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

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manufactured signiﬁcant quantities of such fabrics, even though their products

were not exported.

In the Greek-speaking provinces, the best-known textile manufacture was,

however, located in the remote hill-town of Ambelakia. Here cotton yarn used

by the nascent textile industries of Vienna, Buda and the German lands was

hand spun and dyed, often to the ‘Turkish red’ so popular among consumers

of the time. Organised as a kind of joint stock company, the spinners and dyers

of Ambelakia prospered especially during the last decade of the eighteenth

century.

However, with the resumption of English trade on the continent

after 1815, the producers of Ambelakia were forced to compete, under increas-

ing difﬁculties, with the English machine-spun yarn that was now reaching

their customers.

Imitating Indian (and Iranian) cotton prints

In the early eighteenth century, Indian prints which had reached Ottoman mar-

kets by way of Jiddah or Basra occasionally ﬁgure among the fabrics exported

by French merchants, and the same applies to Iranian cotton prints. As we have

seen, Ottoman consumers had also developed a taste for these light, durable

and brightly coloured fabrics. However, in 1783 the Ottoman government

issued one of its very ﬁrst decrees attempting to protect local manufactures.

Aiming at the widespread use of Indian cottons, the sultan threatened those

who consumed foreign manufactures with dire punishments. This measure

had been advocated by no less a ﬁgure than the ofﬁcial historian Naima earlier

in the century, and had probably been discussed intermittently by Ottoman

bureaucrats of the eighteenth century.

It is in this context that we must view

the attempts to imitate Indian textiles on Ottoman territory.

After 1730, the export of Indian textiles to France through Ottoman ports

came to an end; but during the early eighteenth century, printed cottons (indi-

ennes chafarcani) from Diyarbekir began to attract the attention of French

exporters. As the name indicates, the chafarcanis replicated Indian manufac-

tures, with white ﬂoral designs on a red or violet ground. Some of these fabrics

may have been of Iranian provenance, but most were probably imported from

48 Ibid., p. 25.

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

History 20 (1960), 243–313,atp.257.

50 Ahmed Cevdet, Tertib-i Cevdet ez-Tarih-i Cevdet, 12 vols. (Istanbul, 1309/1891–2), vol. II,

pp. 359–60. I owe this reference to Dr Y

uksel Duman.

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Declines and revivals in textile production

India.

If a border formed part of the design, it was violet if the ground was

red, or else the reverse. Red hues were obtained by dyeing with madder root

and alum, while an iron-based mordant allowed the dyers to produce violet

fabrics, the chafarcanis being noted for their rich and durable colours. Appar-

ently the style had originated in northern India, and may have been brought

to the Ottoman Empire by Armenian traders. But the fabric of Diyarbekir

seems to have been coarser and more solid than the delicate Indian product,

and French purchasers often used it for cushions, curtains and bedspreads.

Both chafarcanis and plain cottons of the ajami type seem to have ﬂourished

well into the 1760s and even 1770s. But at this time, the economic depression

which hit so many sectors of the Ottoman economy also engulfed this man-

ufacture.

Natural calamities led to famines and scarcities of raw cotton, so

that the cotton fabrics produced in northern Syria and Mesopotamia became

more expensive and less attractive to exporters. In addition, constant warfare

in Iran affected the economy of northern Iraq as well. Detailed information

on imitations of Indian cottons became scarce when French merchants gave

up on exporting them. However, quite possibly some of those manufacturers

producing for an Ottoman market survived, or at least revived after a while, for

records concerning the forced sale of Diyarbekir cotton cloth to the Ottoman

central administration show that even in 1815–17 such cloth was delivered in

appreciable quantities.

In 1815–16, the English traveller James Buckingham,

detained in the south-eastern Anatolian town of Urfa due to the insecurity

of the roads, noted that even though many bazaars were now closed, under

‘normal’ circumstances cotton manufactures ﬂourished in this town.

After

having discussed recent developments in the British cotton industry with one

of the more substantial local producers, Buckingham was even offered a job as

a kind of ‘technical adviser’. Obviously his prospective employer hoped that

the market would again expand once the political situation had stabilised.

