The economic and population geography of the Bursa region, 1820-1870

This thesis acknowledges that the Ottoman economy was the sum of its regions and quantitatively and qualitatively examines the economic and population geography of the Bursa district (sancak) in northwestern Turkey between 1820-1870. The causes and extent of regional divergence in economic development is a key concern of historical economic geography. Due to the long unavailability and underutilization of Ottoman economic and population microdata and heavy reliance on consular reports concerned with imports and exports, the Empire's economic and population history has not been examined from a spatially distinct regional development perspective. The thesis marks a significant contribution as the first study focusing on the spatiotemporal aspects of economic development and population characteristics of a region in the Ottoman Empire. It focuses the Bursa district, corresponding to present-day Bursa province, which had a large multi-ethnic, multi-religious population with close to 90% rural inhabitants and rich and varied biodiversity and geophysical properties that gave rise to a great diversity of livelihood systems. Its urban center was one of the largest and most occupationally diverse towns in the Ottoman Empire. As a commercially and administratively important and cosmopolitan district commonly identified with its urban center, Bursa stands out as a silk manufacturing stronghold in the existing literature. The domestic silk industries' rapid deindustrialization and incorporation into the capitalist economy after 1820 resulted in Bursa's portrayal as just another periphery of capitalism. Surely, sericulture was essential to the well-being of most households, especially due to the increasing cocoon needs of the rapidly mushrooming silk factories in the city, and the region did not practically directly participate in international trade except for silk. On the other hand, sericulture was a short-term, seasonal endeavor that complemented a wide range of other economic activities. Instead of singling out a sector or a locality, the present thesis adopts a holistic view and offers a comprehensive survey of continuity and change, stability and dynamism, and unity and diversity in Bursa's economic and population trajectory at the regional, subdistrict, urban, and rural levels between 1820-1870, or during the years when the shocks of incorporation into the world economy and deindustrialization were felt most intensely. It utilizes mid-nineteenth-century Ottoman microdata – namely, Ottoman population (nüfus) registers, tax (temettuat) surveys, inheritance inventories (tereke), and tombstones - in conjunction with hitherto unused archival documents, British Parliamentary Papers, and English, German, French, Greek, and Bulgarian travelogues. Besides a comprehensive quantitative and qualitative documentation of the regional economy and its infrastructural, environmental, and socioeconomic determinants, ranging from agricultural technology to the impact of epidemics, natural disasters, and military conscription, the thesis also covers population characteristics (especially ethnoreligious identity, population density, and household size) and migration over the 50 years. To complement and complicate the macro findings, which occupy the first half of the present study, the thesis introduces the "Historical Life Course" (HLC) perspective that has been used in western historical demography for over half a century and can tremendously benefit Ottoman historiography by quantitatively and qualitatively portraying regional trajectories. HLC requires the creation of longitudinal databases created from linked individual microdata to observe phenomenon throughout the life courses of individuals and households. For the first time in Ottoman studies, this thesis creates individual and household biographies by linking population registers, tax surveys, inheritance inventories, tombstones, and available supplementary archival material. Not only does this method allow for writing life course biographies of previously unknown people, but it also enables the cross-verification of the various microdata sources and checking their compatibility. Macro level analyses, be it at the regional, district, or quarter/village level, supply the material, environmental, social, cultural, symbolic, and political contexts. To spatialize and visualize the findings, the study employs ArcGIS and QGIS software for analyses of economic and population geography at macro and micro-level. Geographic data, such as overland road transport network (extracted from a georeferenced 1943 map produced by the German military staff), soil quality, and SRTM elevation data, not only supplements the spatial analyses but also enhances the explanatory power of the microdata. This way, the thesis allows for the reconceptualization of history as a geospatial science.