Cultivators, creditors and the state: Rural indebtedness in the nineteenth century Ottoman empire

Date

2008-01-01

Author

Aytekin, Erden Attila

Metadata

Show full item record

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Item Usage Stats

162
views

0
downloads

Although the existence of rural indebtedness in the Ottoman empire in the nineteenth century and some of its consequences are well known, information about the grassroots structure and causes of indebtedness and the structure of debt relationships is limited. This article explores rural collective indebtedness using two debt registers from the districts of Mihalic and Kirmast in western Anatolia. By placing these within a broader theoretical and historiographic context, it challenges the conventional notion that the Ottoman state generally strived to protect the peasantry from the detrimental effects of indebtedness. It is argued that the official approach was determined by two interrelated facts: the structure of the ruling class at the time was unstable, and its new components were drawn from wealthy elements who themselves engaged in money lending. For this reason, the attitude of the Ottoman state to rural indebtedness was largely one of indifference, and such interventions as did occur were rare and ineffective.

Subject Keywords

Arts and Humanities (miscellaneous), Cultural Studies, Anthropology

URI

https://hdl.handle.net/11511/48470

Journal

JOURNAL OF PEASANT STUDIES

DOI

https://doi.org/10.1080/03066150802151041

Collections

Department of Political Science and Public Administration, Article

Suggestions

OpenMETU
Core

Agrarian Relations, Property and Law: An Analysis of the Land Code of 1858 in the Ottoman Empire Aytekin, Erden Attila (Informa UK Limited, 2009-01-01) Contrary to the prevalent tendencies of 'state-centrism' and legal formalism in the literature, this article studies the Ottoman Land Code of 1858 not as an initiator of trends but as a product of social change. The Code recognized private property on land, enlarged liberties of landholders, and pushed inheritance rules further towards gender equality. Deeply influenced by the uneven development of the capitalist relations of production, agrarian conflict, and the complex matrix of the interests of ruling g...
Microcredit in the Ottoman Empire: a review of cash waqfs in transition to modern banking Karagedikli, Gürer (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018-03-01) This paper explores the credit activities of cash waqfs in the Ottoman Empire in the nineteenth century by relying on original waqf registers. It conceptualises cash waqfs as microcredit organisations, and questions the established view that they went into decline in the nineteenth century at the face of competition with the formal credit institutions. With the help of a new dataset we provide a picture of the geographical distribution of cash waqfs and bank branches in the Ottoman Empire across the century...
Definitions of national identity, nationalism and ethnicity in post-Soviet Azerbaijan in the 1990s Tokluoglu, C (Informa UK Limited, 2005-07-01) This article examines the major political debates in post-Soviet Azerbaijan vis vis the very assumptions of individual autonomy, equality, national culture and citizenship, and universalism upon which modern nation-states have historically been based. The information presented in this article is based on personal interviews conducted with the leading and influential members of the Azerbaijani political elite in 1998. The interviews were based on two broad themes. The first relates to the perceptions of the ...
Surplus-receivers (Zevaid-Horan) from imperial waqfs: between philanthropy and political economy Aslanmirza, Özge; Orbay, Kayhan; Department of History (2017) This study examines the place of surplus-receivers in the waqf institutions through their contribution to the philanthropy and the political economy of the 16th-17th century Ottoman Empire. The study specifically focuses on surplus-receivers to reveal who they are, what their place and importance in the waqf, how and on which base they were assigned to these duties and how they can be interpreted in the context of the philanthropy by the examination of mainly the registers of zevāid-horān and waqf account b...
Construction of the republic in city space: from political ideal to planning principles Karakaya, Emel; Keskinok, Hüseyin Çağatay; Department of City and Regional Planning (2010) After the establishment of the Republic of Turkey, urban planning was one of the main instruments for the development of national economy. In this respect, urban plans for numerous cities and towns were prepared between 1923 and 1940 in Turkey. This thesis reveals the reflections of Republican ideology to urban planning principles. The aims of this study are to clarify the political concepts that were active in the Early Republican Period, translation of political concepts to spatial context and to reveal t...

Citation Formats

E. A. Aytekin, “Cultivators, creditors and the state: Rural indebtedness in the nineteenth century Ottoman empire,” JOURNAL OF PEASANT STUDIES, pp. 292–313, 2008, Accessed: 00, 2020. [Online]. Available: https://hdl.handle.net/11511/48470.