Faroqhi S.N. The Cambridge History of Turkey: Volume 3, The Later Ottoman Empire, 1603-1839

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and mostly qualitative material to try to assess the nature of the commercial

operations undertaken by Western traders in the Ottoman dominions. At the

end of the sixteenth century, France and Venice were, without any doubt, the

two major actors involved in the Levant trade. Both nations enjoyed a long

experience of trade in the region, and a direct involvement of their respective

states in the protection of their commerce. Venice, particularly, despite fre-

quent interruptions due to open conﬂicts with the Ottomans, maintained a

prominent position in the Western trade of the empire, with a solid implanta-

tion in major urban centres and a predominance of its high-quality cloth on the

local market for luxury textiles. Far more important, however, was the export

trade from the empire, which consisted of a large variety of products, of local

or Eastern origin. Pepper and silk were the major items that originated from

further east. As for local products, they included textiles, such as cotton from

western Anatolia and mohair yarn from the region of Ankara; dried fruits,

such as currants from Greece and the Ionian islands; dyestuffs, such as galls

from south-eastern Anatolia and Iraq, soon followed by a new commodity,

Arabian coffee, exported through Cairo and Damietta. Not to be forgotten,

the Levant – as it was often called – also exported a number of manufactured

goods, primarily textiles. Thus a certain Towerson was sent out to ‘Angurie

of Azia’ (Ankara) by the English ambassador cum trader Harborne, to buy

‘water chamblets, moccados & grogerins’, of various colours and qualities.

One of the major changes observed during this period was the gradual

shift in the Levant trade from the domination of the Mediterranean powers

of Venice and France to the newcomers from the Atlantic seafront, namely

the Dutch and the English. Conscious of the power of both local and Mediter-

ranean competitors, Harborne had warned his commissioned trader that ‘you

must make acoumpt you are amoungest yor enimyes for that nether Jew

greeke or venetiane but will be pricked with envie at yor beinge all whome

therfore you cover the same for they be all subtill malytious & vnfaithfull

people whom you must over com throughe gods grace with wisdom & pay-

tience’.

Yet, malicious and unfaithful as they may have been, the Venetians

were seriously losing ground in the Levant trade from the 1600s on. The

17 Chamlets or camlets (French camelot) was the name given to mohair fabrics. The ‘water-

ing’ of such textiles gave them a wavy or moir

e ﬁnish. Moccado or mockado (Italian

mocaiardo), also called mock-velvet, described a piled cloth of silk or wool. Grogerins

(French gros grain) were coarse fabrics of mohair and wool: see David French, ‘A Sixteenth

Century English Merchant in Ankara’, Anatolian Studies. Journal of the British Institute of

Archæology at Ankara 22 (1972) (special number in honour of the seventieth birthday of

Professor Seton Lloyd), 241–7,atp.245.

18 Ibid.

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French were still present, but would experience a similar withdrawal from

the Levant market by the mid-century, due to the negative impact of war and

political instability on France’s commerce and industries, and to notable weak-

nesses in the latter’s consular and commercial implantation in the Ottoman

lands. The decline of the French presence in the Levant would, however,

remain a temporary phenomenon, prolonged until the last decades of the

seventeenth century, when France would gradually recover lost ground and,

eventually, dominate the Levant trade throughout most of the eighteenth

century.

English success in the early seventeenth century was in its greaterpart linked

to the ability of English merchants to trade their woollen broadcloths against

local products. Previously, the Levant trade had represented a severe drain on

the metallic stock of English traders, as most of the Ottoman products were

purchased against silver coins or bullion, for lack of a sufﬁcient quantity of

exports that would have balanced this trade. However, the decline of Venetian

commercial presence in the Levant – most particularly with respect to cloth

exports – opened a new and fruitful avenue of trade for the English.

Among all products exported from the Levant, silk held a prominent and

sometimes almost exclusive place. Aleppo, in northern Syria, was the main

centre from which Europeans were able to tap this rich trade. Brought to the

city through a caravan trade dominated by Armenian merchants, Persian raw

silk was then bought by French, Venetian and English factors, who exported it

back to their respective countries. It is estimated that in the 1620s, some 90 per

cent of the 230 tons of raw silk consumed in Europe originated from Aleppo.

During that period, silk accounted for over 40 per cent of European imports

from the city. The French led this trade with some 140 tons out of a total of

200, leaving the rest to the Venetians and the English. However, the situation

was soon to change: by the 1660s, English imports of silk had reached 150 to

200 tons, while the Venetians and the French had virtually disappeared from

the market.