Cotton manufactures as reﬂected in

Ottoman records

The particular attraction of eighteenth-century French sources consists in the

numerical data they contain, which allow us to chart the progress or decline of a

51 Fukasawa, Toilerie et commerce du Levant,p.48.

52 Genc¸, ‘Osmanlı ekonomisi ve savas¸’.

Ibrahim Yılmazc¸elik, XIX. y

uzyılın ilk yarısında Diyarbakır (1790–1840) (Ankara, 1995),

pp. 312–13.

54 Compare Suraiya Faroqhi, ‘Al-Ruha’, EI 2.

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suraiya n. faroqhi

given manufacture. By contrast, Ottoman data are often qualitative. Moreover,

recent studies of urban life on the basis of local records will often play down

economic aspects in favour of cultural and socio-political ones. As a result, even

those few primary sources informative on the subject of textile production and

referred to in the secondary literature have not been analysed as closely as they

might otherwise have been.

In this context it has emerged that eighteenth-century Mosul was a centre of

cotton manufacture directed largely towards local markets. As the population

expanded during this period, demand also increased, and workers outside the

guilds, especially women, came to hold an important position as spinners.

Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century kadi registers also show that the Pales-

tinian town of Nablus focused on cotton manufacturing. In this hillside town,

fairly remote from the ports of both Sayda and Beirut, cloth was manufactured

for a peasant clientele demanding sturdy fabrics in accustomed designs. Given

low-cost labour and simple implements, locally produced goods had an edge

over their foreign competitors.

Moreover, long-term links between cloth

merchants and their peasant customers also meant that even if the former dis-

tributed‘old-fashioned’ stuffs,the latter wouldnot be as likely to switch to other

suppliers as would ‘unattached’ urban customers. On the other hand, unlike

other rural sites, where home weaving and auto-consumption dominated, the

Nablus countryside was by no means an insigniﬁcant market. Demand was

buoyant; at weddings, it was considered appropriate not only for the bride and

groom but also for the guests to appear in new outﬁts. Nineteenth-century

documentation on peasants going to town in a holiday mood in order to make

such purchases is fairly ample.

Apart from the insecure years at the very end

of the eighteenth century, the same custom probably prevailed in earlier times

as well. Unfortunately the kadi registers do not seem to contain any evidence

on the elaborate embroideries which must have decorated the clothing of at

least well-to-do brides, and which survive in respectable quantities from the

nineteenth century. It is likely that embroidered holiday clothes were worn in

earlier times as well, even though the designs may well have been different.

Where the Tokat manufacture of cotton textiles is concerned, we know

rather little about its period of ﬂorescence, apparently in the late seventeenth

and the ﬁrst half of the eighteenth centuries. But the city’s kadi registers

55 Dina Rizk Khoury, State and Provincial Society in the Ottoman Empire: Mosul 1540–1834

(Cambridge, 1997), pp. 137–8.

56 Beshara Doumani, Rediscovering Palestine: Merchants and Peasants in Jabal Nablus, 1700–

1900 (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London, 1995), pp. 95–130.

57 Ibid., p. 29.

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Declines and revivals in textile production

provide a good deal of evidence on the crisis period which the manufacture

experienced from the 1770s onward, in common with so many other branches

of Ottoman trade and industry.

