The main objectives of this article are to delineate the economic activities of the port of İzmir in the eighteenth century and to show that İzmir, during the course of the century, developed into the most important port in the import and export trade of the Ottoman Empire with western Europe. The French, operating out of Marseilles, were the principal trading partners of both İzmir and the Ottoman Empire at the time. Among the other most important western European communities that did business in İzmir were the British and the Dutch. İzmir was also the centre of complex and diverse financial transactions that were as important as trade and sometimes even more. Furthermore, this study shows the key role that non-Muslims played in the economic activities of the city-port. İzmir's close commercial relations with major western European economic centres makes the city-port of great importance for the study of Ottoman economic history in the eighteenth century.

For governments in power during periods of war, securing the food supply of the urban areas and the military has been one of the most important economic problems. The expansion of the armed forces and the necessity to feed them better inevitably leads to increases in the demand for foodstuffs. In the more developed economies, the more mechanized and more flexible agricultural sectors have often been capable of responding to increased demand. The pressures of an emergency situation, however, have a much more severe impact on the agrarian structures in an underdeveloped economy, often leading to decreases in the levels of production. Under these circumstances, the food supply policies of the governments will have far-reaching implications for different strata of the peasantry and for the urban classes.

It is the aim of these notes to make a balance sheet of the development problems which Turkey is currently facing and to assess medium-term growth prospects for the Turkish economy. Such a balance sheet necessitates a retrospective look into the recent past, in which a distinction should be made between the pre- and post-1980 periods since it was early in 1980 that a major reorientation of economic policies into an orthodox “structural adjustment” line took place. Hence we investigate roughly two seven year periods covering 1973-79 and 1980—86 (with more emphasis on the second period), being fully aware that with respect to certain variables the year 1980 may not always serve as a dividing line.