The Ottoman Empire and its Heritage, Politics, Society and Economy, vol. 1, State and Peasant in the Ottoman Empire: Agrarian Power Relations and Regional Economic Development in Ottoman Anatolia During the Sixteenth Century.

• Author: Venzke, Margaret L.

This is an economic study of Ottoman rural society in north-central Anatolia in the sixteenth century that is based on the Ottoman fiscal surveys (or tax registers, Tahrir Defterleri), specifically on the mufassal or detailed registers. Huri Islamoglu-Inan's particular focus within the great province of Rum are ten administrative districts (nahiye), comprising some five hundred rural settlements, in which the author includes uninhabited mezraas, and the towns of Corum, Niksar, and Tokat, for a fifty-five-year time span, 1520-75, although going as far back as 1455 for certain areas. The uniqueness of this work lies in its centering on and close integration of a thesis, and it is an interesting thesis at that. Islamoglu-Inan argues that the Ottoman "regulations" or "institutions" (the author's terms) governing surplus extraction in the countryside, property, and exchange between town and village, with particular emphasis on the first, were responsible for increased crop yields and productivity that were to accommodate the nearly one-hundred-per-cent growth in this area's population and the increased commercial development in the towns in this period. The importance of this thesis, she notes, is that it both contradicts the conventional view of the non-changing, stagnant character of pre-industrial agrarian economies, "Asiatic" ones in particular, and, more specifically, for the area she studied, it prevented such unfavorable outcomes as the fragmentation or expropriation of peasant holdings, the formation of large estates, etc., which one might have expected. As useful as it is as food for thought, the thesis is not convincingly proved, nor does it appear supportable in light of the outbreak of the Celali revolts affecting this and other areas of Anatolia in the period following the study. This by no means diminishes the individual findings of the study, where, together with its careful and creative methodological approaches, its true value lies.

The study consists of five chapters, introduction, and conclusion; three maps; and sets of two appendices each that follow and support, in their turn, chapters two through five. The appendices contain the study's many statistical tables and a narrative explanation and analysis of these tables. The essence of the study, and so much of its underlying work, lies in these tables. In the interests of space, the following is noted in a cursory manner before addressing the heart of the study. After...