be compared with the other great agrarian empires of

Eurasia at the time: Ming (and later Qing) China, Mughal India, Safavid Persia, and later Muscovy and

Tokugawa Japan, among others.3 Despite this, the Ottoman state is given no consideration in the above

analyses—Pomeranz does not mention it, and Parthasarathi dismisses the empire from his analysis with a

single sentence.

As I delved into research, however, it soon became clear that scholarly consideration of the place

of the Ottoman Empire within the larger world-system or world-economy has been overshadowed by a

conflict within the larger field of Ottoman historiography itself, much of which involves how to

understand a series of economic, demographic, and political disasters in the Empire that has come to be

1
Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence : Europe, China, and the Making of the Modern World Economy,
Princeton Economic History of the Western World. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000); Prasannan
Parthasarathi, Why Europe Grew Rich and Asia Did Not : Global Economic Divergence, 1600-1850 (Cambridge ;
New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011); Andre Gunder Frank, Reorient : Global Economy in the Asian Age
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998).
2
Charles Philip Issawi, The Economic History of the Middle East, 1800-1914; a Book of Readings (Chicago,:
University of Chicago Press, 1966), 23.
3
Sam White, The Climate of Rebellion in the Early Modern Ottoman Empire, Studies in Environment and History
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 18.
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known as the Seventeenth Century Crisis and the role that it played in the underdevelopment of the

Ottoman economy.

What follows is an examination of how Ottoman studies has dealt with the Crisis and the way that

it seems to have irrevocably altered the Empire’s ability to compete with Europe. The field of Ottoman

studies itself represents a veritable minefield of political and economic sensibilities, and I have divided it

into three and a half paradigms: The Classicists (and the Neoclassicists), the Revisionists, and the Post-

Revisionists. These schools have examined the same events with differing (if not entirely opposing)

interpretations of the way in which the Ottoman state and its economy functioned; the way in which the

state was able to deal with the rise of European mercantilism and nurture proto-capitalist responses to it;

and the way in which the Ottoman Empire integrated with the larger world economy around it.

I propose that the question around which must Classical and Revisionist scholarship is based—

that of, “Why did the Ottoman Empire not industrialize?”—is fundamentally flawed, and that, while the

same question is examined by Post-Revisionist scholars it has become a secondary question to “Did the

Ottoman empire need to industrialize?” This new wave of scholarship, which includes examinations of

geographic and environmental factors that played a role in the Seventeenth Century Crisis and the

Empire’s slow recovery from it have finally begun to provide us with a deeper understanding of the

Empire’s internal functions and the role of external European factors in determining the eventual fate of

the Ottoman state itself.

T HE F ACTS

The Ottoman state was established toward the end of the 13th century in western Anatolia as a

loose confederation of tribes of various ethnicities and religious affiliations all under the nominal control

of the Osmanlı,4 a tribe of Oğuz Turks who had migrated out of Central Asia over the course of the

4
See “A note on the pronunciation of Turkish,” page 23.
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previous two centuries.5 The Ottoman Empire, as it came to be known, conquered the rump of the

Byzantine state and much of the Balkans before taking Constantinople in 1453 and establishing it as their

third and final capital. Shortly thereafter, the Empire reached its territorial height with the conquest of the

Levant and finally Egypt, which brought the holy cities of Mecca and Medina as well as the lucrative

Indian Ocean trade under Ottoman suzerainty.6 With the conquest of Egypt, the title of caliph of Islam

was conferred upon reigning Ottoman sultans until its abolition in 1923.

Over the course of the 16th century, the population of the Ottoman Empire accelerated

dramatically along with agricultural production, as did the population of much of Europe and the

Mediterranean basin. It has been speculated that the population of the Anatolian heartland and the

Balkans may have been as high as 35 million by the 1580s, up from 12 million in the 1520s. 7 At the same

time, there was a dramatic increase in urban population vis-á-vis rural population—it is estimated that

Istanbul’s population may have grown by half if not doubled between 1550 and 1642, and most of the

major Anatolian and Arab provincial capitals seem to have grown at around the same rate. Over the

course of the 17th century, however, population growth—and, indeed, the population itself—declined

precipitously and would not return to is previous levels for almost two centuries.8 In some areas of rural

Anatolia, the number of households fell by as much as 80 per cent during the first half of the seventeenth

5
The empire is named for the dynasty’s founder, Osman—Osmanlı devlet meaning “house of Osman”—which is
the Turkified version of the Arabic name Uthman (whose spelling it shares in the Perso-Arabic script used prior to
1927), the name of the third caliph of Islam. It is believed to have been an Italian corruption of the latter that gave
rise to the Europeanized “Ottoman.”
6
On the latter, see: Giancarlo Casale, The Ottoman Age of Exploration (Oxford ; New York: Oxford University
Press, 2010).
7
Ömer Lütfi Barkan, "Essai Sur Les Données Statistiques De Régistres De Recensement Dans L'empire Ottoman
Aux Xve Et Xvie Siècles," Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 1 (1958); "Research on the
Ottoman Fiscal Surveys," in Studies in the Social and Economic History of the Middle East, ed. M. A. Cook
(London: Oxford University Press, 1970); Halil İnalcık, "Impact of the Annales School on Ottoman Studies and
New Findings [with Discussion]," Review (Fernand Braudel Center) 1, no. 3/4 (1978); White, The Climate of
Rebellion in the Early Modern Ottoman Empire, Ch 2.
8
This has, lamentably, been accompanied by a break in archival records – pre-1600 population figures are much
more available than post-1600 figures.
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century, with 30-40 per cent of villages in some provinces left completely emptied.9 Around the same

time, agricultural production shifted away from the use of certain crops and toward others (possibly the

result of new crops introduced via the Columbian exchange), and the agricultural lands were abandoned

and left to re-desertify in the semi-arid climate, many of which would not be reclaimed for over a century.

