Faroqhi S.N. The Cambridge History of Turkey: Volume 3, The Later Ottoman Empire, 1603-1839
Подождите немного. Документ загружается.
suraiya n. faroqhi
on yearly tax-farm revenues useless, as the tax-farmer now paid a fixed sum
for the remainder of his life. However, the entry fine, levied whenever a new
tax-farmer took over, should still allow us to determine whether textile pro-
duction was expanding or declining.
8
In the case of industries with heavy state
demand, such as the manufacture of sailcloth or fabric for military uniforms,
orders for textiles may provide a rough notion of productive capacities. Lists of
administratively fixed prices, especially for Istanbul, provide some indication
of the fabrics originating from provincial towns available in the markets of the
capital, and thus also about internal trade in textiles.
9
As for raw cotton, silk or mohair exports, figures are available from English,
French and Dutch sources. If we possessed some idea of overall production of
these essential raw materials, which in most cases we do not, we would know
where, and to what extent, scarcities due to excessive exportation crippled
Ottoman artisan production. However, European documents also contain a
fair amount of information on prices, which may be useful when we wish
to judge the production costs of Ottoman craftsmen.
10
Admittedly, caution is
in order, as Ottoman textile producers might live closer to the source of raw
material than exporters, and therefore pay lower transportation costs. Or else
they might enjoy privileged access to materials such as raw wool, as was true
of the Jewish artisans of Salonika.
11
Certain qualities of fibre even might be
reserved for local producers exclusively, as in the later eighteenth and early
nineteenth centuries, was the rule in the Ankara mohair industry.
12
Ye t g ive n
the relative scarcity of such information in Ottoman documents, these data
gleaned from European sources, whatever their limitations, still constitute
worthwhile indicators of textile production in the lands bordering the eastern
Mediterranean.
In addition, qualitative evidence should not be neglected. Disputes between
textile-producing artisans and tax-farmers, between the former and the admin-
istrators of pious foundations renting out workspace, and, last but not least,
among fellow guildsmen themselves, provide useful information on the condi-
tions under which production took place. Artisans’ attempts to hold their own
8 Mehmet Genc¸, ‘Osmanlı maliyesinde malik
ˆ
ane sistemi’, in T
¨
urkiye iktisat tarihi semineri,
ed. Osman Okyar and
¨
Unal Nabanto
˘
glu (Ankara, 1975), pp. 231–96.
9 M
¨
ubahat K
¨
ut
¨
uko
˘
glu, Osmanlılarda narh m
¨
uessesesi ve 1640 tarihli narh defteri (Istanbul,
1983).
10 Elena Frangakis-Syrett, The Commerce of Smyrna in the Eighteenth Century (1700–1820)
(Athens, 1992).
11 Suraiya Faroqhi, ‘Textile Production in Rumeli and the Arab Provinces: Geographical
Distribution and Internal Trade’, Osmanlı Aras¸tırmaları 1 (1980), 61–83 at p. 68.
12 Suraiya Faroqhi, ‘Mohair Manufacture and Mohair Workshops in Seventeenth Century
Ankara’,
˙
Istanbul
¨
Universitesi
˙
Iktisat Fak
¨
ultesi Mecmuası 41, 1–4 (1982–3), 211–36.
358
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
Declines and revivals in textile production
against the members of local power structures are also highlighted in Ottoman
documents. In some cases, foundation records inform us about the adminis-
tration of common funds, and thus provide information on relations between
the different textile-producing guilds. And where information is really scarce,
as is often true of the smaller textile centres, casual references to fabrics being
traded, given away or stolen may provide precious indicators. Such references
are common in the registers kept by local judges (kadı sicilleri) and the central
administration itself (ahk
ˆ
am defterleri).
