Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 July 2015
In this paper I will construct separate time series for the wage levels of agricultural and unskilled (and non-factory) urban workers in nineteenth-century Ottoman Anatolia. An earlier study (Boratav et al. 1985) was able to construct an annual time series for urban wage levels by utilising a weighted average of the wages of skilled and unskilled laborers in towns and cities. Production of a time series for agricultural wages, on the other hand, is important for seeing the wage variations in rural and urban areas in the nineteenth-century Anatolian context and is crucial for understanding the peculiarities of the Ottoman (and later Turkish) economic development. These variations, at least to a degree, were responsible for the differences in labor costs in various parts of the empire and thus determined the peculiarities of the Ottoman incorporation into, world-economy (Ergene 1995).
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