Centred on the socio-economic life of Anatolia in the Ottoman period, this volume examines aspects of production, local and international trade, consumption and the role of the state, both at a local and a central level.

Living in the Ottoman Realm brings the Ottoman Empire to life in all of its ethnic, religious, linguistic, and geographic diversity. The contributors explore the development and transformation of identity over the long span of the empire's existence. They offer engaging accounts of individuals, groups, and communities by drawing on a rich array of primary sources, some available in English translation for the first time. These materials are examined with new methodological approaches to gain a deeper understanding of what it meant to be Ottoman. Designed for use as a course text, each chapter includes study questions and suggestions for further reading.

The eastern provinces of the Ottoman Empire used to be a multi-ethnic region where Armenians, Kurds, Syriacs, Turks, and Arabs lived together in the same villages and cities. The disintegration of the Ottoman Empire and rise of the nation state violently altered this situation. Nationalist elites intervened in heterogeneous populations they identified as objects of knowledge, management, and change. These often violent processes of state formation destroyed historical regions and emptied multicultural cities, clearing the way for modern nation states. The Making of Modern Turkey highlights how the Young Turk regime, from 1913 to 1950, subjected Eastern Turkey to various forms of nationalist population policies aimed at ethnically homogenizing the region and incorporating it in the Turkish nation state. It examines how the regime utilized technologies of social engineering, such as physical destruction, deportation, spatial planning, forced assimilation, and memory politics, to increase ethnic and cultural homogeneity within the nation state. Drawing on secret files and unexamined records, Ugur Ümit Üngör demonstrates that concerns of state security, ethnocultural identity, and national purity were behind these policies. The eastern provinces, the heartland of Armenian and Kurdish life, became an epicenter of Young Turk population policies and the theatre of unprecedented levels of mass violence.

Did the ‘seventeenth-century crisis’ visit the Ottoman Empire? How can we situate the explosion of rural violence and the rebellions of the turn of the seventeenth century in the Anatolian countryside? The Collapse of Rural Order in Ottoman Anatolia provides the reader with a fresh and innovative perspective on the long scholarly debate over the question of ‘decline’ in early modern Ottoman history. It offers a new agenda, new type of source material, and a new methodology for the study of demographic crisis. Through a systematic examination of little-known detailed avârız registers, Oktay Özel demonstrates in detail the mass desertion of rural settlements, the destruction of agricultural economy, and the resulting collapse of rural order in Ottoman Anatolia at the turn of the seventeenth century.

State and Peasant in the Ottoman Empire studies the dynamics of Ottoman peasant economy in the sixteenth century. First, it shows that contrary to the conventional wisdom about the 'stationariness'of the Asian agrarian economies, Ottoman peasant economy witnessed substantial growth in response to population increase, urban commercial expansion and to increased taxation demands. Second, the book argues that economic development did not take place independently of political structures, of the state. This meant that in the light of the fiscal and legitimation concerns of the Ottoman state and contrary to the assumptions of the models of economic development, changes in population and in commercial demand did not result in the disruption of the integrity of the small peasant holding as the primary unit of production. The book develops these arguments in the context of a detailed empirical study of the economic trends, of the state rules or institutions that embodied the relations of revenue extraction, and of exchange in Ottoman Anatolia.

This meant that in the light of the fiscal and legitimation concerns of the Ottoman state and contrary to the assumptions of the models of economic development, changes in population and in commercial demand did not result in the disruption of the integrity of the small peasant holding as the primary unit of production

First published in 1997. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

A major contribution to Ottoman history, now published in paperback in two volumes.