The downs and ups of the seventeenth century:
supply and demand
For some of the better-known branches of Ottoman textile production, the
early seventeenth century was a period of difficulties. On the supply side,
Iranian silk, as yet the principal raw material in the manufacture of Bursa
silk stuffs, had become more expensive, due to increasing English and Italian
demand. However, because of political constraints – the palace was apt to
dictate prices – producers were unable to pass on the price increase to their
customers. That many potential buyers had sustained losses in income due
to the financial crisis of the early 1600s did not help matters. This situation
resulted in a ‘profit squeeze’, which forced many manufacturers to suspend
operations. Others tried to expand their market by producing lighter and
cheaper fabrics. But apparently pressure from power-holders, who continued
to demand the old heavy fabrics, prevented such innovators from gaining
legitimacy and establishing an equivalent of the English ‘new draperies’ in the
Ottoman market.
13
A development similar to that observed in early seventeenth-century Bursa
occurred, a little later, in the Salonika production of woollen cloth. Weav-
ing medium-quality woollens was a specialty of the Sephardic Jews settled
in this town by Sultan Bayezid II.
14
Down to the middle of the seventeenth
century, this craft had produced both for the market and for the janissaries,
supplying the woollen cloth from which the outer garments of the corps mem-
bers were made. In this case, Venetian and later French demand for Balkan
wool, inferior though this raw material may have been when compared to
the Spanish or English product, tended to drive up prices, while imports
of finished cloth from England limited the consumers’ market. Moreover,
13 C¸ izakc¸a, ‘Price History’.
14 I. S. Emmanuel, Histoire de l’industrie des tissus des Isra
´
elites de Salonique (Paris, 1935);
Braude, ‘Undevelopment’.
359
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
suraiya n. faroqhi
well into the sixteenth century the Ottoman state had paid a modest price
for the uniform cloth delivered. But from 1600 onwards, these deliveries
were increasingly viewed as taxes pure and simple, thus forcing the pro-
ducers to depend on a shrinking market for their entire livelihoods. This
situation explains why many Salonika manufacturers attempted to leave the
city in spite of official prohibitions, settling in places as remote as Izmir and
Manisa.
15
Difficulties connected with the growth of raw material exports were also
experienced in the cotton industry. Although in the sixteenth century Ottoman
state officials had often regarded cotton as a strategic raw material whose
export was strictly prohibited, this attitude changed by the early seventeenth
century. Possibly because diminished naval activity in the Mediterranean had
reduced the administration’s concern about sailcloth, the export of raw cotton
by Venetian merchants was now tolerated; the need for customs revenue may
have played a part as well.
16
Unfortunately, no production figuresfor raw cotton
survive; so it is difficult to determine whether in the long run, the supply of
raw cotton in the Aegean coastlands, Thessaly and other cotton-growing areas
caught up with increasing demand.
In areas close to the major ports and entrep
ˆ
ots, such as Istanbul, Izmir,
Salonika or Aleppo, competition from European woollensadded to the difficul-
ties of textile manufacturers. While the Ottoman state frequently intervened to
protect the raw material sources of its textile-manufacturing subjects, imports
of foreign fabrics were generally regarded in a positive light. Imports appeared
to supply the market with needed goods, thus lowering prices, and were not
usually curtailed.
17
From the late sixteenth century onwards, the Levant Com-
pany thus could import large quantities of English woollens into the Ottoman
Empire to balance its purchases of Iranian raw silk in Aleppo or Izmir. These
fabrics were sold at bargain prices, as the Levant Company’s principal profits
came out of the resale of Iranian silk in Europe.
18
It was mainly the Ottoman
producers of medium-quality woollens who suffered, particularly the Salonika
weavers. For the ‘mass market’, such as it was, even moderately priced imports
were too expensive. Thus local manufactures of the cheaper goods survived
and even thrived: the decline of the Salonika industry was balanced to a certain
15 Feridun M. Emecen, Unutulmus¸ bir cemaat, Manisa Yahudileri (Istanbul, 1997), pp. 35ff.
16 Faroqhi, Towns and Townsmen,p.136.
17 Halil Inalcik, ‘The Ottoman Economic Mind and Aspects of the Ottoman Economy’,
in Studies in the Economic History of the Middle East from the Rise of Islam to the Present Day,
ed. M. A. Cook (Oxford, 1970), pp. 207–18.
