Fighting over Fruit: Inter-imperial Rivalry and the Date Trade in Basra Inter-imperial rivalry is one of the more potent forces that spiraled the world into war in 1914. This rivalry played out in multiple locations within the Ottoman Empire. Due to the Berlin-Baghdad railway and encroaching German interests, historians frequently focus on Ottoman Iraq as a major hotspot of this rivalry. However, was this really the case for all aspects of the Ottoman Iraqi economy? In my paper I use my own original research and archival sources to examine the date trade in Basra. I take an historical approach to the data and contextualize my findings within the framework of globalization. I specifically evaluate the date trade in Basra as a case study to investigate these supposed inter-imperial rivalries. The date trade was a multinational competition between Ottomans, Americans, the British, and the Germans to procure the fruits at the lowest prices during the annual fall auction. Due to the peculiarities of geography, large steamships could only sail from Basra at high tides that occurred every two weeks. Once the dates were purchased, there was a frenzied rush to secure them, pack them and, then ship them. As dates were a seasonal treat in Europe and the US, associated with Christmas, the first boats to reach ports in November could secure the highest prices. A delay to shipping at the right tide could translate into a two week delay and the loss of considerable profits. Sabotage of all sorts occurred. This paper investigates whether these individuals and corporations were part of this inter-imperial rivalry. This paper will argue that it was more likely that merchants would indeed cooperate across national lines against common threats. This paper’s case study focuses on several incidents. One such example concerns how the American company, Hills Brothers of NY was so successful in previous years that German and British companies worked together against them in 1913.

Abstract During the reign of Bey Hammouda Ibn Ali (1782-1814), the Ottoman province of Tunis had reached unprecedented levels of economic growth, which led historian Charles-André Julien to describe Bey Hammouda’s reign as the “Golden Age” of Tunis. Other scholars, on the other hand, describe this period as the “Golden Age of the Tunisian Corso.” Much of Tunis’ booming economy during that period depended on the Bey’s corsairs, who, like the Tunisian merchants, played an important role in the Bey’s economic system. They were economic agents authorized by the Bey mainly to protect Tunisian commerce and their allies’ ships from their enemies. Studies on Tunisian corsairing during that period do not adequately explain the relationship sea raiding had with trade. On the other hand, studies on Tunisian trade during that period have focused either on Bey Hammouda’s political and economic reforms, the Tunisian merchants wealth, or trade activities including the trans-Saharan slave trade. My paper examines the role of corsairing and trade in Bey Hammouda’s complex political and economic reforms. And so, it will illuminate how the interplay of these activities led Tunis’ economy to prosperity in a time marked by the dislocating Napoleonic wars and also periods of significant drought in the agricultural lands of Tunis’ hinterland. Using Arabic, English, Ottoman and French diplomatic correspondences, treaties, and local Tunisian chronicles, I will trace how Bey Hammouda generated state income through his reliance on corsairing and foreign trade. By evaluating the interconnections of increased sea raiding and foreign trades, my paper will show how Bey Hammouda staved off economic disaster in a period of political and environmental instability, and so, against the odds, generated economic policies that allowed this Ottoman province in North Africa to reach unprecedented levels of economic growth.

Kept as a state secret in the Spanish empire, merino sheep partook in global empire building in the mid-eighteenth century and onwards. Scholars working on the global biography of merino sheep studied South Africa, New England, Australasia, Western Europe, and the Western Mediterranean. In this paper, I put the efforts of the Ottoman empire to import and crossbreed merino sheep in the Balkans and the Western Anatolia in the early 1830s and 1840s into a dialogue with the literature on sheep and empire building. I note that the Ottoman interest in merino breeding intersected with the period of steep rise of wool prices (1827-1835) in international markets as well as the aftermath of the abolishment of Janissary corps. By focusing on granular details from the Ottoman imperial archives, first, I document and argue that the Ottoman chapter in the global merino history reveals underexplored regional connections among Russian, Spanish and Ottoman empires. My archival findings clarify that Ottoman bureaucrats, merchants, and consuls were driving forces in the functioning of capitalism in the Eastern Mediterranean. Second, I argue that the importation of merino sheep made ongoing bureaucratic correspondences on domestic and foreign breeds, veterinary care, sustainability of wool supply, and aesthetics of fez production visible. Third, by looking at the case of imperial landed estates (ciftlik) of Mihalic, an imperial institution established for sheep breeding specifically in the vicinity of Bursa in the 1840s, I demonstrate that Ottoman interest and investment in merino breeding were accompanied by meticulous and rich record keeping processes attentive to local and global events. Reading these account books with a critical gaze, I investigate the ways in which the lower and middle rank imperial functionaries run, monitored, imagined, and intervened what supposedly constituted an institution of the imperial “economy” and “ecology.”