By the end of the 1660s, English trade in the Levant had reached an absolute

peak–ofover

£400,000 – which it would not surpass before the nineteenth

century. In a rather paradoxical way, this predominance over the Levant mar-

kets masked a gradual shift of English commercial interests from the east-

ern Mediterranean to America and Asia. The share of the Levant in English

19 Ralph Davis, ‘English Imports from the Middle East, 1580–1780’, in Studies in the Economic

History of the Middle East, ed. by Michael A. Cook (Oxford, 1970), pp. 193–206,atp.195.

20 Suraiya Faroqhi, ‘Crisis and Change, 1590–1699’, in Inalcik and Quataert (eds.), Economic

and Social History,pp.411–636,atpp.499–503.

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overseas trade was steadily decreasing: from 16 per cent in the 1620s it had

dropped to 12 per cent towards mid-century and to only 7 per cent at the turn

of the eighteenth century. From then on, the Levant would constantly remain

a negligible destination for English exports and a very marginal provider of

imports (see table 14.6). Silk imports, which remained more or less stable at

their 1660s level until the 1720s, gradually started to drop to about half that

level by the 1750s. Clearly, this phenomenon was directly linked to the emer-

gence of new sources of raw silk, namely Italy and India (particularly Bengal

silk), which put an end to the Levant’s almost exclusive grip on this textile raw

material (see table 14.9). The same was true of the major English export to the

Levant, broadcloth. Until the ﬁrst decades of the eighteenth century, this item

had maintained itself at a comfortable level of 18,000–20,000 pieces per year.

From then on, it had steadily dropped, almost disappearing by the 1760s (see

table 14.1).

It is clear then that English supremacy over the Levant trade – to a certain

extent shared with the Dutch – was partly accidental, in the sense that it

resulted from a combination of half-hearted success on the English side and

of a failure of Venetian and French traders to maintain their former hold on

the market. The situation as depicted in the 1680s by the French themselves

spoke for itself: the English and the Dutch, controlling 43 and 38 per cent of

the Levant trade respectively, had left less than 20 per cent of the market to

the French (16 per cent) and the Venetians (3 per cent) (see table 14.3).

Yet despite these rather discouraging ﬁgures, the French were intent on

claiming back their past role as the leaders of the Levant trade. Colbert, con-

scious of the importance of this trade to the realm, had made a decisive attempt

at reviving it, by granting a franchise charter to the city of Marseilles in 1669.

The idea of a Marseilles-based monopoly of trade with the Levant was more

than appealing to the trading community of the city, whose vision had long

been focused on the eastern Mediterranean. The franchise was perceived by

most traders as a de jure recognition of a de facto situation of pre-eminence

in the ‘natural’ direction of the city’s commercial thrust. Soon enough, fol-

lowing several unsuccessful attempts by Colbert to found companies styled

after the Levant Company, the oligarchic structure of a community of pow-

erful Marseilles merchants, under the aegis of the chamber of commerce of

the city, came into being, setting up the rules and regulations of a systematic

exploitation of the trade channels to the Levant.

21 Robert Paris, Histoire du commerce de Marseille, vol. V: De 1 660

a 1789. Le Levant (Paris,

1957), pp. 9–24, 44–71.

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Capitulations and Western trade

Apart from the promotion of Marseilles to the status of a chartered port,

the revival of Frenchtrade in the Levantdepended mostly on a major shift in the

international policy of Louis XIV. Franco-Ottoman relations had been on the

verge of a severe rupture, due to the aid granted by the French to the Austrians

at Saint Gotthard, and to the Venetians during the Cretan war. Viewing French

dreams of hegemony over northern Europe with great fear, many European

states made substantial efforts – including Leibniz’s scheme of a conquest

of Egypt – in order to exploit this breach and divert Louis XIV’s attention

towards the Levant. However, the French crown was intent on maintaining

its aggressive policy against the Dutch Provinces, while it tried to mend its

differences with the Ottomans. In 1673, while French troops dismantled the

Netherlands, the ambassador, marquis de Nointel, obtained the renewal of

the French capitulations, which once again put France on an equal footing

with England, and provided the basis of the revival of French trade in the

Levant.

