M?g?rd?ç Cezayirliyan was a sarraf who lived in Istanbul from 1805 to 1861. He became one of the most powerful merchants of the mid nineteenth century in the Ottoman Empire. Although he was referred as a sarraf and as a merchant, the spheres he was involved in were more varied ranging from tax collection to the establishment of schools and theatres. By becoming involved in the collection of taxes and custom duties, he also established alliances with state officials in various provinces such as Mudanya, Bursa, Symrna, Crete and Thessalonica. This paper examines the functioning of M?g?rd?ç Cezayirliyan with a specific concentration on his intertwined relations with the state and tax farmers, as well as with other traders. Through the analysis of the activities of this powerful provincial actor such as his involvement in tax farming, custom duty collection and money lending by utilizing archival materials which have not been used in any study so far and are available in the Prime Ministry Archives in Istanbul, I aim to depict the functioning of the Ottoman tax collecting practices and socio economic changes that took place during the 19th century and highlight the regional differences in terms of the state’s relations with powerful provincial actors during the nineteenth century. Through such an analysis of specific cases in which Cezayirliyan was involved, first, I aim to show the intertwined relationships such as alliances between sarrafs, state officials and tax collectors. Then, I argue that these alliances between Cezayirliyan and state officials as well as those between him and tax collectors were not permanent. The significance of such an analysis lies on the scarcity of the studies on sarrafs and their relations with state officials and provincial actors in the Ottoman Empire. The additional significance of this study is that it gives the opportunity to make further comparisons with other powerful merchants, tax collectors or sarrafs for further research.

The contribution is mainly based on the record and identification of the papers truly used by copyists in Egypt, and in Yemen, along the period, with some glances on Sudan and Ethiopia (Islamic areas). It will focus on papers bearing watermarks, which were imported commodities from Europe. Its aim is to know the Companies which were trading on both sides of the Red Sea, then the countries which were producing and exporting the paper sheets. Starting in the field of technics and the art of the book / codicology, we have collected papers bearing watermarks in different places in Yemen. Some are already documented and published (http://www.anne.regourd.org/docs/Filigrane-Zabid.pdf; « Les routes commerciales entre Zabîd et l’Europe : les papiers filigranés de fonds manuscrits de Zabîd (Yémen, fin 18e-milieu 20e s. »). The overwhelming majority of the extant copies and original manuscripts are from the 17th to the beginning of the 20th Centuries. The following step consisted in taking these watermarks as an original source for the historical study of the Paper Trade in the area. Some researches already available for Egypt and Sudan in the same period made the comparison possible; as for the manuscripts of Ethiopia, I recently made a few, but fruitful investigations. I could eventually evidence the struggle between Italy and Turkey to control the market. Indian paper sheets were also used in Yemen (beginning of the 20th C. at least). Was the West Bank of the Red Sea a place from which the paper sheets were going to some places in Subsaharian Africa, like Nigeria, in competition with other Trade paths? Until the 19th C., traders were conveying cargos, but were not coming back with empty bags. For what commodities were they exchanging paper sheets? Our increasing knowledge of the paper is a tool to date when a manuscript was copied. Moreover, the roots of Trade are aimed at here, which are as well those of the circulation of people and ideas.

This paper will explore the reorganization of the legal infrastructure and the concurrent emergence of a new understanding of “commerce” in late Ottoman Egypt (1841-1876). Two historical phenomena constituted the background for this process, namely, the prominence of European extra-territorial rights and the attempt to consolidate the domestic Egyptian legal order. Starting the early 1840s, the number of European merchants operating in Egypt increased dramatically as a result of the abolition of state monopolies. The incoming merchants enjoyed extra-territorial rights that often rendered them immune from prosecution in local courts. Meanwhile, the nineteenth-century Egyptian state was the site of numerous attempts to synchronize various contemporaneous legal institutions and codes: imperial, state-enacted, religious and consular. In light of this background, conflicts between local and European merchants were irresolvable through legal means. Hence, the Egyptian state and various European consulates cooperated to establish mixed merchant courts. These courts were presided over by an equal number of local and European merchants, deployed Ottoman, French and Egyptian state-enacted commercial laws (in this order), and enjoyed jurisdiction over most merchant legal disputes. The paper argues that the attempt to govern the commercial sphere through newly introduced legal practices resulted in a substantive redefinition of “commerce” as a concept. In building this argument, it will demonstrate how certain activities, such as specific kinds of exchange and money lending were excluded, while others, like inheritance, were included into the new commercial sphere. Furthermore, it will touch upon the question of who had access to this commercial sphere. For example, did a merchant’s specific trade or legal status affect his access into the commercial sphere? Three sets of sources will serve as the foundation for this paper: 1) the proceedings of the Cairo merchant court (circa 1856-1876). These proceedings record the details of thousands of merchant disputes and how they were adjudicated; 2) (Near) contemporaneous encyclopedias such as Philip Jallad’s Qamus al-Idara wal-Qada‘, which define “commerce” more explicitly. These works reveal which definition became widely-accepted toward the end of the nineteenth-century; 3) The commercial laws that informed nineteenth century merchant courts, including several versions of the French and Ottoman codes of commerce.

This papers aims to challenge the validity of two major assumptions of the nineteenth century Ottoman economic history from a labor perspective: the abrupt demise of Ottoman urban artisanal production and ethno-religious division of labor within that production. The long prevailed stance in the literature associated the disappearance of Ottoman urban guild production in the nineteenth century closely with the free trade agreements with European powers. According to this dominant view following the 1838 Anglo-Turkish Treaty industrial goods from Great Britain and other European countries acquired an unprecedented, broad and facilitated access to the Ottoman domestic market via lower customs duties and these out-competed more expensive guild controlled Ottoman urban artisanal production. The second assumption, ethno-religious division of labor, presupposes that ethnic and religious affiliation of Ottoman subjects were decisive factors in choosing or finding employment for the trades they were working in. Based upon this assumption spatial organization of urban guild production has also been envisaged as segregated along ethno-religious lines, which meant neighborhoods build upon artisanal division of labor. The main source of this paper is an Ottoman census, Temettuat: Registers of Income Yielding Assets, which is extraordinary in the quantity and quality of the data it provides. This census covers almost all of the Ottoman territories in 1845 and provides detailed information on income sources on household basis both for urban and rural population. The specific source material of this study is a databank extracted from this census with entries on ethno-religious affiliation, occupation, occupational income and total income of households’ heads. I will utilize one subset of this data, covering urban centers, Ankara, Bursa, Edirne and Salonika, which had around 5000 households and ethnically and religiously diverse populations in mid-nineteenth century. In addition to assess the demise argument of urban artisanal production and ethnic division of labor hypothesis, the nature of the available data can allow to pose the following analytical research questions regarding the labor relations and their outcomes: To what extent did existing spatial organization of artisanal production determined the urban fabric of chosen cities? What were the major determinants of different income levels in same trades compared between cities? Taking into consideration the income level differences of masters, assistant masters and apprentices in same trades in same locations what can be the major determinants of hierarchies within and patterns of promotion of guild production?