Taking the Italian Adriatic port-town of Ancona as its starting point, this paper presents the preliminary results of a larger project on the commercial networks active across the Ottoman lands and the Italian peninsula in the 16th century. While long-distance trade in the premodern period is often portrayed as organized around ethno-religiously homogenous diasporas, the research conducted so far points to the multi-religious and cross-imperial nature of trade networks. This paper then argues that cooperation among merchants of different religious confessions was central to the trade networks that circulated goods across the Ottoman and Anconitan markets in the 16th century. In a project that will soon integrate the data from the Islamic courts of the Ottoman empire, the study of notarial deeds, lists of confiscated goods, and court proceedings of Ancona has allowed to sketch out a picture of who the Ottoman merchants in Ancona were, which towns they came from, and the identity of their Ottoman and non-Ottoman partners. This approach brings at least three advantages. First, it advances the understanding of early modern trade networks by going beyond the assumption that cooperation among kin and/or coreligionists was the norm. Second, it offers a privileged view into how ordinary Ottomans were connected to their non-Ottoman neighbors thus complementing our knowledge on renegades’, viziers’, and pashas’ connections with the non-Ottoman world. Third, it provides a window into how people of different religious denominations interacted in the multi-religious Ottoman empire. Below is a sample of the sources studied: -Notarial deed in which the Greek Georgi represented the qadi of Valona Ramadan who was complaining about the missed shipment of a cargo of woolen cloth he had purchased in Ancona from Ottoman Jews (1536). -Notarial deed featuring a Muslim and a Christian Albanian exporting woolen cloth to Lezhe in Ottoman Albania (1540). -List of goods the Inquisition confiscated to the Sephardi New Christians in Ancona for allegedly having returned to Judaism (1555). These lists include the names of the victims’ customers and partners. -Firmans in Ottoman Turkish addressing the topic “merchants of the protected domains” and/or regulating trade with Ancona (926/1520, 932/1526) -Decisions of the communal council of Ancona regulating trade between the port-town and the Ottoman Empire as well as the presence of Ottoman merchants in Ancona (16th c.) -Papal briefs regulating the trade and presence of Ottoman merchants in Ancona (1532-).

This paper examines animal trade from provinces, mainly the Anatolian ones, to Istanbul from the mid-19th to the early 20th century. This was a period in which the Ottoman state moved away from provisionism to liberal economic policies. Animal trade and meat supply of Istanbul was influenced by this change with the abolition of ondal?k a?nam (a special tax levied for the purpose of ensuring a cheap supply of meat for the residents of Istanbul) and loosening of control over meat prices in 1857. However, there are very few studies that examine how Istanbul was supplied with meat after the mid-19th century. This paper seeks to address this gap in the literature by analyzing gradual adoption of liberal economic policies and continuation of provisionist concerns at different levels of state administration. Before the mid-19th century, maintaining a steady supply of animals and keeping meat prices low for both the palace and residents of Istanbul was the priority of the state. The paper will initially discuss some provisioninst policies pursued by the Ottoman government in the 1840s and 1850s. This include the imposition of price ceilings, promulgation of punitive orders to redirect sheep flocks to Istanbul, and efforts at eliminating intermediaries between producers and consumers in times of need. Then, we will analyze how the elimination of such policies in the late 1850s changed the market dynamics and actors involved in meat trade by drawing on a variety of primary resources including Ottoman and British archival documents, newspapers, and traveler accounts. Following the elimination of price ceilings, some merchants sought to exercise control over animal supply and thereby to manipulate the meat prices in the imperial capital. In discussing how such activities were responded by the Istanbulites and state offices, the paper shows that different state institutions responded differently to the abolition of provisionist policies. For instance, while the municipality of Istanbul pushed for price control especially at times of war and famines, the Ministry of Trade and Council of State consistently followed a laissez-fair approach. In conclusion, the paper argues that establishment of a free market economy in meat trade did not show a linear development in Ottoman Istanbul. Instead, that was a slow and conflictual process involving various social actors such as herders, meat traders, butchers, residents of Istanbul, and state officials. The findings suggest that we need to problematize development of liberal economy based on concrete case studies.