18 Braude, ‘Undevelopment’.
360
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
Declines and revivals in textile production
extent by the seventeenth-century expansion of rough woollens (aba) in the
area of Plovdiv (Ottoman Filibe).
19
Ottoman textile producers of the seventeenth century also faced competi-
tion from Indian cottons.
20
Apparently Ottoman consumers were just as much
impressed by the quality of the textiles and the beauties of their designs as were
those in Europe.
21
South Indian cotton manufacture was geared to export mar-
kets and highly specialised; the ‘Arabian’ (i.e. Ottoman) customers’ tastes were
carefully taken into account. Indian cottons reached Ottoman territory by way
of Jiddah and Basra, and the mart of Aleppo by caravan. Wealthy merchants
of Cairo found this trade, along with the better-documented importation
and re-exportation of coffee, lucrative enough. Thus coffee and Indian fabrics
compensated for the decline in the spice trade from present-day Indonesia,
which by the seventeenth century was increasingly being monopolised by the
Dutch.
22
High-quality Indian cottons competed with silk, while more modest
customers might wear quilted garments stuffed with cotton wool as a conve-
nient substitute for woollens. The popularity of these textiles resulted in certain
Indian technical terms for cotton fabrics entering the Ottoman language as
loan words.
23
The impact of politics
Economic factors apart, seventeenth-century political problems aggravated
the difficulties of Ottoman textile producers. In the years down to 1640 at
the very least, the unrest known as the Celali uprisings and the activities of
rebellious governors frequently made the roads impassable, so that textiles
produced for anything but the local market remained unsold for long peri-
ods of time. Destruction of cotton fields and wool-bearing flocks must have
further limited supplies. Some textile towns, such as Bursa, Urfa, Ankara or
Tosya, were attacked and/or occupied by the rebels, with wholesale plunder
the result.
24
Northern Syria was at the same time affected by the rebellion of
Canbolado
˘
glu Ali Pas¸a, and the grand vizier Kuyucu Murad Pas¸a’s campaign
19 Nicolaj Todorov, La ville balkanique aux XVe–XIXe si
`
ecles: d
´
eveloppement socio-
´
economique
et d
´
emographique (Bucharest, 1980), pp. 225–7.
20 Sinappah Arasaratnam, Merchants, Companies and Commerce on the Coromandel Coast,
1650–1740 (Delhi, 1986), pp. 95–102.
21 Halil
˙
Inalcık, ‘Osmanlı pamuklu pazarı, Hindistan ve
˙
Ingiltere: pazar rekabetinde emek
maliyetinin rol
¨
u’, METU Studies in Development (1979–80, special issue), 1–66.
22 Andr
´
e Raymond, Artisans et commerc¸ants au Caire au XVIIIe si
`
ecle, 2 vols. (Damascus,
1973–4), vol. I, p. 135.
23
˙
Inalcık, ‘Osmanlı pamuklu pazarı’, pp. 22–41.
24 Faroqhi, Towns and Townsmen,p.140.
361
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
suraiya n. faroqhi
to subdue it. Military activity must have led to a contraction in the supply espe-
cially of silk, for peasant women in flight could not care for their silkworms. In
the case of the Iranian product, the numerous Ottoman–Iranian wars down
to 1639 formed a major cause for production decline. This probably was not
compensated for by the loads of silk Ottoman soldiers occasionally managed to
carry off as booty. While we lack the figures that would permit us to weigh the
impact of war damage in contrast to that caused by economic conjunctures,
the impact of both internal and external warfare must have been consider-
able. C¸ izakc¸a, in his study of the Bursa silk industry, assigns the principal
responsibility for the crisis of local manufactures to European demand for raw
silk.
