Literature on the late Ottoman economy mainly focuses on the port cities of Eastern Mediterranean and the Balkans. Studying the development of port cities once they came into contact with the world economy, this literature underemphasizes the commercial and economic dynamism of the Ottoman hinterland. Studies on Erzurum, one of the major cities of Ottoman Eastern Anatolia, reflect a similar viewpoint: After the Russian occupation in the 1828-29 War, Erzurum is assumed to face with an economic decline with the destruction of the city and immigration of Armenian communities to Russia. In the following decades, the economic decline could not be arrested or reversed. Instead, it grew worse because of social and political unrest the city and its environs underwent. Contrary to this literature, this paper argues that in the 19th and early 20th centuries Erzurum experienced considerable economic development and developed strong trade ties with regions both within and beyond the Ottoman Empire. The paper studies animal (mainly sheep and some cattle) trade of the Erzurum province from the Tanzimat era until the early 20th century. Documents from Ottoman archives show that the province of Erzurum was an important center for live-animal and meat trade. For instance, Erzurum played a major role in meat provisioning of Istanbul and increased its share in sheep exports to Istanbul throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries. While sheep was also sent to Aleppo, Damascus, and Egypt, cattle from the province were sold in large numbers to Eastern and Central Anatolia for the production of pastırma (dried meat). The documents consulted show that sheep trade had also a transborder dimension: Some of the animals exported to above-mentioned markets were collected from tribes and villagers in Russian and Iranian Empires. Our paper will analyze actors of this trade such as tribes, moneylenders, meat merchants, and drovers. It will study how these actors built and maintained trade networks that spread across different regions of the empire. It will also analyze the fragility of these networks and problems that the actors of animal trade faced during their long march from Erzurum to Istanbul in the west and to Aleppo, Damascus, and Egypt in the south such as unfavorable climate conditions, epidemics, and animal diseases.

During the second half of the nineteenth century, sheep farming became one of the most profitable economic activity for investors, merchants, peasants and nomads of the Ottoman provinces of Erzurum and Van. From these two provinces, great numbers of sheep were exported both to the domestic markets, especially Istanbul, Aleppo, Damascus and Egypt and international markets including Russia and Iran. Sheep, being the most important export item of these two provinces, contributed to the integration of local economy to imperial and inter-imperial markets. From production to trade, it drew different segments of Ottoman society and brought significant profit to those groups. Among all these economic actors, Kurdish nomadic tribes had a significant place, since they were not only owners, but also suppliers of large numbers of sheep to the markets. Based on the Ottoman and British archives, my presentation will discuss how increasing commercialization of sheep farming during the second half of the nineteenth century influenced nomadic tribes, particularly their internal organizations and relations with other tribes and the peasants in the provinces of Erzurum and Van. I will argue that as sheep farming turned into a lucrative economic activity because of the increasing meat demand of urban areas, tribal nomads sought to increase the number of sheep in their flocks, which eventually required large pasturelands. From the 1870s onward, major pasturelands of the provinces of Erzurum and Van became sites of contention among various tribes. Commercialization of sheep farming and the participation of the nomads in this process, not only contributed to the territorialization of the tribes through the “enclosure” of large pasturelands, but also resulted in the stratification of tribal structures. The history of the Kurdish tribes of the Ottoman East has been largely remained as a political history. Tribes not only have been perceived as stable entities in their social and political structures, but also have been conceived and studied in opposition to the central imperial state. This paper, however, aims to present an alternative view. It will not only demonstrate the role of the nomadic tribes in regional, imperial and inter-imperial economies through their engagement in sheep production and its trade, but also discusses the impacts of this process on nomadic tribes, their internal organizations and their relations with other tribes and the peasantry. This presentation is based on research project supported by Boğaziçi University Research Fund Grant Number 17941

Literature on monopolies in the Ottoman context either focuses on the period following the establishment of the Ottoman Public Debt Administration in 1881 as a part of the incorporation of the Ottoman economy to the capitalist world system or mostly the smuggling activities with which the Ottoman subjects involved with challenges against this integration. The predominant preoccupation of the Ottoman historiography with the political history of the Ottoman East further silences the economic history of the region for the nineteenth century. Departing from this premise, this paper entertains the notion of monopoly in an Ottoman province, Diyarbekir. By examining the establishment of salt monopoly in the province, this paper investigates how the monopoly on salines contributed to changing economic dynamics in the province. Private-like salines in the district of Siirt/Sġerd which until 1861 remained outside the scope of the Ottoman fisc posed both political and economic challenges for the Ottoman government. Focusing on particularly the initial period of the monopoly, the paper sheds light on the means the Ottoman fisc developed for taking the salines under the state control. It simultaneously examines the tension between the monopoly officials and the tribe leaders who until then controlled the salt production in the province. While highlighting the Ottoman government’s local solutions by which the former cooperated with the tribe leaders for the maintenance of the monopoly in the region, the paper also deals with the economic consequences of the monopoly on the inhabitants of the region. Opposing the prices set by the salt monopoly, the inhabitants resorted to salt smuggling much earlier than the literature suggests. The opposition taking the form of direct violence against the Ottoman government at times, however, demonstrates the particular features of the making of monopolies in the Ottoman East. Drawing upon a rich array of Ottoman archival materials, this paper contextualises the local making of the salt monopoly in the province of Diyarbekir in dialogue with the Ottoman legal and fiscal measures taken for the further development of the monopoly. The local opposition which furthered the security-driven concerns of the monopoly officials, this paper argues, not only provides insights to the economic tensions when the salines are transferred to the Debt Administration, but also violence-driven making of the economy of the Ottoman East.

What were the characteristics of the cottage industry in the Ottoman East in the late nineteenth century? This presentation centers itself on this question and examines the dynamics of textile making in the Armenian villages in the Shatakh (Çatak in contemporary Turkey) in the broader Van province. The cottage industries in the region began to develop among the landless peasants in the second half of the nineteenth century and began to dominate the local economy by the early twentieth century. About one hundred households who produced textiles only in the Tagh district, the center of Shatakh, illustrates this point. Due to its dependence on labor-intensive production and organization by merchants in the town, the manufacturing activities in these districts in many ways constitute a text-book example of cottage industry in the Ottoman country side. Yet, the textile production in Shatak is still worth examining on various grounds. This paper, by using contemporary ethnographic studies of the region and local sources, will discuss various types of economic and social relations and networks embodied in the cottage industries in the region. These relations included (gendered) hierarchies of labor within the communities as well as relations between merchants in the towns and producers in the countryside. Through the commercial networks of the merchants, the products reached a wider geography both in the broader region and across the border, in Caucasia. Moreover, the paper will discuss the conditions of the propertyless Armenian peasants and their relations with the Kurdish tribes who were both producers of raw materials and consumers of the textile products. Last but not least, the case study aims to contribute to the broader economic history of the empire by approach the Ottoman East on par with the other regions of the empire, such as the Balkans and the Arab provinces, where the cottage industry has been a subject of scholarly analyzes. Thus, the case study of the cottage industries in Van region will provide us a complex set of vertical and horizontal networks which characterize the broader social and economic dynamics of the Ottoman East in the nineteenth century. This presentation is based on research project supported by the Boğaziçi University Research Fund Grant Number 17941.