The Seventeenth Century Crisis also witnessed a major armed rebellion (the Celali rebellion) that lasted

for several decades, along with some of the Ottoman army’s most spectacular defeats on the never-ending

front with the Habsburg Empire. The crisis and the governmental response have been interpreted and

explained in several different ways, mostly reflecting the controversies in the field of Ottoman

historiography itself.

There are two factors of the Ottoman economic structure prior to the Crisis that have lent

themselves to varying interpretations. The first is that the Ottoman state maintained a command economic

system in which manufacturing, quotas, and the flow of goods (and services) were tightly controlled by

the state. Such commodity flow was well regulated, and intended to provide the peasantry and agricultural

classes with adequate provisions, while the remainder was siphoned for “the necessity of provisioning

Istanbul,” the latter clause being enshrined in law.10 The provisioning of the military in whichever active

deployment it might find itself at the time was also a key concern, and this was handled via the allotment

portioned to the capitol.11 The failure of this command economic system to support the population during

the Crisis (and the Celali rebellion that followed), along with the state’s shift towards encouraging

mercantilism in port cities coupled with the implementation of an intensive system of tax farming over the

18th century, were often presumed to be tacit admission on the part of the Ottoman leadership that the

command economic structure had failed—most likely the cause of the Crisis—and that it needed to be

replaced with a proto-capitalist structure inspired by European models.

9
Oktay Özel, "Population Changes in Ottoman Anatolia During the 16th and 17th Centuries: The 'Demographic
Crisis' Reconsidered," International Journal of Middle East Studies 36 (2004); White, The Climate of Rebellion in
the Early Modern Ottoman Empire, 207-11.
10
Huri İslamoğlu-İnan, The Ottoman Empire and the World-Economy, Studies in Modern Capitalism (Cambridge;
New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 50.
11
White, The Climate of Rebellion in the Early Modern Ottoman Empire, 17.
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Second, the central treasury set price ceilings (narh) on all commodities traded within the empire.

The narh was not an arbitrary figure, but was calculated in such a way that producers should earn enough

to make a living, but buyers should be able to acquire them at a reasonable price. “To let a commodity

grow expensive would not encourage producers to make more, it was supposed, but would only drive

speculation and harm consumers.”12 Given this price regulation, the arrival of foreign commodities in

regional ports throughout Anatolia and the Levant whose prices could not be controlled by the state, and,

from the mid-16th century onward, priced and often paid for in foreign currency (the Spanish real) outside

the control of the state treasury is believed to have caused significant damage to the state provisioning

system by providing a disincentive for guilds and manufacturers to continue supplying the state.

In the 19th century, a series of economic and political reforms collectively known as the Tanzimat

were enacted, with mixed success. As part of the reformist campaign, the empire became mired in foreign

debt over the latter half of the 19th century, before making the fatal choice to align with the Central

Powers in World War I against Britain and France (not coincidentally the Empire’s two primary foreign

creditors).

The driving questions of Ottoman history are as follows:13

1. How adaptable was the Ottoman state and society in the early modern era?
2. Were there indigenous or internal social, economic, and/or intellectual processes displaying signs
of “modernity” prior to the advent of the West, or were they mostly imports or imitations?
3. What was the comparability of the Ottoman state and society with their counterparts elsewhere in
the world at the same time?
4. How can we best construct a framework that would take into account and explain the
phenomenon of the 17th to 18th century period?
Let us turn now to the question of how the above events have been subjected to different

interpretations and explanations by various waves of scholarship.

12
Ibid., 22.
13
Adapted from Dana Sajdi, "Decline and Its Discontents," in Ottoman Tulips, Ottoman Coffee: Leisure and
Lifetsyle in the Eighteenth Century, ed. Dana Sajdi (London: I. B. Tauris, 2007), 6.
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T HE C LASSICISTS AND N EOCLASSICISTS 14

The first major phase of Ottoman historiography, what I refer to as Classical Ottoman Studies,

has deep roots within the base of traditional Orientalist scholarship as well as the prevailing post-World

War II economic model of modernization theory.15 The field of Oriental studies itself (later subdivided

into Middle Eastern and Asian Studies and then further subdivided into more specialized fields) was an

outgrowth of the study of linguistics, and tended to rely on a textual analysis of documentation and core

readings that were assumed to be representative of a certain mindset—the “Oriental Mind”—that guided

all decision making processes and could be counted upon to explain individual or collective behavior in

any given time or setting.16 The opening by the Turkish Republic of the Ottoman archives to foreign

researchers after World War II spurred on the first wave of scholarship from outside—notably H.A.R.

Gibb, Harold Bowen, and Bernard Lewis, along with the Turkish scholar Halil İnalcık.17 The questions

that these scholars sought to answer, and the history they sought to construct, was based largely on

Europe’s last encounter with the empire as a weakened shell of itself in the 19th century, the so-called

Sick Man of Europe.

The result was a narrative focusing on the Ottoman state’s failure to compete with the

economically advanced, technologically superior, and culturally dominating western world. It emphasized

the overall decline of the empire from the end of the 16th century—the time of Issawi’s optimistic

pronouncement heralding a Golden Age—to its economic and de facto political domination by Europe in

14
The classifications of the phases of Ottoman scholarship are my own as there are no standardized names for them:
Sajdi refers to them as the decline / anti-decline / post-anti-decline paradigms; Emrence prefers economic terms.
15
Cem Emrence, Remapping the Ottoman Middle East Modernity, Imperial Bureaucracy and the Islamic State,
(London: I.B.Tauris, 2011). 15.
16
This broader historiography is covered in Zachary Lockman, Contending Visions of the Middle East : The History
and Politics of Orientalism, 2nd ed., The Contemporary Middle East (Cambridge, UK ; New York: Cambridge
University Press, 2010).
17
Niyazi Berkes, The Development of Secularism in Turkey (Montreal: McGill University Press, 1964), microform;
H. A. R. Gibb and Harold Bowen, Islamic Society and the West; a Study of the Impact of Western Civilization on
Moslem Culture in the near East (London, New York,: Oxford University Press, 1950); Halil İnalcık, The Ottoman
Empire : The Classical Age 1300-1600 (London: Phoenix Press, 2000); Bernard Lewis, The Emergence of Modern
Turkey, 2nd ed., Oxford Paperbacks No 135 (London, New York etc.: issued under the auspices of the Royal
Institute of International Affairs by Oxford U.P., 1968).
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the 19th century. This declensionist narrative usually emphasizes the role of authoritarian sultans,

decadent institutions and a lack of effective leadership beginning around 1600.18 Most Classical Ottoman

historians tend to approach the topic of decline by equating modernity and progress with centralizing,

secularizing, or statist policies—the same factors and policies that were indicators of similar reforms in

