This paper introduces methods to estimate wealth levels and disparities among Muslim inhabitants of 18th-century Ottoman Kastamonu. Our sources in this pursuit are estate inventories of the deceased (sing. tereke) as recorded in Kastamonu court records (sicils), mainly in the first half of the 18th century (1712-60). By analyzing information provided by these sources through a variety of quantitative techniques, we measure levels of inequality among Muslims of Kastamonu and describe the relationship between economic privilege and social, political, religious, and occupational status as well as gender identity. Our work outlines the contours of economic stratification in 18thcentury Kastamonu and reveals the relative positions of various social groups within this hierarchy.Kastamonu was a middle-to small-sized town in north-central Anatolia. By the mid-18th century, Kastamonu subprovince (sancak), located on the Black Sea coast and part of the province (eyalet) of Anatolia, probably had a population of about 30,000 households. The town of Kastamonu-the legal and administrative center of the subprovincehad a population of about 4,000 households, including the inhabitants of its forty-one quarters and the villages located nearby. 1 Little information exists about the town's demographic composition during the period we are discussing, although we assume that its population was primarily Muslim and Turkish. 2 Heywood claims that the town remained relatively isolated during Ottoman times due to its distance from the military and courier road network. 3 Even though court records indicate local and regional trade networks in the area that involved wool, cotton cloth, and copperware, it is not clear to what extent these networks contributed to the town's economic welfare. Compared to other Anatolian urban centers such as Ankara, Bursa, and Kayseri, Kastamonu has not received much attention in modern scholarship. However, because the town's court records are quite complete relative to its size, they are well suited to the type of analysis presented here.Like many subthemes of economic history, inequality and wealth distribution have not received much attention in Ottoman historiography. In this article, we propose different procedures to measure wealth and inequality levels in a particular historical setting.
This essay investigates the ways in which the notion of "justice" was utilized as a mechanism of political legitimization in the early-modern Ottoman Empire. I claim that there existed alternative definitions of justice and that these were instrumental in the struggle between the central government and those official and unofficial power-holders in the administrative and geographical peripheries of the empire. According to the specialized terminology of the Ottoman administrative system, "justice" was the protection of the rural and urban producers against abuses of the military elite. This definition highlighted the personal benevolence of the ruler who claimed to be the sole protector of the weak against oppression. On the other hand, at least some segments of the ruling elite insisted on representing justice as the recognition of the mutual rights and obligations of the sultan and his "servants." Justice, in this context, referred to the protection of privileges and entitlements of those who were thought to deserve them. While using a variety of sources - including treatises on government and ethics composed by the Ottoman literati, documents from regional court records and correspondence between the imperial center and the officials in the provinces - my primary focus is on Evliya Çelebi's seventeenth-century travel-book, Seyahatname, and a well-known seventeenth century chronicle, Tarih-i Naima.
This article studies temporal variations in wealth levels and distribution in an Ottoman context during the eighteenth century. By analysing the probate estate inventories of the Muslim deceased in Kastamonu, located in north-central Anatolia, we demonstrate that real wealth levels generally declined over the course of the century. Our analysis also suggests that the economic conditions of poor men, if not women, deteriorated more so than those of the rich, fuelling growing inequality. The article explores the factors that contributed to these trends and discusses the relevance of our findings for long-term economic development patterns in the region from a comparative perspective.
This article offers a quantitative analysis of wealth inequality in the Ottoman Empire, employing data from probate inventories (terekes) of eighteenth-century Kastamonu, a town located in northern Anatolia. Extracting information on wealth levels and personal characteristics of individuals, we estimate aggregate measures of wealth inequality, namely the Gini coefficient, the coefficient of variation, and the wealth shares of the wealthiest 10 and 25 percent of estates. We use regression analysis to identify the time trend of wealth inequality and determine how warfare, significant weather events, macroeconomic variables, and shifts in population characteristics affected it.
Based on probate estate inventories from eighteenth-century Kastamonu in north Anatolia, this study examines intergenerational mobility patterns in one Ottoman provincial town. Although the topic is well-studied in many Western contexts, historical and contemporary, we still know little about the ways in which socioeconomic disparities and class identities were transmitted across subsequent generations of parents and children in the Ottoman Empire. In order to explore this issue in a sophisticated fashion, this article introduces quantitative techniques and categories of analysis tailored specifically for Ottoman sources. In addition to other findings, our analysis suggests that Kastamonu in the eighteenth century was vertically and horizontally segmented: Not only were there significant impediments to intergenerational mobility across privileged and underprivileged sectors of the society, such transitions were also infrequent across sub-groups within upper and lower classes. Despite a general lack of intergenerational fluidity at all socioeconomic levels, however, our calculations also reveal that the provincial elite were particularly immobile.
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