Browsing by Subject "Tea trade"

Now showing 1 - 2 of 2

Open Access
Bureaucrats into merchants: tea, capitalism and the making of the Republican bourgeois
(Routledge, 2023-05-03) Ansel, Esra
This article uses the story of the Albayrak Tea Company and its founder Mustafa Nezih Albayrak as a prism to examine the formation of a class of Muslim merchants in early Republican Turkey. Mustafa Nezih Bey, an Ottoman bureaucrat who ventured into business in the late 1910s, became one of the most prominent tea merchants in the early Republic, paving the way for its mass consumption. Looking at the overlap between the late Ottoman bureaucracy and the Turkish bourgeoisie, this study aims to show a continuation in the economic field rather than a break between the Late Ottoman Empire and Early Republican Turkey. The making of the Republican merchant elite was a complex process that involved not only state policies and long legacies of merchant activity from the Ottoman era but transformations in education and mass media in the aftermath of the 1908 Revolution.
Open Access
The global history of the Ottoman and Turkish tea trade
(2023-06) Ansel, Esra
This study aimed to write the global history of a commodity, namely tea, that was consumed in the late Ottoman Empire and early Republican Turkey but not produced locally and imported from various places such as China, Russia, Europe, South Asia and Japan. This research attempted to write the history of a product and how it connected people, places, and continents from a global framework, using primary sources in multiple languages, including documents from the Ottoman and Republican State Archives, British Trade Reports, Trade Statistics, advertisements, travelogues, and contemporary newspapers. Rather than presenting a single linear narrative, the current dissertation gives multiple viewpoints and insights based on a critical review of the sources and making connections that other scholars had not considered.