Europe—which assumes a one-size-fits-all approach to political reform (in other words, that European

reform models should apply to and function in the Ottoman state as they did in Europe).19

In the Classical paradigm, the Seventeenth Century Crisis and its aftermath is seen as a time of

internal chaos in the Ottoman Empire, based around a struggle for political domination between two

opposing forces: the reactionaries (conservative, religious, provincial authorities stuck in a “backward”

mindset often rendered “typical” of the “Islamic mind”) and the progressives (elite, military, centralizing

forces trying to remake the empire in the image of Europe). The inability for any one side to prevail in

this struggle paralyzed the central government and locked it into upholding economic policies that were

ineffective, thus resulting in the economic, demographic, and political changes seen in the Seventeenth

Century Crisis. The illiberalism and command nature of the Ottoman system could not compete with the

increasing laissez-faire mercantilism-capitalism of Europe, and the former ultimately collapsed under the

weight of its own decadence and mismanagement, as well as internal opposition from strong political

factions within the state. Over the course of the 18th and 19th centuries, various reforms were attempted

along European and capitalist lines—such as the tax farming implemented over the 18th century and the

Tanzimat reforms of the 19th century—but these reforms were only partially implemented due to the push

and pull between the two opposing groups, represented as factions at court in the Ottoman archives whose

debates were captured for posterity.

18
V. Necla Geyikdağı, Foreign Investment in the Ottoman Empire : International Trade and Relations 1854-1914,
Library of Ottoman Studies (London ; New York: Tauris Academic Studies, 2011), 1; Issawi, The Economic History
of the Middle East, 1800-1914; a Book of Readings, 23.
19
White, The Climate of Rebellion in the Early Modern Ottoman Empire, 3; İslamoğlu-İnan, The Ottoman Empire
and the World-Economy, 42.
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The Classical School and its Neoclassical offspring focus on a systemic failure of the Ottoman

Empire to change and adapt over time to new economic conditions, or to take advantage of (or propose)

new technological or systemic innovations in order to compete with Europe; in short, the empire was not

equipped for modernization on an essential, systemic level and thus destined for failure. As Halil İnalcık

explains:

The Ottoman Empire was a Middle Eastern state and the dominant mentality in such
states was to leave society unchanged. Only then would there be peace and prosperity in
the country. The economic structure was based on the principle of increasing the
revenues of the state without impoverishing the people, and for this end the social order
was to remain as it was.20

While world-systems theory had not yet been proposed at the time that the bulk of the Classical

scholarship was written, it seems likely that the Classicists would agree with Immanuel Wallerstein’s

placement of the Ottoman economy outside of the world-economy entirely. This assumption of the

eternal, unchanging nature of the Middle Eastern state, and a dogged insistence on sticking to textual law

even in the face of all common sense and dire need among the population is a hallmark of Orientalist

scholarship and was the subject of significant invective by Edward Said in Orientalism. Under such

circumstances, the question of the Ottoman Empire’s ability to act with agency in the world economy

(such as it was envisioned at the time), or of its potential to industrialize, was a non-starter. The Ottoman

administration’s refusal to fully commit to a reform of its economic system along capitalist lines—

instead, adopting certain proto-capitalist institutions while failing to implement others—were proof

positive of this eternal mindset and an inherent inability to change.

The Neoclassical school shares many of the hallmarks of the Classical school, but focuses on

economic structural causes (rather than political causes) for the Ottoman Empire’s inability to adapt; as V.

Necla Geyikdağı states bluntly, “In the Middle Eastern state the adaptation to changing conditions and

20
Halil İnalcık, "The Ottoman Economic Mind and Aspects of the Ottoman Economy," in Studies in the Economic
History of the Middle East from the Rise of Islam to the Present Day, ed. M. A. Cook (London: Oxford University
Press, 1970), 207.
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times was out of the question.”21 Timur Kuran focuses on the mechanisms of Islamic finance, theorizing

that the inflexibility of the Islamic legal code and its injunctions against, for example, the charging or

raising of interest (forbidden as usury), and the legal mechanisms known as waqfs, 22 which served as tax

shelters, discouraged capital investment thereby stunting the ability of any Islamic government or system

to adequately compete with the proto-capitalism developing in Europe, or to attempt the implementation

of similar economic models at home. Not even the caliph of Islam himself, it is supposed, was able to

surmount the strict adherence of sharia law even when faced with military uprisings and civilian

discontent.23

Both schools have been criticized, however, for assuming that the Ottoman system strictly

adhered to dogmatic principles that can be read through juristic texts (as does İnalcık) or treasury

documents (as does Kuran) and that such documents from the state archive can be assumed to speak for

what was going on within the entirety of the empire at all levels. Further, such insistence on textual

documentation has led numerous scholars—İnalcık, Kuran, and Geyikdağı among them—to suggest that

the central government would obstinately pursue policies for either religious or political ideology’s sake

to the exclusion and potential harm of the Empire, even in the face of political opposition, armed

uprisings, and foreign encroachment.

