The sixteenth century came to an end with the countries of the Ottoman Middle East falling into a grave economic and social crisis which presaged a decisive turning point in their history. The most symptomatic sign of what was, in fact, a structural crisis was a series of popular revolts which appeared most prominently among the Muslim Turkish population of Anatolia. Known as the Celali revolts, these uprisings developed into open civil war against the forces of the Ottoman state, and in their first phase lasted approximately fifteen years, from 1595 to 1610.

Speaking of comparative urbanization, Gideon Sjoberg noted that the Near East, the region in which cities first rose, has been understudied by urban sociologists. Few research projects have been realized on contemporary urbanization in the Arab World. This paper purports to examine recent trends of urbanization in the region; and their inter-relationship with the ‘modernization’ process.

The functions of a modern central bank are manifold, but fall into a few general categories — technical, advisory, and control. Technical activities do not demand a separate central banking institution; they could be performed equally well by alternative arrangements. These functions are of a clerical nature and do not require continuous decision-making. For example, central banks typically handle the government's financial accounts, making its payments and collecting its receipts, paying interest on debt as well as the principal when the debt matures, and marketing the securities when issued. In effect, the central bank acts as an agency of the Finance Ministry, the latter making the decisions, the former implementing them. Similarly, central banks typically monopolize currency issue, but in so far as this is an automatic procedure — issuing currency to whomever wishes to acquire it — no decision-making is involved. Indeed, these two functions have often been performed by the Treasury itself, and even today occasionally still lie in the domain of some treasuries.

At the beginning of the seventeenth century the beylicate in Tunisia was a minor executive office. In the course of this century Tunisia's political institutions underwent a gradual change, the outcome of which was the emergence of the beylicate as the country's dominant ruling institution. This development involved a twofold process: the transformation of the beylicate into a hereditary institution having roots in native Tunisian society, and the gradual isolation and reduction of the authority of the foreign military class which had usurped power from the representative of the Ottoman sultan.from the representative of the Ottoman sultan. In this study I will analyse the meagre data available for this period of Tunisian history in order to explain the historical circumstances and local forces which account for this development.

It has been just fifteen years since my researches in the Başbakanlik Arşivi (Prime Minister's Archives) in Istanbul on Ottoman provincial administration and finance before the nineteenth century led me to attempt to describe what I saw in the archives for the benefit of other researchers. Since that time, a number of additional collections in that archive have been catalogued and made available, and my own subsequent research into the Ottoman reform movement in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries have enabled me to examine these and other materials which I did not see or examine during my earlier research efforts in Istanbul. It is the purpose of this survey, then, to describe these more modern archival materials in Istanbul, particularly those in the Başbakanhk Arşivi which were not described in my earlier article, in the hope of encouraging all those interested in modern Ottoman and Middle Eastern history to make use of them in the course of their own research. In order to help the reader understand the nature of the bulk of materials in each collection, I am dividing them into four general categories: basic laws and regulations, administrative records and regulations, records of sultans and individual statesmen, and judicial records, although in fact the materials in each collection at least partly overlap in nature with those of the others.