Among the various institutions and practices singled out as distinctly Ottoman contributions to Islamic civilization, one has drawn surprisingly little comment and analysis. Neither so eye-catching as the devşirme system nor as fundamental as the kanun, it still emerges as an important factor in Ottoman, thence Islamic, history. This is the legitimized practice of usurious piety, the waqf al-nuqūd (pl. awqaf al-nuqud), the establishment of a trust with money the interest from which might pay the salary of a teacher, or preacher, or even unashamedly pass into the pocket of the founder of the trust.

Although contemporary Europeans often stated that the Ottoman government kept no population statistics, the Ottomans in fact often kept very detailed population records. The Ottoman ‘censuses’ recently used in scholarly research are only general summaries of population. More exact demographic research demands information on demographic structure, such as age, sex, and family affiliation. Since general ‘censuses’ are useless for such analysis, population registers (nüfus defterleri) must be used.

The purpose of the paper is to give a broad outline of the policies and principal features of economic developments in the fifty-year period that has elapsed since the foundation of the Republic, with a view toward helping to evaluate future trends and policies, hopefully in the coming fifty years.

In the course of studying all surviving copies of Arabic Dioscorides manuscripts I have come across some interesting statements in the introduction and colophon of a Leiden manuscript of De Materia Medica. This manuscript belongs to the Warner Collection or Legatum Warnerium of the Library of the University of Leiden, Cod. Or. 289. This vast and valuable collection of oriental manuscripts was acquired by Levinus Warner in the early seventeenth century during his term of appointment as Dutch ambassador to the Ottoman court in Istanbul. The collection was given to the university upon the death of Mr. Warner in 1665.

Today we are witnessing a very rare phenomenon in world history: a state suddenly deluged with an apparently inexhaustible amount of wealth as occurred in sixteenth-century Spain and Portugal when the riches of the New World flowed to the Iberian peninsula. Now the ‘black gold’ under the sands of the Arabian desert has provided one of the most underpopulated and under developed regions of the world with an equivalent bonanza. The new wealth of Spain helped to ruin that country. What will be the fate of Saudi Arabia and its small neighbors?

The dowry is the movement of women and goods in the same direction (Goody 1973: 18). Or, as Tambiah puts it, ‘Wherever dowry is paid, wealth is not transferred in one direction and women in the other, for both wealth and women travel in the same direction’ (1973: 62). This one-sided exchange is rather curious as one side in the transaction gets all the values while the other seems to give them all away. A person who gives a dowry as a father has once received a dowry as a groom. As a consequence of his once being a receiver he has an obligation to his daughter to be the giver of a dowry. Unlike other types of wife-giving and wife-receiving, in this system it is individuals and not lineages or families who give and receive women. As a consequence alliances between families are not formed.

Marx, the prophet of revolution, may no longer haunt conservative politicians, but Marx, the theorist of revolution, continues to both attract and arouse social scientists. In the words of one student of politics, the social sciences, especially political sociology, can be described as a ‘century-long dialogue with Karl Marx.’ And as one prominent historian of ideas has aptly stated, Marx can properly be called the midwife of twentieth-century social thought, ‘for in the process of discarding what they had found invalid in Marxism and explaining what aspects of it had proved helpful, the innovators of the late nineteenth century took their first steps towards constructing a more general theory of social reality.’ For example, Emile Durkheim developed the paradigm of ‘mechanical and organic solidarity’ to counter the theory of class struggle. Vilfred Pareto and Gaetano Mosca stressed the dichotomy between ruling elites and ruled masses to supplant the concept of socioeconomic classes. Robert Michels formulated the ‘iron law of oligarchy’ to warn that popular organizations, such as the Social Democratic Parties, would bring in not the era of democratic socialism but the autocracy of bureaucratic socialists.’ And Max Weber, of course, devoted much of his career to showing that the dynamics of class conflict should be studied concomitantly with the heavy weights of conservative ideologies, traditional religions, ethnic castes, and bureaucratic institutions.