To summarize, the Classicists focus on a linear development model for the Ottoman Empire,

beginning with the command economic system that failed around 1600. In trying to recover from this

21
Geyikdağı, Foreign Investment in the Ottoman Empire : International Trade and Relations 1854-1914, 4.
22
Waqf (pl. awqaf, Turkish: Vakf; vulgar plural: waqfs) is a legal trust in which a donor can circumvent Islamic
restrictions and probate on the hereditary disposition of property by establishing and endowing some sort of
benevolence institution—a school, fountain, mosque, soup kitchen, etc. (often with specific provisions for the hiring
of family members or benefactors in administrative positions). Kuran argues that the lack of regulation of the waqf
system, as well as legal mechanisms that prevented the state from collecting taxes or seizing the assets of a waqf
whose endowment could no longer sustain it, prevented waqfs from acting as capital that could be used as collateral
for investment; instead they were tax shelters in which pockets of money could be stashed outside the reach of
government and benefit to local economies. However, within the Hanafi school of Sunni law (which predominates
in Anatolia) there is evidence to suggest that some Hanafi waqfs functioned like banks, distributing loans to citizens
and driving investment. See: Timur Kuran, "The Provision of Public Goods under Islamic Law: Origins, Impact, and
Limitations of the Waqf System," Law & Society Review 35, no. 4 (2001); Murat Çizakça, "Cash Waqfs of Bursa,
1555-1823," Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 38, no. 3, The Waqf (1995).
23
Timur Kuran, The Long Divergence : How Islamic Law Held Back the Middle East (Princeton ; Oxford: Princeton
University Press, 2011).
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failure, the Empire was unable or unwilling to adopt capitalism wholeheartedly, and the system as a

whole was paralyzed as the result of an internal struggle between reformers and traditionalists. Even

those reforms that were enacted were never wholeheartedly endorsed by the entire administration and so

doomed to failure. Europe industrialized while the Ottoman Empire languished and could never catch up,

eventually being dominated economically by Europe and meeting its eventual end in the Treaties of

Versailles and Sévres.

T HE A NNALES S CHOOL AND THE O TTOMAN R EVISIONISTS

Even before the rise of the Annales school, the classical wave of Ottomanist scholarship inspired

a number of reactions questioning the validity of the Classicist paradigm. The Annales school and its

influence on the field of history brought about an eventual sea change in Ottoman historiography. In his

foundational work, Fernand Braudel defines a world-economy as “a sum of individualized areas,

economic and non-economic, which it brings together; that it represents a very large surface area (in

theory the largest coherent zone at a given period, in a given part of the globe); and that it usually goes

beyond the boundaries of other great historical divisions.24” Despite the possibility that the European

world-economy would include the large empire on its southeast border, Braudel did not give it due

consideration:

[C]ommercial life in Turkey still had some archaic features … the reason was that
money, the sinews of western trade, usually made only fleeting appearances in the
Turkish Empire. Part of it found its ways to the ever-open jaws of the sultan’s treasury,
some of it was used to oil the wheels of top-level trade, and the rest drained away in
massive quantities to the Indian Ocean. The west was correspondingly free to use its
monetary superiority on the Levant market…”25

Nevertheless, Braudel’s study allowed an entrée into the field for Ottoman historians who

disdained the Classical approach that denied the Ottoman state and economy agency and place in the

24
Fernand Braudel, Civilization and Capitalism, 15th-18th Century, 1st U.S. ed., 3 vols. (New York: Harper &
Row, 1982), 3: 24.
25
Ibid., 473.
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larger story of European rise and Ottoman decline. Prior to the so-called “Wallersteinian turn”, Halil

İnalcık recognized the Annales school’s possible contributions to the field of Ottoman Studies

(particularly Braudel’s La Méditerranée) and recognized that it could help to formulate not only a new

theory about the seventeenth century demographic and economic crisis, but also that it could help to

formulate a new theory of change within the empire itself.26 Ömer Lütfi Barkan, perhaps one of the most

influential scholars of Ottoman economic history, suggested that the growth of an Atlantic economy, with

the demand for raw materials and purchasing power, was one of the reasons for the price shocks and

inflation that seemed to precipitate the Crisis, but also its failure to develop thereafter.27

Similarly, Immanuel Wallerstein did not initially consider the Ottoman Empire in his analysis. In

the prologue to the 2011 edition of The Modern World-System, Wallerstein admits:

…I sought to specify how one could tell the difference between a peripheral zone of the
world-economy and the external arena. The basic argument was that one could
distinguish trade in bulk goods and trade in preciosities, the former but not the latter
being based on unequal exchange … Using this distinction, I suggested specific
boundaries. Poland and Hungary were part of the modern world-system in the sixteenth
century. Russia and the Ottoman Empire were not. Brazil was within, and the Indian
subcontinent outside.28

In response both to Wallerstein’s omission as well as the influence of the Classicist school, a

second wave of Revisionist Ottoman scholarship arose, seeking to recast the sixteenth and seventeenth

centuries as eras of “transformation” or even “privatization” and “proto-democratization”29 and focus on

26
İnalcık, "Impact of the Annales School on Ottoman Studies and New Findings [with Discussion]."
27
Barkan, "Research on the Ottoman Fiscal Surveys."
28
Immanuel Maurice Wallerstein, The Modern World-System I Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the
European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century, with a New Prologue (Berkeley: University of California Press,
2011), 23.
29
Among the prominent works in this revisionist wave are: Rifaʻat Ali Abou-El-Haj, Formation of the Modern State
: The Ottoman Empire, Sixteenth to Eighteenth Centuries, Suny Series in the Social and Economic History of the
Middle East (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991); Karen Barkey, Bandits and Bureaucrats : The
Ottoman Route to State Centralization, The Wilder House Series in Politics, History, and Culture (Ithaca, N.Y.:
Cornell University Press, 1994); Empire of Difference : The Ottomans in Comparative Perspective (Cambridge ;
New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008); Linda T. Darling, Revenue-Raising and Legitimacy : Tax Collection
and Finance Administration in the Ottoman Empire, 1560-1660, The Ottoman Empire and Its Heritage, (Leiden ;
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the Ottoman Empire’s gradual integration into the periphery of the world-system.30 Although such work

had been published since the 1950s, the seminal piece of the Revisionist paradigm is a co-authored piece

by Huri İslamoğlu-İnan and Çağlar Keyder titled “An Agenda for Ottoman History” (1977)31 This article

directly takes on the assertions of the Classical school (singling out three titles for specific criticism) and

proposes a rethinking of Ottoman History along the lines of the Annales school.32 İslamoğlu-İnan and

