Wealth and Inequality in Ottoman Bursa-Canbakal
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Draft. Please do not quote without the author’s consent. Wealth and Inequality in Ottoman Bursa, 1500-1840 1 Hülya Canbakal Sabancı University New Perspectives in Ottoman Economic History, Yale University November 9 th -10 th , 2012 Abstract This paper is based on the preliminary findings of a larger project on wealth and wealth distribution in seven Ottoman cities in 1500-1840. The project explores, through probate inventories, economic performance in different urban settings and the factors of variation with specific reference to the relationship between capital accumulation, growth and the distribution of wealth. One of the most common paradigms that address the latter being the Kuznets hypothesis, in what follows, I discuss data from Bursa, one of the project cities, in light of what van Zanden calls the ‘super Kuznets curve’, namely, the rising trend of inequality observed in western Europe in the early modern period (van Zanden, 1995). Preliminary analysis points to a similar trend in Bursa. We also identify two secular cycles of population and wealth with accompanying surges of inequality in the 16 th and 18 th centuries. While these findings provide a new axis along which Ottoman history can be located within global early modernity, they also point to the limitations of the Ottoman economic experience which appears trapped in a regime of unsustainable growth until the end of the period examined. In his 1995 article titled “Tracing the beginning of Kuznets Curve,” van Zanden examines the rising trend of inequality that appears to characterize economies in Western Europe from the 15 th century onwards. He identifies in this trend the origins of a ‘super Kuznets curve’ that links early modern growth to 19th -century industrialization, during which the distribution of wealth/income in several countries is known to have deteriorated. This rising trend of inequality is reversed in later stages of development, thus generating the well-known inverted-U shaped curve of wealth/income distribution. 1 Research for this project has been funded by TUBITAK, Turkish Agency for Scientific and Technological Research, 2008-2012. I am grateful to my colleague Alpay Filiztekin for his invaluable guidance and help with the statistics of this project. I also thank Aysel Danaci Yildiz and Ahmet Arslanturk for their diligent work as research associates. Wealth in Bursa, Canbakal The study of price movements and wages in the early modern period too lends support to the idea of a ‘super Kuznets curve’, at least in Europe. Population pressure changes the relative prices of both consumer goods and factors of production to the detriment of low-end consumers and wage earners in most of Western Europe. Particularly, two surges of inequality are observed in the 16 th and the 18 th centuries (Allen, 2001; Fischer, 1996; Hoffman, Jacks, Levin & Lindert, 2002; Milanovich, Lindert ve Williamson, 2007). The overlap between these surges and secular cycles –primarily about population, and even K-waves –primarily about innovation and production, is quite remarkable. But the scholarship interested in historical cycles, mostly in the fields of historical sociology, political science and international relations, treats inequality only marginally (Goldstone, 1991; Berry, 1991; Modelski & Thompson 1996; Neumann, 1997; Alexander, 2002; Turchin and Nefedov, 2009). On the quantitative history side, from which comes our information on inequality, the attention paid to the question of ‘Divergence’ prioritizes an ultimately linear approach to the early modern period, as is also the case in the Kuznets paradigm. Today though, the re-reversal of the Kuznets curve since the 1980s suggests that the smoothing of differences in living standards apace with industrialization, formerly considered to be a linear and unique process, may have more in common with pre-modern cycles of growth than the idea of the specificity of capitalist industrialization allows us to think. Hence, a joint or layered focus on medium and long- term change in the early modern era may prove rewarding. The findings of the present project on wealth in the Ottoman Empire, on which this paper is based, indicates that a joint temporal perspective is rewarding because it exposes the problem of sustainable growth, incidentally, no less relevant today. The current project examines economic performance in seven Ottoman cities in Anatolia and Macedonia. The relationship between capital accumulation, growth and inequality and the reasons behind regional diversity constitute the core of the investigation, hence the relevance of the above paradigm. In this paper, I focus on Bursa, the largest of the project cities and the one with an uninterrupted data set from 1500 to 1840. Preliminary examination of Bursa data indicates a net increase in inequality from 1500 to 1840. It also reveals two rounds of fluctuations in wealth and inequality, one