The Ottoman countryside in the Age of the Autumn of the Mediterranean, c. 1560--1870

This dissertation approaches Ottoman history from the vantage-point of Mediterranean history. It centers on the shift in the center of gravity of the basin's economic life from its low-lying lands to its hillsides and mountains, and back. The contraction in the basin's ploughed fields was a long-term and deep-seated movement. Here this geohistorical shift is examined in a double register. The first register tracks the grand agrarian cycle which spanned from the 1560's to the 1870's. This cycle had three temporalities. Framing it was the Little Ice Age with its wetter (and colder) winters, and increased rain and snowfall both of which increased incidences of flooding, extending marshlands and swamps. The second temporality was set by the transformation that took place in the world---economy's division of labor: as Amsterdam's ascent turned the Baltic grain trade into its "mother trade," the restructuring which followed had a profound effect on the commercialization of agriculture in the Mediterranean. The third periodicity was bracketed by the seventeenth-century crisis which facilitated the conversion in most parts of the Mediterranean of the arable into pastureland and vineyards, prompting a contraction in cornland.; The second register tracks how the Venetian and the Italian city-states' merchants and bankers, in countering forces that threatened their command over the basin after the sixteenth century, initiated processes which, in the final analysis, contributed to the partial abandonment of the basin's plains. These processes were three in number. First, the westerly migration of oriental crops, cotton and sugar, by the city-states away from the eastern Mediterranean to the islands under their control: this emptied the coastal plains where commercial crops were cultivated. Secondly, the devastation the region's woollen and silk industries suffered in the aftermath of Venice's industrial renaissance popularized ruralization of manufacturing across the region, placing the premium on industrial crops. Thirdly, the rise of overland trade between the Mediterranean and the North Sea via Ottoman Europe favored, because of the growth in animal power, lesser cereals. It is around these two axes and the abandonment of the plains that the transformations in Ottoman agriculture are accordingly analyzed.