25
Survivals, revivals and new departures
There were, however, some compensations. With Iranian silk becoming more
costly, raw silk production in the Ottoman lands expanded, especially in the
Bursa region.
26
Mulberry production had been of no great significance in the
sixteenth century, but, around 1700 or 1730, reasonably prosperous inhabitants
of this city, including many women, owned mulberry orchards; even though
mulberries are edible, and the leaves can be used as fodder, it is still likely
that the primary motivation for growing this tree was the cultivation of silk-
worms. Farming land, and, in exceptional cases, even built-up real estate was
converted for this purpose. Mulberry growers were not necessarily identical
with silkworm raisers, as sales of mulberry leaves are on record. In the eigh-
teenth century, silk cultivated in the Bursa region remained at the disposal
of Ottoman artisans. While Syrian silks were sought out by foreign mer-
chants, this does not seem to have been true of the Bursa product; before 1815,
French merchants who attempted imports to Marseilles found demand rather
slack.
Bursa silk taxes revived as early as the 1620s, once the disruption of the
civil wars had somewhat abated.
27
Costs were cut by employing poor free
people, now quite numerous in this populous city. We no longer encounter
the slaves who had manned many looms in the sixteenth century, and who
needed maintenance while they were being trained for unfamiliar and often
demanding work. In all probability less expensive silk fabrics were turned out
25 C¸ izakc¸a, ‘Price History’.
26 Haim Gerber, Economy and Society in an Ottoman City: Bursa, 1600–1700 ( Jerusalem, 1988),
pp. 81–4.
27 C¸ izakc¸a, ‘Incorporation’.
362
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
Declines and revivals in textile production
in sizeable quantities and absorbed by a largely local market.
28
Apparently
the transition from high-luxury fabrics to those appropriate for well-off but
not very rich urban customers went quite smoothly. A careful monograph
of seventeenth-century Bursa does not record major distress occasioned by a
decay of the city’s silk industry.
29
In the wool sector, the most prosperous trade, apart from the abasof
Plovdiv/Filibe, seems to have been carpet manufacture. Surviving carpets are
notoriously difficult to date, but both Ottoman and European sources indicate
the buoyancy of this craft. Moreover, unlike what seems to have happened in
the silk industry, seventeenth-century producers did not yet feel impelled to
sacrifice quality to quantity.
30
The main centre of commercial manufacture
was apparently Us¸ak. An Istanbul register of administered prices, dated 1640,
indicates that Us¸ak rugs were common on the Istanbul market. Often they
were ornamented with a sofra (flat surface on which food was served) in the
centre, and thus must have corresponded to our medallion Ushaks.
31
Evliya C¸ elebi, who visited Us¸ak in 1671–2, is the only author, Ottoman or
non-Ottoman, to have described the town at the time of its florescence.
32
Camels and carts brought in quantities of wool, and lively sales took place
in the town’s business centre. A root from which red dye was manufactured
grew in the nearby village of Boyalı, and served local producers. Us¸ak carpets
were found as far afield as the Armenian monastery of Jerusalem in the east
and Transylvania in the west.
Evliya’s comparison of Us¸ak rugs with those of Isfahan and Cairo is not
mere rhetoric. Us¸ak carpets are characterised by elaborate scrollwork, rather
different from the geometrical designs and stylised animals we associate with
Anatolian rugs down to the sixteenth century. Presumably this change in
taste radiated from the palace, where Safavid court rugs with their exuberant
decorations seem to have made a great impression. Among the products of
the little town of Kula, Evliya also records carpets, in addition to red and
multi-coloured kelims.
33
28 Gerber, Bursa,p.66. Suraiya Faroqhi, ‘Bursa at the Crossroads: Iranian Silk, European
Competition and the Local Economy 1470–1700’, in Making a Living in the Ottoman Lands,
1480–1820, ed. Suraiya Faroqhi (Istanbul, 1995), pp. 113–48.