As the manufacture declined, the local market

was supplied with printed cottons from Istanbul and Malatya, Maras¸, Antep

and Diyarbekir. This would indicate that cottons from south-eastern Anatolia

and northern Syria, though themselves in difﬁculties, held up better than those

of Tokat. Rising indigo prices seem to have played a signiﬁcant role in the

problems of the Tokat industry. As proﬁt margins contracted, merchants with

cottons to dye came to prefer small towns such as K

opr

u, where presumably

dues were lower. Thus the khan of the Tokat cotton printers, built by a high

Ottoman dignitary in more optimistic days, now stood deserted. A petition

from a local notable in 1764 points to non-economic factors as a reason for

the decline of the industry: even before the crippling taxation of the Russo-

Ottoman war (1768–74) spread economic crisis all over the empire, the Tokat

printers had been driven out of town by heavy irregular dues. However, the last

years of the eighteenth century witnessed a degree of recovery. This may partly

have been due to the willingness of Tokat entrepreneurs to risk manufacturing

new types of fabrics, particularly chintzes (m

ucessim, de

girmi). But they had no

monopoly on these stuffs, which were also being woven in the smaller towns

of the region. Moreover, the heavy taxes imposed on vegetable dyes in order

to ﬁll the coffers of Selim III’s new-style army corps did not exactly help the

industry.

Ottoman silks of the eighteenth century

These have always had a poor press among art historians, who favour the intri-

cate ‘cloud’ and ﬂoral designs of the sixteenth century, and regard eighteenth-

century Ottoman silk weaving as a decaying craft. Historians with a ‘statist’

slant have suggested that the lower degree of centralisation typical of the eigh-

teenth century inevitablyhad negative consequences for the arts.

Judgingthat

the ‘decline’ in Ottoman silk weaving began as early as the late sixteenth cen-

tury, Fahri Dalsar has suggested that lively demand, which could not be satisﬁed

with the limited number of workers available, was at least partly responsible

for a decline in quality. The same author has noted that Ottoman silk weaving

revived in the late eighteenth century, but that at this period Ottoman silk

manufacturers worked largely for local markets. It has also sometimes been

58 Duman, ‘Notables’.

59 Fahri Dalsar, T

urk sanayi ve ticaret tarihinde Bursa’da ipekc¸ilik (Istanbul, 1960), pp. 291–307,

esp. p. 307; Tahsin

Oz, T

urk kumas¸ ve kadifeleri, 2 vols. (Istanbul, 1951), vol. II, p. 42.

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suraiya n. faroqhi

suggested that the decline in Ottoman luxury textiles was caused by a shift

towards French silks. But a perusal of the clothing of sultans and princesses

preserved in the Topkapı Sarayı shows that in the eighteenth century, identi-

ﬁable French manufactures constituted the exception rather than the rule.

Most fabrics have not been assigned a speciﬁc origin by the cataloguers and

other experts, and must therefore be presumed of Ottoman origin. A distinct

change in taste is, however, visible: plain silks, decorated with appliqu

e work or

embroidery had become popular, or else we ﬁnd small designs, often arranged

in stripes. Apparently these fabrics were both lighter and less difﬁcult to weave

than their predecessors from the ‘classical’ period.

New names for silk stuffs

were also becoming popular, such as the different varieties of a silk fabric

known as hatayi.

Among manufacturing centres, Bursa remained of considerable impor-

tance. Apparently a fair share of the silks produced were consumed locally. As

a perusal of kadi registers dating from the 1730s shows, it was not unusual for

urban women to own several silk dresses, silk shirts were not unknown, and

velvet cushions appear among the possessions of both women and men. This

would mean that though silk no longer linked Bursa to foreign markets to the

same degree as had been true in the sixteenth century, producers had adapted

by bringing onto the market cheaper fabrics accessible to a larger number

of local consumers. A document of 1777 refers to a labourer who had woven

kutnu on behalf of his employer; this was a mixture of silk and cotton used by

women of modest social status.

Already in the seventeenth century, the island of Chios had been known for

its manufacture of atlas and kemha, those silks which had been dyed red with

kırmız being assigned the highest value.

By the eighteenth century, raw silk

from Bursa was also used in this manufacture. Presumably the silk industry

was able to develop in part because the proﬁts of Greek sea captains made

investment capital available.In particular,the silk belts woven and embroidered

on the island developed into a well-known luxury item, with which the pages

of the palace were issued on special occasions. This prominence of Chios silks

in the consumption of the eighteenth-century palace also explains the fact

that while Ottoman fabrics with legible inspection stamps (damga) are not

very common, the Topkapı Palace contains some items with well-preserved

60 H

ulya Tezcan, Selma Delibas¸ and Michael Rogers, Topkapı Sarayı-Museum: Textilien

(Herrsching am Ammersee, 1986), pp. 169–70.

