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Supervening Crises and Social Formation in Early Modern Ottoman Aleppo, 1697 – 1786
Abstract
The study of crisis in the early modern Ottoman Empire has yielded productive answers on the reproduction of social order, transformations in governance, the evolution of institutions and polity, and connections to the world economy. The seventeenth-century crisis particularly occupies an important place in the historiography of the early modern empire. Economic and social historians have sought its causes in political, economic, and ecological forces. Other scholars, making use of the advances of world-historical approaches, have utilized comparative perspectives to reveal the crisis’ multifaceted and global nature. The approaches cited above merge in their focus on structural issues, be they internal or external, such as revenues crisis, inflation, and population growth. Plenty, then, is said in the seventeenth-century crisis debate. Less, however, is written about supervening crises, which occur mostly over shorter periods of time and out of the immediate control of those experiencing them. These include environmentally spurred ones, taking place at the limit of the social formation (as defined by Sevket Pamuk). Additionally, where studies on them exist, they are mainly concerned with the Balkans, Anatolia, and Egypt, leaving a sizeable region of the Ottoman Empire unexamined. This becomes significant when recognizing that the Ottomans ruled with “zones of varying degrees of administrative control”: as they moved away from the center, administrative practices operated under different dynamics of rule. This differential rule was no less true for Syria. Given that they reflect a different kind of relation between the government and local communities, crises in Syria merit a separate study. There, supervening events were recurring, unexpected, and varied. Looking at supervening crises occurring in Aleppo between the sixteenth and seventeenth century (such as locusts, transient extreme weather conditions, and earthquakes) this paper seeks to answer the following questions: What were the social and political consequences of supervening crises in Aleppo’s early modern society? What do these types of crises reveal about the interactions between the environment and the social order, and between the state and governed? Further, what was their place in the seventeenth-century structural crisis? In short, what was the implication of such events on the social formation in early modern Ottoman empire? This paper utilizes public works records, land surveys, travel accounts, and chronicles from Syria. Methodologically, this research goes along the lines of a growing body of work on Middle East environmental history that pays equal attention to environmental limits and historical contingency.
Discipline
History
Geographic Area
Ottoman Empire
The Levant
Sub Area
None