29 Gerber, Bursa.
30 Kurt Erdmann, Europa und der Orientteppich (Mainz, 1962); Onno Ydema, Carpets and
their Datings in Netherlandish Paintings, 1540–1700 (Zutphen and Woodbridge, 1991).
31 K
¨
ut
¨
uko
˘
glu, Osmanlılarda narh m
¨
uessesesi,pp.71, 72, 178.
32 Evliy
ˆ
aC¸ elebi, Seyahatn
ˆ
amesi, 10 vols. (Istanbul, 1314/1896–7 to 1938), vol. IX, p. 39 and
elsewhere.
33 Ibid., p. 52.
363
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
suraiya n. faroqhi
Cairo, which in the sixteenth century had possessed a major reputation for
its ‘Mamluk-style’ carpets, continued to produce in the seventeenth century.
Jean Th
´
evenot, who visited the city in 1657, maintains that many carpets sold
in Europe as ‘Turkish’ had in fact been woven in Cairo. Th
´
evenot is one of the
very few authors to have left a description of a workshop producing ‘classical’
Ottoman carpets. He witnessed young boys working under the supervision
of a master, who came to every loom from time to time with a pattern in his
hand. From this paper the master read off the number of knots in a given colour
required by the design, and Th
´
evenot was much impressed by the rapidity of
the process.
34
Anatolian carpets had apparently been exported, to Tibet as well as to
Mediterranean Europe, ever since the thirteenth century. However, due to
the ambitions of Dutch seventeenth-century painters in the documentation of
worldly riches, more is known about the types favoured by northern European
buyers than is true for any previous period. That the export of carpets attracted
the attention of certain Ottoman ulema is proven by a sultanic command, dated
1610–11, which forbade the manufacture of rugs with prayer niches on them.
35
It was taken for granted that rugs were often sold to infidels, and therefore it
was forbidden to decorate them with religious symbols; however, given the
numerous rugs with prayer niches in European collections, this admonition
does not seem to have produced any concrete results.
Scattered information indicates the continuing (or renewed) prosperity of
textile manufacturing in western Anatolia, but especially in the hinterland of
Aleppo and in Egypt. Jewish refugees from Salonika brought the manufacture
ofwoollencloth to Manisa;this wasprobablylower inquality than thatsupplied
to the janissaries but appealing to a modest local clientele.
36
Evliya C¸ elebi
emphasises the mid-seventeenth-century prosperity of Ayntab (Gaziantep),
which had added six or seven new quarters to the urban fabric between 1648
and 1671–2, apart from a sizeable number of khans, shops and mosques. Ayntab
produced ‘coloured’ (elvan) cotton cloth, probably one of the mainstays of its
commercial activity.
37
The Nuremberg merchant Wolffgang Aigen, who lived
in Aleppo between 1656 and 1663, considered this city a centre of the long-
distance trade in cotton and cotton yarn. His principal concern being with
goods that might profitably be exported, Aigen emphasises that cotton cloth
34 Jean Th
´
evenot, Voyage du Levant, ed. St
´
ephane Y
´
erasimos (Paris, 1980), p. 232.
35 Ahmed Refik Altınay, Onbirinci asr-ı hicr
ˆ
ı’de
˙
Istanbul hayatı (1592–1688) (Istanbul, 1988),
pp. 43f.
36 Emecen, Manisa Yahudileri,pp.35ff.
37 Evliy
ˆ
aC¸ elebi, Seyahatn
ˆ
amesi, vol. IX, pp. 353, 359.
364
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
Declines and revivals in textile production
from Kilis reached Aleppo for sale to exporters, and mentions the manufacture
of silk velvets, atlas and a fabric called tabin by the Orthodox Christians of
Aleppo.
Camlets woven from mohair also figured among the goods exported from
Aleppo during the middle of the seventeenth century.
