Introduction to Part III: The Slow Recovery

To judge from accounts of the early eighteenth century, the level of population and agriculture in Ottoman lands had made little progress since the aftermath of the Celali Rebellion. In 1706, the returning Venetian ambassador could still report that “Asia is a country bereft of people with scarce revenue, full of brigands, breeding rebels, scattered with wandering tribes and people living in tents, governed by officers too far from the eye of the sovereign.” Over the following decades Ottoman lands became a trope for neglect and desertion in the literature of the Enlightenment.