This paper examines the conflicts and cooperation surrounding the Ottoman export trade to the United States in the period 1900-1914. I place the export trade, which included a wide variety of agricultural products as well as carpets and antiquities, in a global and globalizing context. However, the main focus of my research delves into the date and licorice trade. The US firms of Hills Brothers (dates) and MacAndrews and Forbes (licorice) were the dominant Western firms trading in these commodities. During the first two decades of the twentieth centuries, these US businesses both cooperated with and came into conflict with a variety of Ottoman subjects. The Ottoman interests that worked with and against the Americans included date plantation owners, tax farmers, and regional government officials. The conflicts that arose over taxation, usufruct, and monopolistic practices demonstrate local conditions and the degree to which the centralizing reforms of the Ottoman state were effective in late Ottoman Baghdad and Basra. Analyzing these conflicts reveals the functioning of the Ottoman state in the area and reflects ways in which earlier reforms of the 19th century manifested in this period. The cooperation that occurred, likewise, suggests that even potentially separatist local nationalist factions like the Naqib of Basra operated within and utilized the Ottoman system. US merchants also operated within and prospered through the Ottoman system, as US interests utilized local practices like tax farming to further their own agendas. US businesses operated within the Ottoman system and their role can be interpreted as both imperialistic but also as that of partners within a working and vibrant economic system. The trade between the US and the Ottoman Empire is also reflective of growing US economic interest in the Ottoman Empire. Therefore, this paper details the export trade in order to support conclusions about internal Ottoman governance and economic practice; I also argue for a historiographic reconsideration of US interest in late Ottoman Iraq, specifically that the US deserves a larger role in the literature than it has previously been assigned.

For most of the nineteenth century, Eskişehir had been a modest Western Anatolian provincial center of somewhat diminishing importance. In the last twelve years of the century, this course reversed itself spectacularly due to the construction of the German-funded and managed Ottoman Anatolian Railroad. The railroad brought great social, economic, and environmental changes to the lands it passed through. Eskişehir, due to its central location and function as a junction between the Ankara and Konya branches of the railroad was, arguably, the locality most transformed by the railroad in its first two decades of operation. While the Anatolian Railroad has generally been studied from the perspective of diplomatic history, or in terms of its large-scale economic and political effects, I investigate the social, cultural, and local economic history of the regions which the advent of the railroad so greatly transformed. Making use of sources discovered during extensive research at the Ottoman Archive in Istanbul, as well as contemporary newspaper reports in both the foreign press and the nascent local press, I examine the case of Eskişehir as a locale in which the changes were particularly great in an endeavor to discover the reactions and adaptations of locals to these great changes in their technological environments. Prior to the construction of the railroad, exposure to non-Ottoman foreigners was somewhat rare. First with the construction, in which most skilled workers and managers were imported from Europe, and then with the operation of the railroad, when any passenger passing through on the way to Ankara or Konya was obliged to spend the night in Eskişehir, this changed. Due to its central location, Eskişehir became a railroad town with a particularly large population of railroad company employees. Culturally, this meant the opening of a “railroad school” for the children of foreign railroad employees, and a small number of elite local children. Other cultural effects included the establishment of a theater, as well as European- style hotels and restaurants. Of more questionable benefit to the quality of life, Eskişehir housed the major industrial site that was the main storage and repair facility for the railroad, and modern abattoirs sprouted in the vicinity of the train station and befouled the environment for local residents. In these examples and others, my paper demonstrates the railroad effect of urbanizing Eskişehir, focusing on social and small-scale economic effects.

The Islamic courts have been placed at the center of commercial life of the Arab Ottoman provinces and the court records have been declared as the source that would give researchers insight into the actual Muslim practices of trade in the region. Whether tracing the activities of the head of the merchants’ guilds in 17th century Cairo, assessing the fortunes of merchants in 18th century Damascus, writing the economic history of an Arab city, or evaluating the position of Islamic commercial law vis-à-vis practice, researchers have turned to the Islamic court registers for select cases upon which to base their narrations and analyses. These studies reaffirmed the centrality of the Islamic courts in commercial life. This paper questions such centrality by studying merchants’ real interactions with and utilization of the Islamic legal system in Damascus throughout the 17th century. The goal is to assess the volume and type of cases involving merchants by equally focusing on what is in the registers and what is not. Analyzing cases from 17th century court registers in Damascus, the paper pursues different questions: How often and why did merchants go to the courts? In what capacity did they use them and for what purposes? Which merchants used the courts most? It shows that prominent and wealthy merchants rarely went to the courts for business. They showed up mainly as witnesses, guarantors, or party in real estate transactions. It also shows that many of the cases involving merchants were either inheritance lawsuits or estate probates; they were brought to court after the death of the merchant or one of his partners. Such a surprising finding challenges established assumptions in the field that the Islamic courts provided the legal framework for trade and business in the region. By conducting longitudinal data analysis and differentiating between types of merchants, this study sheds light on the validity/invalidity of the common assumptions that view the Islamic courts as the main legal institution for commercial activities in the Ottoman Arab provinces. It contributes to the recent scholarship on the dynamic interaction between Islamic law and economic performance.