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Article contents
Introduction
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 July 2015
Extract
It is customary to say that the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century prosperity of the Ottoman Empire was derived from its control of international trade routes leading toward Europe. From this perspective, the closing years of the sixteenth century are regarded as a turning point. When English merchants entered the Mediterranean and the Dutch established a monopoly over the Moluccan spice trade, the Ottoman state lost its dominant role in world commerce, particularly since Ottoman merchants rarely left the Sultan's domain, and therefore did not control the sources of their trade goods. Loss of customs revenue contributed to fiscal crisis, which in turn led to political turmoil as overtaxed peasants fled their villages (Lewis, 1968, p. 27 ff.). In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (or so it is claimed), world trade would have bypassed the Ottoman Empire entirely if it hadn't been for the transit trade in Iranian silk which continued into the 1730s, and a limited exportation of local grains and cottons, which did not become really significant until the high prices of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. From 1815 onward, the Ottoman Empire increasingly entered the orbit of industrializing Europe as a market for manufactured goods and a source of raw materials, and this state of affairs was made “official” by the signing of the Anglo-Ottoman convention of 1838.
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- Copyright © New Perspectives on Turkey 1991