Manufacturing and the Ottoman Empire and Turkey, 1500-1850.

In addition to an introduction, article and afterward by Donald Quataert we have in this work the contribution of three other scholars. Each deals with manufacture in a particular century: Sixteenth to mid-Twentieth. The editor asserts that "the present volume is easily the most comprehensive account of Ottoman manufacturing available and, in some respects, it is a state-of-the-art summary." The study, he claims, "will help to move Ottoman economic and industrial history to a higher methodological plane." Nevertheless, and as he is quick to admit, "quite fundamental issues remain unresolved", namely the unclear relationship of manufacturing during the Seventeenth Century to that in the Eighteenth or the Nineteenth Centuries (pp. 3-4).

In this work we have a laborious undertaking to assemble what is best known of Ottoman manufacture through available documentation and the scant secondary sources deriving from foreign reports as well as the disjointed contribution by a variety of Western and Turkish scholars who have concerned themselves with particular aspects rather than the picture as a whole. That gaps in our knowledge remain is almost unavoidable. Nevertheless, the authors are to be commended for the meticulous care exhibited in putting together what should serve as a springboard for further expansion of study and research in this long neglected aspect of Ottoman economic history.

The contributors are experts in the fields which they undertook to expound upon. In the first article, "Labor Recruitment and Control in the Ottoman Empire (Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries)," Professor Faraooqhi studies the manner in which those engaging in the crafts were "mobilized to participate in production processes too large for the ordinary market and guild to handle" (p. 13). As early as the Fifteenth Century products of such manufacture in cotton, silk and angora textiles from Anatolia were already part of the export trade. As she notes, it is easier to deal with the trade than the manufacture aspect because, here as in Medieval Europe, it is better documented. For her the problem revolves around how to put the puzzle together without coming up with too many unconvincing solutions (p. 15). She focuses on a number of aspects thereof. the mobilization of labor in the face of low density population spread without huge expenditures in capital, how to unravel the riddles confronting Ottoman economic historians as concerns silk manufacture in Bursa and the role of slave weavers in it;* slave labor in both private and public enterprises was not considered uncommon by her account. Nor was it unusual to move labor around from area to area by Ottoman forces, especially after the conquest of Tabriz from the Safavids in 1514. Draftees were also employed in manufacture for army needs. She also treats services performed in the producers, own shops and workplaces, capital and labor in mining, as well as the military and civilian sectors involved in manufacture.

In piecing the different puzzles together, the author has serious difficulty because "source materials are so scarce that it is hard to establish a series of `turning points' . . . to determine the conjunctures of Ottoman manufacturing as a whole" (p. 40).

Mehmet Gens's article is concerned with Ottoman industry in the Eighteenth Century. He sought a broad treatment of the subject which resulted in a sketchy framework focusing on some characteristics and trends as best they was still very modest at best, being circumscribed by the availability of resources and labor. The Ottoman system relied on provisionism to ensure the availability of cheap and good quality goods. Given the paramount needs of the military, the state undertook to avoid reliance on foreign armaments by sustaining all necessary installations. Traditionalism, or looking to past models, was a second principle guiding industry at this time. Fiscalism was the third of the economic policies adopted. It aimed at maximizing income of the state treasury.

Such principles did not encourage the emergence of capitalist entrepreneurs to fuel any large-scale industrialization nor to lessen the burden of taxation to meet financial needs. Collective working solidified traditional patterns in that artisinal organization and its emphasis on egalitarianism dominated production and resisted change. Rural industry could not develop because there was no entrepreneurial group with capital to invest. Lower returns and increased military demands in the latter part of the Eighteenth Century obliged the government to pursue the policy of exacting a progressive tax in kind, thus weakening the sector most likely to develop. The author also treats state investments in manufacture e.g. woolen cloth, a policy that had negative effects, weakening rather than strengthening it and necessitating reliance on imports of woolen products from Western Europe (p. 72). Silk manufacture in the 1720s increased rapidly because of growing preference in the palace for silk rather than for wool products. The manufacture of sail cloth on a large scale meant a boost to sailcloth manufacturing.