Keyder assert that the Classicist paradigm is too focused on institutions and statist policies, as it

adheres to the institutional framework of analysis. They, too, are faced with the problem
of providing an explanation for the coherence of an unintegrated set of institutions.
Consisted with the choice of their unit of analysis – that of civilization with an Islamic
essence – they assign the role of cementing the totality to religious ideology, i.e., Islam.
… Given this perspective of atomized civilizations, [they] assume that the Islamic society
lived in ‘isolation’ until its first real contact with the West in terms of the Napoleonic
invasion [of Egypt, 1798]. Therefore its decline can be explained in terms of the
‘dimunition in strength of the Islamic spirit.’33

This paragraph establishes two of the primary goals of the Revisionist scholarship: first, to move

away from the state institution as the key unit of analysis in Ottoman history, and, second, to challenge

the intertwined dual narrative of an isolated east that had to be forcibly incorporated into the world

economy after 1798, along with the previously discussed narrative of golden age and decline.

New York: E.J. Brill, 1996); Sevket Pamuk, A Monetary History of the Ottoman Empire, Cambridge Studies in
Islamic Civilization. (Cambridge ; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Ariel Salzmann, "Measures of
Empire: Tax Farmers and the Ottoman Ancien Régime 1695-1807" (PhD diss, Columbia University, 1995); Baki
Tezcan, The Second Ottoman Empire : Political and Social Transformation in the Early Modern World, Cambridge
Studies in Islamic Civilization (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010).
30
Emrence, Remapping the Ottoman Middle East Modernity, Imperial Bureaucracy and the Islamic State. 15.
31
Huri İslamoğlu-İnan and Çağlar Keyder, "Agenda for Ottoman History," Review (Fernand Braudel Center) 1, no.
1 (1977). It is perhaps worth noting that the article was heavily edited between its original publication in 1977 and
its reprint in 1987; in addition an introduction was added to the volume to address criticisms of the original article. ;
See: Huri İslamoğlu-İnan, "Introduction: 'Oriental Despotism' in World-System Perspective," in The Ottoman
Empire and the World-Economy, ed. Huri İslamoğlu-İnan, Studies in Modern Capitalism (Cambridge: University
Press, 1987).
32
Not coincidentally, both İslamoğlu-İnan and Keyder were students of Wallerstein.
33
Huri İslamoğlu-İnan and Çağlar Keyder, "Agenda for Ottoman History," in The Ottoman Empire and the World-
Economy, ed. Huri İslamoğlu-İnan, Studies in Modern Capitalism (Cambridge: University Press, 1987), 44-45;
Roger Owen, "The Middle East in the Eighteenth Century - an 'Islamic' Society in Decline: A Critique of Gibb and
Bowen's 'Islamic Society and the West'," Review of Middle East Studies 1 (1975).
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For their part, İslamoğlu-İnan and Keyder apply the economic theory of the Asian Model of

Production (AMP) to the Ottoman economy, which they define as

characterized by independent peasant production in which the peasants do not form

autonomous units but constitute components of a larger unit, the limits of which are
defined by the extent of the authority of the state. The peasant producer is integrated into
the larger unit through the delivery of his surplus in the form of taxes to the state and
through the ideological juridical apparatus that provides the matrix for the state's
extraction of agricultural surplus. Thus, this integration ensures a political determination
of the division of labor within the system.34

In the model proposed by İslamoğlu-İnan and Keyder, three systemic functions were achieved via

state control over internal trade and provisioning within the empire. First, mercantile activity and

accumulation of capital was controlled (unlike in the emerging models of contemporary Europe). Second,

through strict governmental controls on trade and manufacturing, which included the regulation that all

land belonged to the sultan, a certain division of labor was assured. This was intended to provide the

“surplus-receiving class” with the commodities required for their consumption (herein justifying the legal

provisioning of Istanbul, which could not support itself). Thirdly, internal trade within the empire

provided a link between the AMP (with its peasant producers and tax-collecting state officials) and petty

commodity production in urban guilds. Merchant capital was needed to articulate this connection, and

therefore the weakening of political control over the function of the economic system would threaten a

disarticulation – in other words, it would threaten the system itself.

This, it is argued, is precisely what happened during the 17th century crisis. The arrival of foreign

merchants in Anatolian and Levantine ports offering silver coinage at a higher price than the narh was at

its heart an incentive to circumvent administrative control (a double whammy, since the currency of

exchange was foreign silver outside the control of the state treasury). This development, İslamoğlu-İnan

and Keyder argue, is the story of the integration of the Ottoman world-empire into the periphery of the

34
İslamoğlu-İnan and Keyder, "Agenda for Ottoman History," 49.
Rose 14

larger world-economy.35 As this external trade developed, the Ottoman empire was integrated, not in a

production role, but as a supplier of raw goods and market for finished products that went to feed

Europe’s proto-capitalist projects. “Proto-industrialization, for example, because of its potential

competition with manufactured imports, would not be one of the evolving organizational forms … the

absence of proto-industrial activity is one of the differentiating factors characterizing the periphery.”36

Money was to be made outside of Ottoman lands—external trade became more valued than internal trade,

and so the domestic system entered a crisis.

