Last updated 10th July 2024: Online ordering is currently unavailable due to technical issues. We apologise for any delays responding to customers while we resolve this. For further updates please visit our website https://www.cambridge.org/news-and-insights/technical-incident
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 26 July 2012
Economic history is an underdeveloped discipline in Middle Eastern historiography. Within our field, economic history articles are not published often, and books on economic history are rare. It is true that certain topics have been better explored than others, as Maya Shatzmiller's contribution to this roundtable on medieval economic history shows. Previous scholarship on Ottoman economic history has focused on land tenure, fiscal practices and institutions, artisanal production and organization (almost exclusively in urban areas), economic and charitable functions of awqāf, and, especially for the 19th century, questions relevant to Ottoman incorporation into the capitalist world system. There also exist studies on urban and rural markets, regional and long-distance trade networks, and economic activities of specific individuals (primarily government officials and provincial notables), although these tend to be descriptive. But there are very limited numbers of studies on standards of living; levels, accumulation, and distribution of wealth; productivity in agricultural production and manufacture; demography (especially for the 17th and 18th centuries); credit relations and financial institutions; and economic development. As in the literature on medieval Islamic contexts, sophisticated quantitative research is particularly rare, which makes empirically based comparisons among different parts of the region and with other parts of the world very difficult.
Author's note: I thank Febe Armanios, Atabey Kaygun, and Elyse Semerdjian for reading and commenting on this essay.
1 See the contributions to this roundtable by Maya Shatzmiller, Timur Kuran, and Şevket Pamuk.
2 Opportunities for economic history improve for the 19th century, thanks to the greater availability of consular reports and Western correspondence during this period and also to the emergence of a modern state structure that produced documents suitable for economic and quantitative research.
3 Ghazzal, Zouhair, “Familles et Fortunes à Damas: 450 Foyers Damascains en 1700 by Colette Establet and Jean-Paul Pascual,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 28 (1996): 432Google Scholar.
4 Ghazzal, Zouhair, “A Reply to André Raymond,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 30 (1998): 474Google Scholar.
5 Cf. Jean-Philippe Platteau's contribution to this roundtable.
6 This is how Ghazzal describes the proper method of interpreting estate inventories: “What is badly needed is a concept of ‘political economy’ for a ‘non-disciplinary’ society in which kinship (qarāba) and socio-professional and religious groupings (ṭawā’if) are crucial, but such an enterprise could not be done properly without massive recourse to the fiqh literature for ‘property’ (mulkiyya), ‘money’ (māl), ‘value’ (qīma), and other such concepts.” “Familles et Fortunes,” 432.
7 For a similar demeanor toward quantitative approaches, see Ze'evi, Dror, “The Use of Ottoman Sharīʿa Court Records as a Source for Middle Eastern Social History: A Reappraisal,” Islamic Law and Society 5 (1998): 39–45CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
8 Familles et Fortunes is one of the very rare book-length studies on estate inventories. The majority of studies on these sources tends to be descriptive, impressionistic, and quantitatively timid.
9 Kuran, Timur, The Long Divergence: How Islamic Law Held Back the Middle East (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2010), 17Google Scholar.
10 My intention here is not to pick a quarrel with Ghazzal, whose work on legal history I admire. I am referring to his characterization of Establet and Pascual's work only because it is a sophisticated representation of a common but usually unarticulated attitude toward a particular kind of research orientation.