61 See the miniatures of Levn

ı(1720):

Oz, Kumas¸ ve kadifeleri, vol. II, p. 43.

62 Ibid. 63 Dalsar,

Ipekc¸ilik,p.322.

64 K

uko

glu, Osmanlılarda narh m

uessesesi,p.116.

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Declines and revivals in textile production

damgas of Chios. Remarkably enough, the island with its largely non-Muslim

population also gained a reputation for its prayer rugs.

Further silk manufactures were located in Istanbul itself; Istanbul dibası is

often mentioned in eighteenth-century records.

A sultanic command dated

1754 provides some information about the production process.

It was issued

in response to a complaint from the silk spinners (ibris¸im b

u esnafı) working

for the foundation supporting the library established by Ahmed III in the third

courtyard of the Topkapı Palace.

This guild, which possessed Muslim as well

as Christian members, claimed that in the past, the merchants bringing raw

silk into the capital had sold this item to the petitioners, who manufactured

the yarns known as ibris¸im and b

umc

uk – the latter when woven give a ﬁne,

crinkly fabric. The undyed yarn was then sold to the silk merchants, who had

it dyed and put it up for sale in their shops. But recently some entrepreneurs

had sent the silk to be spun in the Bosporus villages, Bursa, Edirne and even

Tokat, presumably because prices were lower in these smaller settlements.

How much silk was then woven in the localities in question and how much

was delivered to Istanbul weavers remains unknown. This practice was now

prohibited; we must assume that in our text raw silks arriving from localities

other than Bursa were at issue. It would not have made sense to forbid silk-

spinning in the latter city, where this craft had a long history. Unfortunately

there is no positive information on the sources of the raw silk under dispute.

Some Iranian silk may still have reached the Ottoman capital, though probably

not a great deal. The Peloponnese and Syria may well have formed the main

source of the raw material used by the Istanbul silk spinners.

The manufacture of woollens

During the eighteenth century, the manufacture of rough woollens (aba)in

present-day southern Bulgaria expanded beyond the conﬁnes of the Filibe

(Plovdiv) region to which it had been limited in the sixteenth and seventeenth

centuries. Tatar-Pazardzik, Pirdop and Koprivstica in their turn took up the

manufacture of woollens and also of the braid (gaytan) used in large quanti-

ties when making up the fabrics into cloaks. Moreover, the industry, which

Oz, Kumas¸ ve kadifeleri, vol. II, p. 43. 66 Ibid., p. 53.

67 Ahmet Kal’a et al. (eds.),

Istanbul K

ulliyatı:

Istanbul Ahk

am Defterleri (Istanbul, 1997), p. 82.

68 M

ubahat K

uko

glu, ‘Osmanlı esnafında oto-kontrol m

uessesesi’, in Ahilik ve esnaf,

konferanslar ve seminer, metinler, tartıs¸malar (Istanbul, 1986), pp. 55–86; Suraiya Faroqhi,

‘Ortak is¸liklerle

ozel evler arasında XVIII. y

uzyıl Bursa’sında is¸yerleri’, in Bir masaldı

Bursa ...,ed.EnginYenal(Istanbul, 1996), pp. 97–104.

373

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suraiya n. faroqhi

previously had been entirely urban, now began to draw in the labour of peas-

ants working in their spare time.

Thus this region constituted one of the few

parts of the Ottoman Empire which may be called proto-industrial; here the

inhabitants of outlying hill villages with little agricultural land lived largely by

textile manufacture.

While local wool was used, this did not satisfy demand,

and traders started to bring in extra raw material from Moldavia and Wallachia.

Both Istanbul and Anatolia served as markets for this product. Merchants

from Filibe or Koprivstica often took surnames referring to the towns in which

they did business; judging by this evidence, Bursa, Amasya, Izmir, Kayseri,

Erzurum and Diyarbekir furnished opportunities for enterprising abacıs. But

some merchants found ways of reaching the remoter markets of Syria and even

India. An eighteenth-century company of abacıs was represented in Damascus

and other Syrian cities, while in the early 1780s another company was dissolved

that had traded with the eastern Indian port of Calcutta. Presumably in the

hot climate of Bengal, aba was used not for clothing but for tents and other

furnishings.