The French recovery was slow, but efﬁcient. By the ﬁrst decade of the

eighteenth century, they were able to match the broadcloth export ﬁgures of

the English; by the 1730s, the trend had been decisively inverted, as French

cloth reached the level of 30,000 pieces per year, against 10,000–15,000 for the

English (see table 14.1). By mid-century, the French could boast that they had

effectively conquered the market, with a share of over 65 per cent against a

mere 15, 3 and 16 per cent for the English, Dutch and Venetians respectively

(see table 14.3).

Western trade in the seventeenth century:

Ottoman passivity?

The analysis and study of Western trade in the Ottoman Empire has often

tended to be viewed unilaterally, from the perspective of the major Western

nations and traders whose commercial ventures have come to be identiﬁed

with the Levant trade. Yet such a view of trade obviously constitutes only one

side of the picture, and tends to overlook the complex issue of Ottoman par-

ticipation in this trade. Moreover, Ottoman participation in the Levant trade,

more often than not, has been considered from the perspective of the ‘receiv-

ing end’ of the channels of trade, that is in terms of the process of integration

of local merchant communities into the commercial networks established by

22 Albert Vandal, L’Odyss

ee d’un ambassadeur. Les voyages du marquis de Nointel (1670–1680)

(Paris, 1900), pp. 77–112.

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their Western counterparts and, more generally, in terms of the impact of

Western trade on Ottoman markets, whether in terms of production, distri-

bution or consumption. The Ottomans are thus more or less systematically

assigned a ‘passive’ role, whereby they are depicted as hosts – or even victims –

of trading activities beyond their own control.

That the Levant trade was not a unilateral business exclusively conducted

by Western traders has now been proven beyond any doubt. Sixteenth-century

records of Ottoman traders circulating in the Mediterranean and exporting

their own commodities to Western markets are frequent enough to allow for

a vision of the Levant trade as a two-way avenue between the western and

eastern Mediterranean basins. In that respect, Venice probably constituted

the principal centre of Ottoman commercial deployment in the area. The

attribution, in 1621, of the famous Fondaco dei Turchi to ‘Turkish’ merchants

by the administrators of the city – after several other locations – was a clear sign

of the need to accommodate, as well as to segregate, an important community

of traders originating from the Levant. Although it is certain that many of them

were Greeks and Armenians, the arrangements made for the refurbishing of

this former palazzo made it clear that a number of these merchants were

Muslim subjects of the sultan.

The discovery of the estate of an Ottoman

Muslim trader in the Venetian archives,

or the conﬁscation, by the Senate,

of the property of some seventy-ﬁve Ottoman Muslim merchants in 1570,

further conﬁrms the notion that Ottoman commercial entrepreneurship was

not only active in the Mediterranean, but that, contrary to most beliefs, it

included a considerable number of Muslim subjects of the empire. Similar

ﬁndings exist in the case of Poland, Lithuania and Muscovy, which were often

visited, especially during the sixteenth century, by Ottoman traders – including

Muslims – who exchanged their mohair fabrics and precious stones for the

much-prized furs produced in these regions.

However, despite the fact that these Ottoman commercial incursions

beyond the western borders of the empire are well documented, one should

bear in mind certain factors which reduce to a large extent the incidence of

23 Agostino Sagredo and Federico Berchet, Il Fondaco dei Turchi in Venezia (Milan, 1860);

Giorgio Vercellin, ‘Mercanti turchi e sensali a Venezia’, Studi Veneziani 4 (1980), 243–75.

24 Cemal Kafadar, ‘A Death in Venice (1575): Anatolian Muslim Merchants Trading in the

Serenissima’, Raiyyet R

umu. Essays Presented to Halil

Inalcık on his Seventieth Birthday by

his Colleagues and Students. Journal of Turkish Studies 10 (1986), 191–218.

25 Benjamin Arbel, Trading Nations: Jews and Venetians in the Early Modern Eastern Mediter-

ranean (Leiden, New York and Cologne, 1995), pp. 65–7.

26 Gilles Veinstein, ‘Marchands ottomans en Pologne-Lituanie et en Moscovie sous le r

egne

de Soliman le Magniﬁque’, Cahiers du monde russe 35, 4 (October–December 1994), 713–38.

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Capitulations and Western trade

these ventures from the perspective of the reciprocity of trade between the

Ottoman Empire and the West. First of all, most of these occurrences took

place in the sixteenth century, and appear to have ceased by the second half

of the seventeenth. Moreover, the limits of this commercial expansion have

been clearly deﬁned: Venice, and occasionally Ancona, in the Mediterranean,

and Lw

ow in Poland seem to have constituted the westernmost limits of Mus-

lim willingness to venture into the abode of war (dar

ulharb) for commercial

purposes.

