Locating an Ottoman Port-City in the Early Modern Mediterranean: Izmir 1580-1780
Keywords: Early Modern History
Environmental history
Mediterranean history
Ottoman history
Port City

Extant historiography considers Izmir as a case of early modern “boom town.” Its transformation from a mere pier for the provisions of Istanbul into a bustling trans-regional port-city, so the standard narrative goes, was due to mercantilist penetration by English and Dutch chartered companies at a time of Ottoman economic and political crisis and social dislocation. This formulation gives little credit to the city’s regional setting as an agent of change. This dissertation, in contrast, addresses the question of Izmir’s rise from the vantage point of Western Anatolia’s environmental outlook, hydrogeological features, and crop rotation patterns. It suggests that the city was forged not out of some in-built characteristics, but of how the inhabitants met the environmental challenges, and how this socio-environmental outlook contrasted with other regions in the long run and was articulated with economic and demographic factors. Using a composite methodology that combines environmental and economic historical approaches, and shifting the scale of observation to situate the environmental trends for sixteenth-century Izmir in a millennial perspective, this dissertation reconstructs the infrastructure of Ottoman socio-economic transformation. It rethinks the periodization and causal linkages between environment and fiscality by means of geography, and argues for understanding Izmir through a continuous monetary process that amplified commercial flows on a Eurasian scale. The first two chapters of this dissertation revisit the Little Ice Age argument concerning seventeenth-century socio-economic transformations. These chapters show the geographical limits of the argument, i.e. how the cumulative impact of regional climactic differentiation distinguished Western Anatolia, and Izmir’s hinterland in particular, allowing the development of local agricultural production and the region’s simultaneous demographic growth, distinguishing it from the rest of Anatolia. In the following two chapters, this work draws inspiration from the way that the question of the birth of the Atlantic has been cut down to size and reoriented, inter alia, through an Indian Ocean perspective. Here I similarly emphasize how trade flows running through Ottoman domains were inherently interlocked with Eurasian trade. I suggest that the bi-zonal Ottoman currency acted as a switch mechanism via the marginal utility of arbitrage, discontinuous in the long run but catalyzing a quintessential economic shift from the established portfolio of Eastern goods to the greater salience and integration of local products and markets. It was this shift, I argue, not a mercantilist penetration, which set the process in place. Focusing on the rise of Izmir also allows us to better understand the superstructure of Ottoman socio-economic transformation not only at the stage of Ottoman capital, but also of endemic commercial flows diffused throughout the empire. Finally, in the fifth and the last chapter, I demonstrate how Izmir became the conduit for wider economic flows not for environmental and economic reasons alone, but also fiscal ones. Specifically, Izmir’s covert taxation policy and taxpayers’ responses shaped its urban demographics in tandem with environmental and monetary processes. Ottoman environmental, economic, and political aspects of socio-economic change were thus connected to Eurasian flows of goods and people.