38
By the late 1600s,
Nablus cotton cloths were being traded in Cairo.
39
Presumably many of these
textiles had been produced in earlier centuries as well, and thus should not be
regarded as novelties demonstrating a hypothetical dynamism of local indus-
tries. But even so, northern Syrian manufactures apparently recovered quite
well from the disturbances of the early seventeenth century.
In Cairo the manufacture of silk cloth employed a sizeable number of
artisans during the last twenty years of the seventeenth century; they appear
to have concentrated on the more modest qualities. Around 1700 Egyptian
textiles were much in demand, both in North Africa and in Syria, but some
varieties also found their way to European customers. Cairo constituted a
major locus of production, while its suburb Gizeh had acquired a reputation for
indigo-dyeing. Evliya recorded the presence of a workshop for textile printing.
Turbans from fine fabrics, intricately ornamented, also figured among the
luxury goods which down to the end of the seventeenth century generated
respectable profits for Cairo’s artisans.
40
Eighteenth-century developments: French
purchases and the cotton industry
Beginning a new period in Ottoman industrial history around 1700 is less arbi-
trary than might be assumed at first glance. During the Ottoman–Habsburg
war of 1683–99, trade had often been interrupted, as few resources could
be devoted to the security of the roads. Craft industries selling regional and
interregional markets must have been adversely affected, as had happened a
century earlier during the Celali uprisings. However, in the early eighteenth
century a concerted effort was made to remedy this problem. On the route
linking Istanbul to central Anatolia and Syria, new khans were constructed,
old ones repaired and the ancient institution of pass-guards was thoroughly
restructured.
41
With communications more secure, the first sixty years of the
38 Wolffgang Aigen, Sieben Jahre in Aleppo (1656–1 663 ): Ein Abschnitt aus den ‘Reiß-
Beschreibungen’ des Wolffgang Aigen, ed. Andreas Tietze (Vienna, 1980), fols. 36v, 61v, 118v
and elsewhere: compare index.
39 Raymond, Artisans, vol. I, p. 323. 40 Ibid., pp. 323–5 and elsewhere.
41 Cengiz Orhonlu, Osmanlı
˙
Imparatorlu
˘
gunda derbend tes¸kil
ˆ
atı (Istanbul, 1967).
365
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
suraiya n. faroqhi
eighteenth century saw a return of prosperity to many Ottoman textile pro-
ducers.
42
Concerning cottons, much of our information comes from the doc-
uments generated by Marseilles merchants. Until 1688 these traders legally
imported cotton fabrics from the eastern Mediterranean. At the time, this
trade accounted for about one-tenth of the value of all goods imported into
Marseilles from the Ottoman Empire. Ottoman cotton fabrics generally seem
to have been of ordinary quality, while the finer qualities came from Iran and
India.
43
In 1688 the importation of cottons into France was forbidden in order
to protect French textile manufacturers, but enforcement was often quite lax.
Smuggling was probably facilitated by the fact that importation for resale to
Italy and Spain remained licit.
A large share of the imported fabrics consisted of white cottons destined
for printing or the confection of shirts and underwear. These commodities
increasingly were used even by poorer Frenchmen during the eighteenth cen-
tury. This resulted in a demand for cheap cottons, which was satisfied either by
the products of local cotton weavers or else by smuggled cloth. White fabrics
known in French commercial parlance as demittes and escamittes were pro-
duced in Izmir, Sayda and Cyprus, and also in the northern Egyptian town of
Reshid/Rosetta. Similar was the quality known as boucassin (Ottoman bogası),
which in Izmir was used particularly for printing. Moreover, Egyptian linens
constituted a manufactured export of some significance, as attested by the
numerous names of textiles recorded in French commercial documents. Most
of them were of relatively coarse quality, meant to clothe sailors or serve as
bedspreads. Many of these linens were white, but blue was also a popular
colour.