The situation was not much different in the case of non-Muslim Ottoman

merchants– Greeks, Armeniansand Jews – whoseinvolvement in international

trade on Western turf remainedrather limited throughout the period. This was

especially true of Jewish merchants, whose vigorous participation in trade with

Venice and other Italian cities in the 1500s had almost completely disappeared in

the following century.

Armenian commercial networks were still extremely

powerful, especially in the trade between India, the district of New Julfa in

Isfahan and Anatolia; yet their activity west of the Ottoman boundaries, even

though it extended as far as London, Amsterdam or Scandinavia, remained

more fragile and, at any rate, could hardly be labelled as Ottoman. Ottoman

Armenians, although connected to this greater Armenian intercontinental

network, remained much more local – at the level of the empire – in their

commercialand ﬁnancial ventures.

Thesame was true of Greeks, whomostly

focused their trading activities on Anatolia, the AegeanIslands and the Balkans,

despite a diaspora established in major European urban centres.

Another example of the limited direct and active involvement of the

Ottoman Empire in international trade may be found in the vicissitudes of

trade in the Dalmatian city of Ragusa (Dubrovnik). This tributary state bene-

ﬁted from a strategic location on the Adriatic Sea and from substantial rebates

on customs dues, which ensured it a position of a near-free port on the fringe

of the Ottoman domains. As such, it had enjoyed a rather prosperous period

of commercial expansion during the ﬁrst decades of the sixteenth century, but

from the 1530s on, its volume of trade had dropped in a most drastic way. In

27 Arbel, Trading Nations, passim.

28 On Armenian networks, see, for example, Levon Khachikian, ‘Le registre d’un marchand

arm

enien en Perse, en Inde et au Tibet (1692–1693)’, Annales 22, 2 (March–April, 1967),

231–78; Michel Aghassian and K

eram K

evonian, ‘Le commerce arm

enien dans l’Oc

ean

Indien aux 17eet18esi

ecles’, in Marchands et hommes d’affaires asiatiques dans l’Oc

ean

indien et la mer de Chine: 13e–20esi

ecles, ed. Denys Lombard and Jean Aubin (Paris, 1988),

pp. 155–81.

29 Traian Stoianovich, ‘The Conquering Balkan Orthodox Merchant’, Journal of Economic

History 20 (1960), 234–313; Faroqhi, ‘Crisis and Change’, pp. 517–19.

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fact, it appears that the city’s commercial activity was revived only in times of

Ottoman conﬂict with Venice, when its main adversary was banned from direct

contact with the sultans’ territories through its commercial outpost of Spalato

(Split). Throughout the seventeenth century, Ragusan trade was therefore of

no consequence, with the exception of the 1645–69 conﬂict over Crete and the

1683–99 Austro-Ottoman wars, when the city experienced a formidable, but

short-lived, revival of its commerce.

It is therefore safe to claim – without assuming total Ottoman passivity in

the matter – that most of the trade conducted between the Ottoman Empire

and European nations was initiated by the latter. Ottoman participation and

interference in – or even control of – this trade was mostly limited to commer-

cial activity taking place within the empire’s boundaries. Several explanations

can be suggested to explain this unbalanced situation between the two parties.

Maritime control and technology was probably one of the most important, as

the Levant trade was heavily dependent on transportation by sea between the

eastern Mediterranean basin and European ports. Against the mastery of

the Western seafaring nations, whose commercial and military ﬂeets ensured

the regular servicing and patrolling of Ottoman waters, the Ottomans could

not beneﬁt from a proper westbound transportation network or from a naval

presence to protect it. Until well into the nineteenth century, a rather clear-cut

division of labour seems to have characterised European and Ottoman par-

ticipation in the Levant trade from the perspective of transportation: the sea

routes – between European and Ottoman ports – belonged to the Europeans,

while Ottomans – and other ‘Orientals’ – controlled land transportation and

inland distribution networks.

Moreover, it is rather obvious that the Ottoman state never attained a level of

concern similar to that of European states for the development and promotion

of international trade conducted by its own subjects. Contrary to the mercan-

tilist policies of Western states, which deployed charters, monopolies, diplo-

macy, consular services and naval protection for their subjects, the Ottoman

government never showed any similar intention to set up an infrastructure that

might encourage, service or support its few expatriate merchants. The occa-

sional c¸avus¸ sent out to Venice or to some other Western city to protest against

the mistreatment of merchants or to promote the interests of a state-sponsored

trader was certainly not comparable to the constant support displayed by the

English, French or Dutch states towards their own merchants.

