Anatolian Urban Network: Regional Commercial Networks Overcoming the Territorial Disparities

1 5 th INTERNATIONAL PLANNING HI STORY SOCIETY CONFERENCE ANATOLIAN URBAN NETWORK: REGIONAL COMMERCIAL NETWORKS OVERCOMING THE TERRITORIAL DISPARITIES METHİYE GÜL ÇÖTELİ Address: Erciyes University, Faculty of Architecture, Department of City and Regional Planning, Kayseri, Turkey 38039 e-mail: [email protected], [email protected], [email protected] ABSTRACT The process of “incorporation of Ottoman Empire into the European-controlled world economy”, which touched to the port cities much earlier than the inland cities, was a partial and piecemeal affair. Thus, differential growth of cities and regional development disparities occurred and finally the transformation and evolution of an urban network appeared in Anatolia. The regional development literature has long argued that port cities do the heavy lifting in the Euro-Mediterranean region for linking diverse circuits of cities and became major cities in the urban hierarchy. However, not much research currently exists on the cities taking place on the lower ranks of the hierarchy. The problem is how did these small and medium-sized cities adapt to the national and global network in the 19th century. This paper focuses on the small and medium-sized cities especially those in remote areas which had the chance to play an active role in the urban system through their direct interactions with the major cities of the system and other urban settlements. In order to address the size distribution of cities and the commercial relationships among cities clearly, data were collected from Ottoman archives (and personal collections). The urban entities, city populations, international and regional trade records, merchant relationships etc. are the variables of the study. The main result is that the city of Kayseri, a medium-sized Central Anatolian city, was able to cope with the rapid changes in the commercial, logistic and strategic network through its web of provincial and regional scaled trade networks. Kayseri was successful in selling specialized commodities to other cities that are located at much longer distance, to the capital of the Empire and building a sub-network in Anatolia. Besides, this study shows that the Anatolian urban network emerged from nested sub-networks which competed with international foreign traders’ networks. These results provide general support for the view that an urban network, which is a spatial organization of interacting cities that show complementarity and exchange. The present study provides a starting-point for further research in the categorization of sub-networks in the Anatolian urban network. INTRODUCTION Incorporation into the world-economy coincided with the weakening of the ability of the Ottoman Empire’s centralized state to control the production, distribution and appropriation of the economic surplus (İslamoğlu-İnan 1987). The incorporation of the Ottoman Empire into the world economy occurred unevenly and drastically affecting one region at an early date while others remained comparatively untouched. Because of the fragmented articulation with the world-economy, Cities, nations and regions in planning history determining the periodization and giving a more precise dating for the incorporation process of the empire is difficult. Various studies date the beginning of incorporation to the sixteenth century, but some studies put it in the nineteenth century. According to Wallerstein, the Ottoman Empire was outside of the capitalist world-economy in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Nevertheless, the process of incorporation into the system or peripheralization was complete between 1750 and 1839. Wallerstein and Kasaba claimed that the decline of the guilds and the Free Trade Treaty of 1838, which was signed between the Ottoman Empire and Britain, facilitated the decline of the Ottoman manufacturing sector in the nineteenth century (Wallerstein 1974; Wallerstein and Kasaba 1980; Wallerstein, Decdeli et al. 1987). In contrast to Wallerstein's interpretation of Ottoman incorporation into the world- economy, Pamuk divided the empire’s integration period into the world economy into several stages. While the first sub-period, beginning from the 1820s to the mid 1870s, witnessed a rapid growth process in the incorporation of Ottoman Empire into the world economy, the second sub-period, lasting between 1880 to World War I, was slow (Pamuk 1987). Similar to Pamuk, Çızakça stated that a two-phase incorporation process began first in the 1550-1650 period and the second in the 1830-1900 period, when permanent and profound integration into the world- economy took place (Çızakça 1985). Besides this periodization, Çızakça suggested that the Ottoman Empire integrated into the Europe-centered capitalist world- economy in part, instead of entirely, as seen in cotton manufacturing in Western Anatolia and Adana, silk production in Bursa and mohair manufacturing in Ankara (Çızakca 1980; Çızakça 1985). Quataert contradicted the claim that the Ottoman manufacturing sector declined in the 19th century due to the effects of the incorporation process into the world- economy (Quataert 1994). According to Quataert, the guilds, who practiced protectionism, stifled commercial competition within the Ottoman Empire. After the disbandment of the Janissary Corps, the best organized advocates of protectionism in 1826, the guilds could no longer restrict trade, and free trade was promoted. Owen and Quataert have suggested that the quantity and value of domestic trade surpassed international Ottoman commerce throughout the period from 1800 to 1914, on one hand urban-based, guild-organized manufactory production declined, but on the other hand rural industry and household manufacturing continued in the first half of the nineteenth century (Owen 1993; Quataert 1994). From the 17th century untill the middle of the 19th century, caravan roads were the only transportation network in the Ottoman Empire. And the major cities of the empire were the inland cities before the nineteenth century. In Anatolia, most of the population gathered in the major inland cities of, Bursa, Kayseri, Ankara, Tokat and Konya. The caravan routes determined the major cities that were located far from the sea coast in the interior regions and acted as production and trade centers. Although the only active ports were Trabzon, Sinop and Antalya in this trade network, they were not dominant economic and political centers using their ports for global commercial practices. For that reason, sea trade was not a major factor in the urbanization of Anatolia before this century (Faroqhi 1994). The nineteenth century, especially the years between 1840-1870, was a revolutionary era of profound structural change in the Ottoman Empire which then came into close and direct contact with Europe. In this period, maritime towns which 1 5 th INTERNATIONAL PLANNING HI STORY SOCIETY CONFERENCE were raised as port cities became the location of this incorporation into the world economy and functioned as gates in-between. Since the port cities acted as the linkage points of the incorporation process, the people of the empire interacted with those from the West. In addition regional and international communication networks, particularly sea and rail routes, came together in these agglomerations. In the second half of the 19th century, mainly in the 1890s, the railroad system connected the interior cities with the ports which were used in the flow of both imported commodities and the export of Ottoman raw materials of local industry. By the end of the nineteenth century the city size distributions differentiated from the beginning of the century. While the inland cities grew, the port cities of Izmir, Trabzon and Samsun became as major port cities in the urban hierarchy of Anatolia. Eventually, the rehierarchization of the Anatolian urban network had to be arranged. Thus, the inland urban network1, which involved classical caravan cities, was shifted to “a number of seaborne cities which were vertically integrated with core cities” (Özveren 1990). In this period of change, most of the attention was directed to the port cities, which were on the top level of the hierarchy. However, a few studies about small and medium-sized cities which provided distribution and commerce functions to their surrounding area on a regional scale have been conducted. It is unclear how these small and medium-sized cities adapted to the national and global network in the 19th century. This paper focuses on small and medium-sized cities, especially those in remote areas, which had the chance to play an active role in the urban system through their direct interactions with the major cities of the system and to assess the regional commercial networks of Kayseri, a medium-sized city in Central Anatolia. The urban entities, city populations, international and regional trade records, and merchant relationships, collected from Ottoman archives (and personal collections), were used to demonstrate the size distribution of cities and evaluate the commercial relationships among cities. ANATOLIAN URBAN NETWORK The number and size of settlements increased and new urban regions such as Eğirdir–Burdur joined the Anatolian urban network (see Figure 1) during the 19th century. Some of the cities, in other words coastal cities like Izmir, Trabzon, and Samsun, ascended to the top of the urban network. According to the size of urban populations in Anatolia between 1830 and 1840 Izmir became the second-largest city after Istanbul with a population of 110,000.

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