In looking at the Seventeenth Century Crisis specifically, İslamoğlu-İnan (in particular) has

sought to avoid Malthusian implications, citing, among others, Ester Boserup as well as her own work on

the development of intensive horticulture in the empire, as well as crop diversification.37 Further, the

registry of new fields was ongoing throughout the population boom of the 16th century, suggesting that

the empire had not yet reached full agricultural capacity.38 A global inflationary crisis as well as a never-

ending war against the Habsburgs caused the state to increase tax burdens. Provincial governors, whose

retinues had grown large and costly during the boom years of the 16th century, were unable or unwilling

to comply. The fight over resources caused increased instability in the form of banditry and uprisings

against unfair policies, and peasants fled to safety, abandoning their lands, thus compounding the

situation. The state’s economic policies and measures taken to curb inflation were useless in the face of

provincial governors who refused to comply and would not be brought in line for decades. At that point,

however, the Ottoman economy was restructured, unwittingly concreting its peripheral role in the world-

35
This is a summary of the core argument in Ibid., 49-50.
36
Ibid., 55.
37
Ester Boserup, The Conditions of Agricultural Growth (London: Allen and Unwin, 1965).
38
Huri İslamoğlu-İnan, "M. A. Cook's "Population Pressure in Rural Anatolia 1450-1600:" A Critique of the Present
Paradigm in Ottoman History," Review of Middle East Studies 3 (1978); "Die Osmanische Landwirtzschaft Im
Anatolien Des 16. Jahrhunderts: Stagnation Oder Regionale Entwicklung?," Jahrbuch zur Geschichte und
Gesellschaft des Vorderen und Mittlern Orients (1985-86); "State and Peasants in the Ottoman Empire: A Study of
Peasant Economy in North-Central Anatolia During the 16th Century," in The Ottoman Empire and the World-
Economy, ed. Huri İslamoğlu-İnan (Cambridge: University Press, 1987); "Les Paysans, Le Marché Et L'état En
Anatolie Au Xvie Siècle," Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales 43 (1988); White, The Climate of Rebellion in the
Early Modern Ottoman Empire, 62, ff 50.
Rose 15

system, rather than resume its prior status as a world-empire that may have allowed it to proceed down

the path toward industrialization.

This is the basic narrative of the Revisionist school, with a few dissenters on various points.

Reşat Kasaba, for instance, argues that despite the arrival of foreign trade in the empire over the 17th

century, the empire remained detached from the world system until the early 19th century.39 In his

analysis, markets in the Ottoman Empire prior to the nineteenth century were either “subordinated to the

political priorities of the ruling class” or that the “independent relations of exchange were too marginal to

support an alternative order to the one dominated by the Ottoman ruling class.”40

Economic historian Şevket Pamuk suggests that the state role in economic policy is

overmphasized:

Ottoman interventionism became increasingly selective. It was used primarily for the
provisioning of the capital city and the army and selected commodities. Perhaps more
importantly, the narh came to be considered not as permanent policy but as an instrument
reserved for extraordniary conditions such as wars, exceptional difficulties in the
provisioning of the capital city, or periods of monetary instability.41

To summarize the Revisionist paradigm: the Classicists focused on the inability (or

unwillingness) of the Ottoman state to respond to outside economic forces and a dogged insistence on

maintaining a certain economic order, thus leadning to a permanent, irreversible decline from the

sixteenth century onward. The Revisionists, by contrast, recognize that the Ottoman state could, and did,

adapt to changes, but were unable to satisfactorily do so. Rising foreign trade, an inflationary crisis, and

the scramble for resources in the 16th and 17th century caused various groups—merchants, provisional

governors—to detach themselves from the state administered system in pursuit of higher profits. The

question of why the Ottoman Empire had failed to indistrialized can be answered by looking at the

39
Reşat Kasaba, The Ottoman Empire and the World Economy : The Nineteenth Century, Suny Series in Middle
Eastern Studies. (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988), 13.
40
Ibid., 6.
41
Pamuk, A Monetary History of the Ottoman Empire, xix.
Rose 16

seventeenth century crisis, and realizing that, after the administration was able to quell internal

disturbances and deal with external struggles, the Empire had been incorporated into the periphery of the

world-economy through provincial and Anatolian ports that were now set up to provide raw materials and

receive finished goods to and from Europe. Given the dire state of the Ottoman treasury, this easy access

to foreign and domestic profits provided a hearty replenishment of coffers, but turned out to be impossible

to reverse as the Empire’s position on the periphery of the world-economy became institutionalized.

The resulting paradigm for Ottoman Studies, that of peripheralization, grew to replace that of

decline as the prevailing mode of Ottoman Studies, which, as Dana Sajdi laments, “came to eclipse as

much as it clarified.”42 Perhaps chief among the frustrations was that the Revisionist narrative still

suggests that the Empire’s “internal conditions and the actions of its rulers and subjects were insignificant

in the face of an irresistible outside power that simply swept them into underdevelopment,” even if the

world-economy and world-systems theories can help us to realize that the failure of the Empire and other

parts of the Middle East to develop was linked to their resources being used to develop other parts of the

world.43 It successfully answers the question of how external factors played a role, but does not offer a

satisfactory picture of what was going on within the Empire itself.

T HE P OST -R EVISIONISTS

Since the establishement of the Revisionist paradigm, Ottoman historiography—like that of other

historical subfields—has moved in several directions that emphasize, among others, state formation,

gender studies,44 urban social history,45 intellectual history,46 and so on. Indeed, the NeoClassicists

described above are part of the Post-Revisionist phase, although I have included them with the Classicists

42
Sajdi, "Decline and Its Discontents," 13.
43
Cemal Kafadar, "The Question of Ottoman Decline," Harvard Middle East and Islamic Review 4 (1997-98): 50.
44
Leslie P. Peirce, The Imperial Harem : Women and Sovereignty in the Ottoman Empire, Studies in Middle Eastern
History. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993).
45
André Raymond, Artisans Et CommerçAnts Au Caire Au Xviiie SièCle, 2 vols. (Damas: Institut français de
Damas, 1973); Abraham Marcus, The Middle East on the Eve of Modernity: Aleppo in the Eighteenth Century (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1989).
46
Bernard Haykel, Revival and Reform in Islam : The Legacy of Muhammad Al-Shawkan̄ I ,̄ Cambridge Studies in
Islamic Civilization (Cambridge, UK ; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
Rose 17

for ease of discussion. The core of Post-Revisionist scholarship dealing with questions of the Empire’s

ability to develop are examined in writings by, among others, Cemal Kafadar, Dana Sajdi, and Sam