30 Francis W. Carter, Dubrovnik (Ragusa): A Classic City-State (London and New York, 1972);

Faroqhi, ‘Crisis and Change’, pp. 520–5.

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Capitulations and Western trade

Yet all these ‘concrete’ reasons for a marked reluctance of Ottoman traders

to reach out to Western markets should not let us overlook what seems to have

been one of the most important causes behind this aloofness: the marginal

character of this trade when compared to the bulk of Ottoman commercial

activity. In the absence of any reliable ﬁgure for this pre-statistical age, only

rough guesses can be made about the proportional share of Western trade to

the total volume of commercial activity in the empire. At any rate, it seems

unlikelythat this tradeshould haverepresentedmore than 10,oreven5, per cent

of all trading activity. Not only dwarfed by a thriving domestic trade, but also

clearly outdistanced by the Eastern trade with Persia and India, Western trade

had little to offer to Ottoman commercial entrepreneurs, who found much

more satisfaction – and much less trouble – in exploiting domestic channels

of trade. The combination of a relative inability – and unwillingness – of

Ottoman traders to implant themselves on Western markets with the obvious

attraction of a rich, wide, and diversiﬁed local market resulted in a situation

almost diametrically opposed to that of the trading nations of Europe. To

the English, the Dutch, and to a certain extent the French, foreign trade often

bore enormous promises of wealth in comparison to the opportunities offered

by a much smaller domestic market. From this situation stemmed a much

more dynamic thrust toward overseas trade, which involved both the private

initiative of traders and groups of traders, and the parallel support provided

by the state and its mercantilist policies.

Ottoman reception of merchants: the political and

economic dimensions

With the Ottomans snugly settled at the ‘receiving end’ of the Levant trade,

it becomes easier to set aside the question of understanding why local mer-

chants did not reciprocate, and to concentrate on the impact of this trade on

the empire. It has often been argued that the main impact of Western trade on

the Ottoman economy has been a gradual process of (passive/dependent)

incorporation into the world economy.

Some signs of this process have

been discovered as early as the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries,

as in

31 See, for example, Immanuel Wallerstein, Hale Decdeli and Res¸at Kasaba, ‘The Incor-

poration of the Ottoman Empire into the World-Economy’, in The Ottoman Empire and

the World-Economy, ed. by Huri

Islamo

glu-

Inan (Cambridge, 1987), pp. 88–100;Murat

C¸ izakc¸a, ‘Incorporation of the Middle East into the European World Economy’, Review

8, 3 (1985), 353–78.

Omer L

utﬁ Barkan, ‘The Price Revolution of the Sixteenth Century: A Turning Point

in the Economic History of the Near East’, International Journal of Middle East Studies 6

(1975), 3–28.

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the case of the Bursa silk industry, which collapsed under the impact of the

‘price-scissors’ resulting from increasing raw-silk prices triggered by a grow-

ing Western demand, and the competition of imported cloth against local

textiles.

However, there is some doubt as to the effectiveness and durability

of Western penetration of certain Ottoman markets at such an early date,

especially if one considers that most local industries – including the Bursa silk

industry – seem to have thrived during much of the eighteenth century.

appears that much of the ‘incorporation model’ stems from the combination

of an ex post facto anticipation of incorporation patterns projected from the

nineteenth century backwards, and a still insufﬁcient amount of information

available on the economic performance of local industries and trades. Indeed,

it seems unlikely that the impact of a still marginal Western trade should have

caused structural transformations of the Ottoman economy. A more plausible

interpretation, for the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, would be to view

such crises as isolated and short-term changes that did not necessarily threaten

the strong resilience displayed by the Ottoman economy.

Yet another ‘crisis’ induced by European trade in the mid-seventeenth cen-

tury may shed some light on the way in which the Levant trade could disrupt –

again, for a short period of time – some of the most basic equilibria of the

Ottoman economy. The introduction in the Ottoman lands of French ﬁve-sol

coins (pi

eces de cinq sols) in the early 1650s had met with such great success

that French and other nations’ traders had soon begun to exploit and abuse

this new commercial opening by shipping increasing quantities of counterfeit

and debased coinage, which eventually ﬂooded the Ottoman markets. The

Ottoman economy was thus being drained of its good coinage, which was

shipped back to southern France and northern Italy, only to be re-minted

into baser versions of the ﬁve-sol coins. This counterfeiting scheme lasted for

almost two decades, until the Ottoman state decided in 1669 to de-monetise

this coinage.

