One of the main obstacles to the development of Iran's foreign trade over the centuries has been the location of its fertile northern provinces, which are shut off from the world's open seas by vast deserts and huge mountain chains. Since these provinces produced the country's most valuable export—silk—and since, after the transfer of the capital to Tehran, they included its largest consuming centers, trade had to be conducted over long caravan routes. In the seventeenth century, much silk was shipped through the Persian Gulf ports, but with the end of the Turco-Persian wars the bulk of Iran's westward trade passed across the Ottoman Empire—through Baghdad, and thence to either the Persian Gulf or the Mediterranean, or through Erzurum (Erzerum), and thence to Istanbul (Constantinople), Izmir (Smyrna) or Aleppo. However, all these routes were long, insecure, and expensive.

A discussion of Turkish guild history becomes meaningless if it does not take as its point of departure that a guild is a professional organization. This means that a guild is neither an organization which is grouped according to professional criteria, nor just another name for groups of artisans or merchants about whose organization nothing definite is known. One may be justified in speaking about the existence of guilds if within a certain area all the people occupied in a branch of the urban economy constitute a unit which, at one and the same time, fulfils various purposes, such as economic, fiscal, administrative and social functions. A further condition is the existence of a framework of officers or functionaries chosen from among the members of such a unit and headed by a headman.

When the Ottoman Parliament was first elected and organized in 1876–8, surprised Europeans tended to assume that this institution was a direct result of European example and European pressure. Indeed, from that day to the present, it has been assumed that this was, in fact, the first Ottoman parliament, the first Ottoman effort at representative government, and the first experiment at involving the subjects of the Sultan in the process of rule, traditionally restricted only to members of his Ruling Class. Yet in fact this Parliament was the culmination of a century-long process of change which had been taking place in the Ottoman body politic since the early years of Sultan Selim III (1789–1807). It might well be argued that if the Parliament of 1876–8 was a failure, it was because of the failure of those who constructed it to rely sufficiently on this previous experience in representative government and legislation instead of simply imitating the European example. The representative legislative and executive institutions developed by the nineteenth century Ottoman reformers on the provincial and local levels will be discussed in a separate study. It is the object of this article to describe the same development in the central Ottoman government during the period of the Tanzimat (1839–76), to provide additional background for subsequent studies of the fate of Ottoman constitutionalism in the years which followed.