In conclusion

As research undertaken during the last twenty-ﬁve years or so has demon-

strated, the old assumption that Ottoman textile manufacturing lacked all

dynamism after the end of the sixteenth century is no longer tenable. Admit-

tedly, luxury and semi-luxury cloths were indeed negatively affected by

European competition for scarce raw materials, quite apart from wars leading

to the closure of trade routes. Fashion changes also took their toll, as the ﬁne

Indian cottons which caught the attention of well-to-do Ottoman customers

must have lessened the demand for silk, just as occurred in contemporary

Europe. However, even in this high-value sector, the export of rugs and car-

pets thrived, to witness the almost 1,000 depictions which have been found

in seventeenth-century Dutch paintings. Moreover, in the eighteenth century,

the silk-weaving industry of Chios was able to attract the custom of Ottoman

court dignitaries.

But it does appear that eighteenth-century textiles especially were geared

less to the wealthy than to middle-income and, in some instances, even to

modest consumers. The markets for cloth intended for a more modest clientele

were usually protected from import competition by the limited accessibility of

69 Todorov, La ville balkanique,p.208.

70 Michael Palairet, The Balkan Economies c. 1800–1914: Evolution without Development

(Cambridge, 1997), pp. 66ff.

374

Declines and revivals in textile production

the Anatolian and Balkan provinces. Moreover, in spite of the poor condition of

the roads, some producers such as the weavers and merchants of present-day

southern Bulgaria builtup far-reaching distribution networks which no foreign

importer could hope to rival. This conﬁrms Fernand Braudel’s observation,

now over twenty years old, that the Ottoman Empire down to the end of the

eighteenth century was able to protect its overland trade routes from foreign

interference, and thereby remained a ‘world economy’ in its own right.

Viewed from the manufacturers’ angle, textile producers adapted quite rapidly

to the falling away of the luxury market, and built up alternative clienteles.

Seen from the taxpayers’ point of view, the inhabitants of most Ottoman

provinces would have had few choices. With signiﬁcant sums of money trans-

ferred to Istanbul every year, provincials needed to sell goods outside of the

region (preferably to the capital, where tax moneys tended to accumulate) in

order to earn the money needed for the next round of taxes. It is possible that

this process became more difﬁcult when so much of textile production was

oriented toward local, middle-range consumers. In the absence of sales ﬁgures,

it is impossible to be sure. But we must take note of the fact that so much of

this textile production disappeared when land became more readily available

in the Balkan states after independence, and the tax load was lightened. Peas-

ants, when given a choice, apparently preferred self-sufﬁciency to production

of textiles for the market. Urban craftsmen, with their custom shrinking, emi-

grated to Istanbul or Salonika, or else reverted to agricultural pursuits. This

shows that much of the eighteenth-century’s expansion of market-oriented

production was in fact state induced, even though in this period Ottoman

bureaucrats took only occasional and haphazard measures to protect local

industry.

71 Braudel, Civilisation mat

erielle, vol. III, pp. 403–408.

72 Christopher A. Bayly, Rulers, Townsmen and Bazaars: North Indian Society in the Age of

British Expansion, 1770–1870 (Cambridge, 1983); Palairet, Balkan Economies,pp.357–61.

375

Rural life

suraiya n. faroqhi

Births, marriages, deaths and migrations

While the vast majority of Ottoman subjects lived in the countryside, mostly as

peasants orelse as nomads, it is impossible to be precise about numbers.Few tax

registers of the type for which the sixteenth-century Ottoman administration

had become famous were compiled after 1600, and those that were have often

survived only in fragments. To ﬁll the gap researchers have attempted to

estimate rural population on the basis of the ‘tax houses’ made up of several

families that in the seventeenth century, in place of ‘real’ households, formed

the basis for assessing the payments and services known as avarız. But ‘tax

houses’ comprised a highly variable number of real households, and it is only

if the sources give us equivalencies that these registers become usable for

population estimates; however, this information is by no means available in

all cases.