One might have benefited from a summary statement which would have put the manufacture of this period in better perspective in view, again, of the absence of a comprehensive analysis of manufacture as a whole in this book.

In his essay, Quataert describes manufacture in the Nineteenth Century. He starts by disagreeing outrightly with those historians who have focused on the decline of Ottoman manufacture in the face of European competition by focusing on the course of cloth manufacturing, which he finds "more complicated and interesting than flat assertions of decline" (p. 87). The subject was dealt with in detail by the author in a separate book published before this collection. Quataert deals with the subject in two unequal parts; the first focuses on Ottoman textile production for the domestic market; it is the larger part because he is convinced this aspect is not as well-known. There is no explicit statement what the second part deals with.

Quataert discusses the reasons for the comparative lack of mechanized factories in the Ottoman Empire. His emphasis on textile is "because this is where the sources led" (p. 90). He alludes to foreign allegations of government ineptitude and corruption which they claim prevented the development of manufacturing during the Nineteenth Century in spite of laws passed after 1870 to encourage it. The Ottoman populace apparently resisted forming factories. Entrepreneurs and workers alike argued against such enterprises for fear of competing with the large-scale home-based manufacture, a kind of cottage industry which perhaps best characterized the nature of Ottoman rural manufacture during the centuries prior to the Twentieth Century.

The stress was still on production for the domestic market whether it was yarn or cloth, which was commonly used in every part of the Ottoman Middle East. Quataert does not agree with those who cite Aleppo as the classical example of industrial decline at this time which he claims "is in the eyes of the beholder not in reality" (p. 101). Silk production increased substantially in response to the demand of foreign markets, with more than 400,000 subjects being involved in it. New technologies and growth in labor supply also gave this industry a boost.

The other commodity that attracted European merchants was the weaving of carpets which increased rapidly after the 1850s. By the end of the century, Anatolia had become the center of carpet making with the Armenians playing a determinative role in spurring the production and marketing of rugs abroad.

Caglar Keyder's article on manufacturing in the late Ottoman and early Republican eras again dwells on the ongoing harnessing of production to the export trade early in the century. The CUP-dominated era encouraged nationalistic approaches. Greeks and Armenians, principal traders and manufacturers to this day, were driven out and Muslims gradually began to take charge of manufacturing. State enterprises ensued, as a product of the bureaucratic reforms instituted under the Young Turk regime. A sad byproduct of the rise in nationalist attitudes and its diffusion to the population at large was ethnic hostility and the forced emigration of Greek minorities.

State enterprises were the product of bureaucratic reformism. It was part of the attempt of the new ruling class to bolster its rule. The CUP initiated conscious measures to promote Muslim business through government contracts and subsidies. Abrogation of the Capitulations contributed to the new order by eliminating fiscal and legal advantages hitherto enjoyed by foreigners. There is more coherence and continuity in the Keyder article because he has more data with which to work, thus contributing to a coherent presentation of the state of industrial development in the Republican era. The author takes us through the course of manufacturing during the transition period (empire to republic), the republic in the 1920s, the crisis of the 1930s generated largely by a growing foreign payment deficit due to the sharp rise in imports, and state planning and manufacturing in the 1930s. The emergence of an entrepreneurial class in the private sector followed the emigration of the dhimmi of Salonica to Istanbul after the city became part of Greece in 1924. World War II contributed to decline in the economy, but in the post-war era the U.S. embarked on a policy that boosted the private sector by allocating dollars to aspiring manufacturers. Rural industry became increasingly inconsequential as the loci of manufacture shifted to the larger cities.

In my judgment this work is an important milestone on manufacturing in the Ottoman era and the early Republic. The authors have made good use of available data in defining the parameters of future research, albeit gaps were unavoidable in such a pioneering study.

* Citing Sahiliioglu, she states that over 25% of the inhabitants of Bursa were slaves (pages 21).