peaking in the 16 th century, the other one peaking in the 18 th century, or peaking in the 2 Wealth in Bursa, Canbakal late 17 th century and staying in a plateau for a century, depending on which inequality measure we look at. Thus, we observe a parallelism between the trends of inequality in Bursa and those in west European economies of the period. This is noteworthy because the first part of the Kuznets hypothesis is the more tenuous one, for there appears to be more diversity in the way early growth affected distribution than did growth in later stages of development. Studies on the industrialization process indicate that several factors, factor endowments, the nature of growth as well as its institutional framework could influence the shape of the distribution curve (Kaelble & Thomas, 1991; Morrisson & Snyder, 2000; Craig & Fisher, 2000; Saito, 2005; Piketty, 2006; Prados de la Escosura, 2007; Milanovich, Lindert & Williamson, 2008). One would not expect less diversity during early modern growth despite the fact that some trends appear common across Eurasia. Recent debates in comparative studies indicate that we are now moving towards a more subtle understanding of diversity within common trends. The Data The project is based on probate inventories of the respective cities. Ottoman probate records provide lists and estimated value or sale price of the realty and personalty owned by the deceased. Personalty includes financial assets (cash and credits) as well as all moveable physical property, and realty includes urban and rural buildings and land. The inventories also list debts owed by the deceased, thus offering a full account of the net worth of the probate population. Therefore, it would be fair to state that Ottoman probate records are superior to some of their counterparts in their comprehensiveness. Yet, like their counterparts, they are biased. Most commonly, they underrepresent women, the younger population, rural population, and possibly, the lower socio-occupational classes. Non-Muslims too appear to be underrepresented in most of the cities studied in this project, but not all, which reflects the varied legal culture in different localities of the empire. At the same time, using the probate inventories as a proxy for real wealth of the probate and non-probate population alike, one has to acknowledge the uncertainties regarding inter vivos transfers, underreporting or misevaluation as well as possible changes over time in patterns of registration. With all these caveats, probate records still stand out as our best tool to study wealth and its distribution in the Ottoman Empire 3 Wealth in Bursa, Canbakal before the 19 th century, with the exception of cadastral surveys for the 15 th and 16 th centuries. The discussion in this paper is limited to men with urban residence, that is, a total of 1,301 probates (Table 1). Although the major trends in urban male wealth are not very different from those we observe in connection with urban wealth in general, it is safer at this point to limit the analysis in terms of gender and residence, for these two factors appear to be important in determining wealth. 2 This is a simple way of eliminating some of the biases inherent in the database without having to deal with estate multipliers for probates belonging to different population groups. In the case of Ottoman probates, multipliers have to be established mostly from scratch as demographics of the Ottoman society are much understudied. That task will be undertaken at a later stage in the project. In order to capture medium term economic fluctuations, the data is organized in nine sub-periods of 20 years each, with 20 years gap in between. In other words, findings from each sub-period stand for 40-year averages. We start at 1500 because, firstly, it is a common benchmark year in early modern studies –although it is clear in the case of Bursa that we need to go further back in time to identify the beginnings of the upward trend that we observe in the 16 th century. 3 Secondly, we have probates from more than one city from 1500 onwards. Our terminus is 1840, roughly the beginning of a new administrative and economic regime effected through reforms and commercial treaties with European powers. Table 1 indicates the chronological structure of the study and the sample size. Unless otherwise stated, all values reflect net wealth (untrimmed) and are deflated according to Pamuk (2000) Istanbul Consumer Price Index (ICPI). For sampling details and price indexes, please refer to the Appendix. 2 Decomposition of inequality in the raw database for all cities indicates that gender can account for up to 44% and residence can account for up to 24% of the total inequality. 3 Bursa was damaged by the Timurid army in 1402 and the subsequent power struggles among the Ottoman princes and the elite. Judging by travel accounts, the damages were repaired and the city had become a major international emporium towards the middle of the 15 th century (Lowry, 2004).