Moreover, in the eighteenth century so many taxes came to be collected by

lifetime tax-farmers that counts of the taxable population became irrelevant.

Therefore, throughout the period treated we can only estimate population for

certain limited regions. Only shortly after our period had ended, in the 1840s,

was a further set of counts initiated, which appears promising for demographic

studies, but as yet the critical evaluation of this material is only in its beginning

stages.

In Anatolia and some parts of Greece,as wellas in Palestine, certain areaslost

population in quite a dramatic fashion during the political troubles and climatic

irregularities of the early seventeenth century, with a low point around 1640–50.

In some instances there seems to have been a regrouping of population in areas

that were more secure or else advantageous from a climatic point of view: in

Palestine, settlements close to the desert were abandoned when the state no

1 Kayoko Hayashi and Mahir Aydın (eds.), The Ottoman State and Societies in Change: A Study

of the Nineteenth Century Temettuat Registers (London, 2004).

376

Rural life

longer protected villagers against Bedouin attacks.

However, a resettlement

of the coastal strip, emptied for security reasons since the Mamluk period,

was undertaken during those same years.

Numerous villages of the central

Anatolian plains were abandoned at the same time, but there was immigration

into the coastal area around Manisa and Izmir as, in spite of all prohibitions,

the exportation of locally grown cotton, raisins and wheat became highly

proﬁtable.

For the non-Muslims the registers of head-tax payments (cizye) have been

used as a basis for population estimates, although some researchers consider it

impossible to use tax data for such a purpose. While in the seventeenth century,

villages had sometimes been assessed lump sums, this was changed in the 1690s

so as to make the cizye into a true poll tax, payable by all male non-Muslims

past the age of puberty.

There being but few rural Jews, the cizye registers

should thus have reﬂected the Christian village population with more accu-

racy than had been true in earlier times. However, it is unclear how we should

interpret the seventeenth-century drop in Christian households recorded espe-

cially for the Balkans.

If there was in fact a population decline, then plague

and typhus epidemics qualify as possible causes, especially with respect to

Epirus, where plague was endemic.

During the last years, researchers have,

however, concluded that what appeared as a single taxpayer might in fact

be two or more, so that it is difﬁcult to use even the late seventeenth-

century ﬁgures as demographic sources. In addition, the idea that lump-

sum cizye assessments were common in the sixteenth century has also been

challenged.

Thus it is highlydoubtful whether, and if so,to what extent, the seventeenth-

century decline in cizye payers reﬂecteda decreasein population.Quite possibly

conversions to Islam accounted for at least part of the difference, especially in

what is today Albania. There also remains the unanswerable question whether

2 Wolf-Dieter H

utteroth and Kamal Abdul Fattah, Historical Geography of Palestine, Tran-

sjordan and Southern Syria in the Late Sixteenth Century (Erlangen, 1977), pp. 56–9; Machiel

Kiel and Friedrich Sauerwein, Ost-Lokris in t

urkischer und neugriechischer Zeit (1460–1981)

(Passau, 1994), pp. 46–50.

3 Antoine Abdel Nour, Introduction

a l’histoire urbaine de la Syrie ottomane (XVIe–XVIIIe si

ecle)

(Beirut, 1982), pp. 61–5.

4 Daniel Goffman, Izmir and the Levantine World, 1550–1650 (Seattle and London, 1990),

pp. 20–1, 82–3.

5 Bruce McGowan, Economic Life in Ottoman Europe: Taxation, Trade, and the Struggle for

Land, 1600–1800 (Cambridge, 1981), pp. 80–104.

6 Ibid., pp. 82–7.

7 Daniel Panzac, La peste dans l’empire ottoman, 1700–1850 (Leuven, 1985), p. 109.

8 Nenad Moa

canin, Town and Country on the Middle Danube 1526–1 690 (Leiden and Boston,

2006).

377