This surprising monetary aberration, long interpreted as a

33 Murat C¸ izakc¸a, ‘Price History and the Bursa Silk Industry: A Study in Ottoman Industrial

Decline, 1550–1650’, Journal of Economic History 40, 3 (1980), 533–50.

34 Mehmet Genc¸, ‘A Comparative Study of the Life Term Tax Farming Data and the Volume

of Commercial and Industrial Activities in the Ottoman Empire during the Second Half

of the Eighteenth Century’, in Les villes balkaniques et sud-est europ

eennesetlar

evolution

industrielle de l’Europe occidentale (Soﬁa, 1976), pp. 243–80; Mehmet Genc¸, ‘A Study of the

Feasibility of Using Eighteenth-Century Ottoman Financial Records as an indicator of

Economic Activity’, in The Ottoman Empire and the World Economy, ed. Huri

Islamo

glu-

Inan (Cambridge, 1987), pp. 345–73; Mehmet Genc¸, ‘18.Y

uzyılda Osmanlı Sanayii’, D

ve Bug

uyle Toplum ve Ekonomi 2 (September 1991), 99–124.

35 Paris, Histoire du commerce,pp.132–4;S¸evket Pamuk, A Monetary History of the Ottoman

Empire (Cambridge, 2000), pp. 149–55.

306

Capitulations and Western trade

European abuse of an economically na

ıve population, in fact ﬁnds its explana-

tion in the drastic dearth of coinage experienced in the Ottoman lands since

the 1640s.

Yet it also points at a rather typical attitude of a government that

saw no real ill in the circulation of foreign coinage, and no immediate reason

to intervene against an obvious and protracted disruption of the market. This

attitude, conﬁrmed by other signs of a rather lenient approach to foreign trade

unthinkable in the context of a mercantilist state, have led to the conclusion

that Ottoman economic policy was essentially anti- or non-mercantilist, and

thus constituted the Achilles’ heel of the empire’s economy in its confrontation

with Western commercial expansion.

Indeed, this argument has generally been developed as a corollary of the

directing principles of Ottoman economic policy – provisionism, ﬁscalism

and traditionalism. These three terms, used in an effort to pin down the

directing principles of Ottoman economic policy, refer to the obsession of

the state with ensuring a constant and secure ﬂow of commodities to con-

sumers, most particularly to the population of Istanbul (provisionism); to the

state’s constant drive to acquire additional sources of revenue – mostly ﬁscal –

and its vision of the economy as subservient and instrumental to the ﬁscal

needs of the treasury (ﬁscalism); and to a marked preference for the preserva-

tion of the status quo in all matters relating to politics, society and economy,

with a consequent animosity towards any innovation – other than the state’s

own – that might disrupt the ‘natural’ order of things (traditionalism). This

economic ideology, an offshoot of the ‘circle of equity’, has generally been

interpreted as the basis of a pre-modern command economy, in which lay the

major reason for the non-mercantilist – or even anti-mercantilist – Ottoman

attitude. Its provisionist nature led the state to encourage imports, as they

were a way to provision the population; its ﬁscalist character also encour-

aged it to do so as imports constituted one of the most attractive sources of

revenue through customs dues.

Although somewhat overrated, especially

with respect to their actual implementation in everyday economic life, these

principles seem to have played an important role in determining the permis-

siveness and casualness with which the Porte addressed issues relating to the

Levant trade. This was particularly true with respect to the absence of protec-

tionist measures in favour of local industries. However, once again, it appears

36 Pamuk, Monetary History,pp.150–1.

37 Mehmet Genc¸, ‘Osmanlı Imparatorlu

gu’nda devlet ve ekonomi’, in V. Milletlerarası

urkiye sosyal ve iktisat tarihi kongresi. Tebli

gler (Ankara, 1991), pp. 13–25; Mehmet Genc¸,

‘Osmanlı

ıktisad

ıd

unya g

us¸

ılkeleri’,

Istanbul

Universitesi Edebiyat Fak

ultesi Sos-

yoloji Dergisi 1 (1989), 176–85.

307