White, all of whom have argued that the second wave of scholarship may have been too hasty in its

reaction to what was seen as the Eurocentric orientaiton of the Classicist paradigm and that scholarship

needs to be pursued where the documentation leads regardless of whether it upholds a paradigm that has

fallen out of fashion.47 As White states bluntly, there are crucial developments “that historians need to

explain – not just explain away.”48

The Post-Revisionist paradigm is still very much in development, but the research that seems to

be offering a more nuanced understanding of the Crisis and the Empire’s response to it lies in the

subfields of economic history and environmental history. The Empire itself is being considered on more

macro levels. More frequently, studies have begun to deal with the Ottoman “core” (generally today’s

Repbulic of Turkey, occasionally including the Thracian region of what is now Greece and parts of

present-day Bulgaria),49 or with one of the provinces (the Levant is a frequent subject); Peter Gran has

published a study looking at proto-capitalism in Egypt prior to 1798.50 Economic historian Cem Emrence

considers the Ottoman core itself too expansive and unweidly and has divided it into three distinct regions

based on economic patterns, and offers a picture of a coastal economy that, by the 19th century, is clearly

based on capitalism and incorporated into the European economic structure.51

The ineffectiveness of the pre-1600 economy and the reasons for its failure in the Seventeenth

Century Crisis has been revisited and questioned:

It is crucial not to dismiss provisionism in this period as just some detour from a
supposed European capitalist rationality, as Ottomanists have tended to do. For a time,

47
Kafadar, "The Question of Ottoman Decline."; Sajdi, "Decline and Its Discontents."; White, The Climate of
Rebellion in the Early Modern Ottoman Empire.
48
White, The Climate of Rebellion in the Early Modern Ottoman Empire, 4.
49
Ibid.
50
Beshara Doumani, Rediscovering Palestine : Merchants and Peasants in Jabal Nablus, 1700-1900 (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1995); Peter Gran, Islamic Roots of Capitalism : Egypt, 1760-1840, Modern Middle
East Series No 4 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1979).
51
Emrence, Remapping the Ottoman Middle East Modernity, Imperial Bureaucracy and the Islamic State.
Rose 18

Ottoman provisioning worked remarkably well, keeping the empire’s population

adequately fed and its military well equipped.52

The events of the Seventeenth Century Crisis are being reconsidered within the broader context of

what has come to be known as the General Crisis. Once considered to have been solely a European

phenomenon, its effects have now been demonstrated from Mexico to China in state breakdowns,

regicides, popular and military uprising, death, disease, and disaster. More wars took place in the mid

17th century than at any point until the 1940s, and human mortality was almost unprecedented in human

history.53 Rather than appearing to have been a series of isolated grievances, the General Crisis has been

linked to climactic changes due to the Little Ice Age that devastated agricultural production throughout

the Northern Hemisphere.

Two scholars—Faruk Tabak and Sam White—have taken an environmental-economic approach

to Ottoman history and discovered that the Little Ice Age had dramatic and disastrous effects that

devastated the Ottoman economy. In 1621, Ottoman chronicler İbrahim Peçevi observed the “rare event”

on February 9 that the Bosphous had frozen over and that people could walk between Istanbul and

Üsküdar on the Asian side.54 Another chronicler reported that, “Famine invaded, and the man who could

get any bread for a dirhem counted himself lucky. With no ship coming to the neighborhood of Istanbul

… no one was capable of getting provisions to Istanbul.” Many historians have assumed that such

chroniclers were resorting to hyperbole and did not take claims seriously.55 Recent environmental studies

have brought to light that the longest drought in entire history of the Ottoman Empire took place in the

last decade of the 1590s, lasting most of the decade, which was followed by several years of heavy

preciptation that seem to have wreaked havoc on the land. The troops on the Habsburg front were

drawing resources away from the provinces, but from 1593 onward provisioning orders begin referencing

52
White, The Climate of Rebellion in the Early Modern Ottoman Empire, 24-26.
53
Geoffrey Parker, "Crisis and Catastrophe: The Global Crisis of the Seventeenth Century Reconsidered," American
Historical Review 113 (2008); Timothy Brook, The Troubled Empire: China in the Yuan and Ming Dynasties
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010).
54
White, The Climate of Rebellion in the Early Modern Ottoman Empire, 123.
55
Ibid., 123-24.
Rose 19

shortages. Banditing became rampant. Prices increased, and merchants began to realize they could make

far more money selling to European merchants – many of whom were facing the same problems back

home – than they could through the government provisioning system. Even as the central government

began implementing austerity measures in response to the famine, the provisionist economy broke

down.56

Ultimately, the reason for the failure of the government provisioning is that the economy and

government were completely overwhelmed by changes over which it had no control—the arrival of

foreign trade on its shores and military campaigns were disruptive forces, but they might have been dealt

with successfully had agricultural production not been disrupted by environmental factors precipitating

the demographic crises and political instability. In other words, the Seventeenth Century Crisis was a

result of all of these changes combined, but not necessarily the cause of them, as was previously believed.

Over the course of the 18th century, the resultant monetary and resource crisis in the Ottoman state

government meant that “the largely self-contained imperial system disintegrated.” Seeking alternate

methods to return to profitability, the government began widespread implementation of the tax farming

system, which replenished the state treasury rapidly and became quite successful as a reliable source of

income both for internal provisioning, but also for transport to ports for export.57 Futher, policies that

relaxed restrictions on foreign trade from provincial ports and encouraged the production of raw materials

for export were also huge boosts to the state economic structure.

