Commercialization of agricultural production in the eighteenth-century Ottoman Empire: property acquisition and local notables

Abstract

This dissertation analyzes the transformation of agrarian relations and their impact on the commercialization of agricultural production in the Ottoman Empire during the eighteenth century in the southern Balkans and western Anatolian hinterlands. It examines the process by which the growth of the illicit wheat trade as an empire-wide development, influenced by changes in the urban-rural trade structure and the level of foreign and domestic demand, gradually reshaped imperial wheat policy. It examines shifts in land tenure and the emergence and consolidation of local elites in the context of landed-estate agriculture. This is achieved through a comprehensive prosopographical study of land tenure and local elite phenomena in Karaferye from the late fifteenth to the second half of the eighteenth century. By the eighteenth century, the analysis is extended also to the Selanik province, with a special focus on Selanik hinterland and in western Anatolia to Bergama in the context of çiftlik investments and illicit wheat trade. This micro-level examination allows for the observation of concurrent changes and continuities in land tenure and the impact of shifts in taxation practices on rural indebtedness and on the labor forms in different regions. It is argued that the growth of the çiftlik market and direct purchases, facilitated by the economic incentives of investor local elites and notables, led to the commodification of wheat through the illicit trade.