With respect to coloured fabrics, Aleppo equally specialised in indigo-dyed
cottons, the colouring matter being imported at first from northern India, and
then from the Antilles. On a smaller scale, this industry also flourished in Tokat,
but during the latter part of the century, fluctuations in the price of indigo
caused great difficulties.
44
Red cottons, presumably those dyed by processes
unknown in Europe until about 1800, also figured among the specialities of
Aleppo. Moreover, there were finer cottons, often with admixtures, which
were not exported to Marseilles in significant quantities, but consumed by
42 Mehmet Genc¸, ‘XVIII. y
¨
uzyılda Osmanlı ekonomisi ve savas¸’, Yapıt 49, 4 (1984), 52–62
and 50, 5 (1984), 86–93; French version: ‘L’Economie ottomane et la guerre au XVIIIe
si
`
ecle’, Turcica 27 (1995), 177–96.
43 Katsumi Fukasawa, Toilerie et commerce du Levant,d’Alep
`
a Marseille (Paris, 1987), pp. 15–69.
44 Y
¨
uksel Duman, ‘Notables, Textiles and Copper in Ottoman Tokat 1750–1840’, Ph.D.
dissertation, Binghamton University (1998). I am grateful to the author for allowing me
to consult his work.
366
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
Declines and revivals in textile production
wealthier Ottomans: alacas/allayas out of linen and cotton, in addition to the
Aleppo textiles known to the French as herbages and bourres, mixtures of silk
and linen. Among these luxuries or semi-luxuries, one might also mention the
striped fabrics known as ikate.
45
In 1703 the prohibition on the import of cottons into France was abro-
gated. This makes more meaningful the data in the Marseilles archives, on
which we must rely for much of our information on the geographical distribu-
tion of Ottoman cotton production.
46
English commerce had been of major
importance in the seventeenth-century Ottoman Empire. But in the early
eighteenth century, this trade largely fell away. English commercial houses
therefore moved on to other business and eighteenth-century English records
tell us much less about Ottoman textile manufacturing than their French coun-
terparts. Even though cotton fabrics only made up 4 per cent of all French
imports from the Ottoman Empire, they were significant in the trade of certain
ports, such as Istanbul and Izmir. It is difficult to establish what is meant by
indiennes de Constantinople, which figure prominently in the Istanbul accounts,
but were also sometimes exported from Izmir. Presumably prints made in
Istanbul itself were consumed by the city’s inhabitants and not available for
export. Some of the fabrics in question may have been manufactured in Izmir,
Bursa and other Anatolian cities, and merely traded in the Ottoman capital.
In the exceptional year of 1717 indiennnes de Constantinople exported to Mar-
seilles werevalued at 585,400 livrestournois. But apart from this windfall, evenin
other years preceding 1720, boucassins and printed stuffs exported from Istanbul
were not insignificant.
47
In later years, however, Istanbul became quite negli-
gible as a source for exportable cotton cloth, and even Izmir declined precipi-
tately. By contrast, Aleppo, even in 1705–14 the principal source of cotton fabrics
exported by Marseilles merchants, constantly expanded its market share, so
that by 1772–6 only this city, and to a much lesser degree Alexandria, were of
any significance as suppliers to France. Ayntab (modern Gaziantep) counted as
an important producer of so-called ajamis, which were sold to French traders
both indigo-dyed and white. But the distribution of French purchases should
only be taken to mean that Aleppo and Alexandria marketed the products of a
vast hinterland, and in no way that these were the only cotton-cloth-producing
centres in the Ottoman Empire. Thus Thessaly and some of the Aegean islands
45 Fukasawa, Toilerie et commerce du Levant,p.20.
46 Ralph Davis, Aleppo and Devonshire Square: English Traders in the Levant in the Eighteenth
Century (London, Melbourne and Toronto, 1967). Compare also the chapter by Edhem
Eldem in the present volume (chapter 14).
47 Fukasawa, Toileries et commerce du Levant,pp.21–6.
367
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008