Most Post-Revisionist scholarship (so far) acknowledges that the Revisionist claim that the

Empire was incorporated into the periphery of the world-economy is probably correct, and even explains

how the economy was restructured in the 18th century to emphasize commerce and profit for the state

treasury out of domestic and foreign trade.

56
Ibid; Faruk Tabak, The Waning of the Mediterranean, 1550-1870 : A Geohistorical Approach (Baltimore, Md.:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008).
57
Daniel Goffman, Izmir and the Levantine World (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1990).
Rose 20

One key difference in the Post-Revisionist approach, as stated at the beginning, is that the guiding

question is now less about why the Empire failed to industrialize and more about whether the empire

needed to do so—and perhaps whether the lack of industrialization should be viewed as a failure at all.

Over the course of the 16th-18th centuries, the Empire had become incorporated into the world-economy,

and apparently did so quite well as it produced a wide array of goods for export, in contrast to a number

of other peripheral regions that practiced monoculture or consisted of single extractive industries.58 What

had been seen as the failure of the Empire to develop its own economy and industrialize was not due to

the state’s ability to adapt to new economic conditions, nor to adopt a liberal capitalist economy

internally, but can be seen instead as the result of the state actively pursuing policies and institutions that

benefitted its position on the periphery of the world-economy both externally and internally by

encouraging the production of raw goods not only for provisioning but also for export to Europe, and, by

the same mechanism, to receive the goods that came into its ports from European factories and distribute

them to markets throughout the Empire.

W HITHER THE O TTOMAN E MPIRE ?

I have attempted to encapsulate the past three quarters of a century of scholarship on the Ottoman

Empire through the lens of what is, at its heart, a loaded question—“Why did not the Ottoman Empire

industrialize?” is, in essence, “Why did the Ottoman Empire not become more like Europe?” The

Classicists posed the question, and the Revisionist answered the question on terms originally posed; as

Dana Sajdi observes neither school of thought leaves much agency in the hands of the Empire itself; the

main debate is over placing fault. It is with the Post-Revisionist wave of scholarship that we begin to

explore issues that examine new sources and provide new perspectives on this question by looking at

factors that lie outside the realm of politics and political economy, and ultimately by wondering whether

we’re asking the right question: did the Ottoman empire need to industrialize or, as was the case in much

of the 19th century world, was relying on Europe’s industrialization sufficient?

58
White, The Climate of Rebellion in the Early Modern Ottoman Empire, 284.
Rose 21

To return to the question that brought me to this project in the first place, however, it seems most

likely that the question of the Ottoman Empire being passed over as a candidate in the Great Divergence

discussion is due to the common findings of both Classicists and Revisionists: that the Ottoman state was

overcome by outside forces and failed to rise to the challenge they posed, and the Seventeenth Century

Crisis has been assumed to be a case study resulting from that failure. That said, I still believe that the

Empire deserves due consideration, and that many of the deeper questions that are asked by the scholars

pondering the Great Divergence are not as irrelevant to the Ottoman Empire as may have initially been

assumed. To begin with, the Great Divergence is based on re-analysis of data to reconsider areas that did

not, in fact, industrialize: inasmuch as Pomeranz has made the case that the Yangtze Valley or Tokugawa

Japan might have become sites of pre-industrial activity, the fact is that neither actually did. Nor did

South Asia in the analysis of Parthasarathi. The sorts of macro-level analysis of nutrition baskets, per

capita incomes, and local industrial organizations that led these scholars to ponder the pre-

industrialization of these areas all remain to be done for most of the cities of the Empire.

Further, while the urban flight precipitated by the Seventeenth Century Crisis did not result in the

urban model of “industriousness” posited by Jan de Vries and Robert Allen,59 this is not to say that the

industrious phenomenon may not have eventually occurred. At least one scholar, Peter Gran, suggests

proto-capitalist activities were underway in the Nile Valley prior to the French incursion of 1798 and Cem

Emrence describes a phenomenon during the mid to late 19th century in the coastal enclaves of the

provinces—Salonica, Izmir, Beirut, Haifa—that seems to approximate industrious activity as described by

de Vries. This was likely too little too late to propel the empire toward industrialization, given that the

conditions that allowed the coastal enclaves to be industrious were the same conditions that meant the

empire was rapidly decentralizing (and, in many cases, breaking up).60 Money was to be made off of

59
Ibid; Jan De Vries, The Industrious Revolution : Consumer Behavior and the Household Economy, 1650 to the
Present (Cambridge ; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008).
60
Emrence, Remapping the Ottoman Middle East Modernity, Imperial Bureaucracy and the Islamic State. Part I:
"The Coast".
Rose 22

feeding Europe's industry with raw materials and semi-finished goods, but not in investing in the

development of an indigenous industrial base.

There are many avenues in Ottoman studies that beg to be explored; these are merely suggested

holes in the current literature that may help to situate the Ottoman state within the larger framework of the

Divergence discussion. The discussion itself is one that hinges largely on a good deal of speculation and

a search demographic characteristics that indicate that the world of 1700 was not so radically divided in

its standards of living as might otherwise be expected. Considering Charles Issawi’s proclamation that

the Empire was “the best governed in the world” at that time, it seems that it may well be time for

scholars to consider the Ottoman Empire as a key player in Europe’s growing economic development,

even if its role was at the periphery of that development. It is up to the next generation of Ottomanist

scholarship to provide the data and tools for us to do so.

Rose 23

A NOTE ON THE PRONUNCIATION OF T URKISH

• C is pronounced “j” as in “judge,” hence Celali = Jelali, Cem = Jem, and so on. The sound
represented by the English “c” is accommodated by the letters K or S because, if you think about
it, C is kind of a useless letter.
• Ç is “ch” as in “choose.”
• Ğ is silent, but lengthens the vowel that proceeds it, hence İslamoğlu is “Islamoolu.”
• İ (dotted letter i) = Like i in “winter.”
• I (dotless letter i) is a nondescript vowel sound that approximates the letter I in the word “lips”.
• Ş = “sh” as in “ship.”

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