From welfare to wealth: Ottoman and Castilian grain trade policies in a time of change

This dissertation is a comparative study of the Ottoman and Castilian grain trade policies. It analyzes how the role of the state in the grain trade was redefined in the second half of the eighteenth century. Official price regulation in the grain sector had long been an established policy in both Ottoman and Castilian realms. However, starting around 1750, both Ottoman and Bourbon reformers attempted to liberalize grain prices. In the Ottoman case, the reform attempt consisted of a partial liberalization: restrictions on internal trade were not totally abolished while price controls were lifted. In contrast to the Ottoman policy, the Bourbon reformers managed to pursue a full-fledged simultaneous liberalization in trading and pricing. This dissertation demonstrates that despite the differences in practice, a comparative analysis of the texts in which the reformers discussed the grain trade policies reveals that the rationales underlying the attempts to change grain trade policies were analogous.;In both cases, policy changes were embedded in an explicit discussion about the "best" form of provisioning, which required an acknowledgement of "alternative" forms. The reformers attempted to establish a more efficient network of grain provisioning by creating incentives to the market actors (i.e. higher prices) in order to close the gap between the private and social returns of the grain trade. Also in both cases, agricultural policy became central to the provisioning concerns for the first time. Both these concerns (agricultural production and efficiency) reflected a shared perception of the link between economic wealth and international power that rendered liberalization a strategy to further national interest. This dissertation aims to reveal the complex relationship between ideological rhetoric and actual policy by examining these eighteenth-century reforms against the background of ideas on price regulation in the Ottoman/Muslim and Spanish/Christian traditions. Furthermore, by adopting an explicitly comparative approach to Ottoman economic policies, the dissertation revisits the broader thesis of the "uniqueness" of Ottoman political economy and sheds light on its ideological and institutional peculiarities without privileging categories based on the European and non-European dichotomy.