The environment, institutions, and economy in the Nineteenth-Century Ottoman Empire: The imperial landed estates of Mihaliç (1840-1850)

Abstract

Being a micro historical study, this thesis examines the establishment and management of the imperial landed estates of Mihaliç, as an example of a state enterprise, for a decade between 1840 and 1850. Designed and established for producing wool through breeding imported merino sheep in the Western Anatolia, this entrepreneurial activity carried the motivation of lessening dependency on international wool markets. Based on extensive use of archival documents, the major questions revolve around the macro issues of economic performance, institutional setting, and environment-making. In doing so, this study aims at critically engaging with how institutions, economy, and environment came into play as interdependent constituents of a larger social metabolism in the nineteenth century Ottoman Empire. Unlike approaches that consider state enterprises in the empire solely as discrete facts in discussions on modernization, centralization, and bureaucratization, this study suggests that economic enterprises should be first and foremost be considered as a complicated and often continuous production process. Benefiting from rich interaction between history and political economy, this thesis seeks to present and relate many issues such as monetary profitability, coexistence of monetary and in-kind economies, prices, market exchange, capital accumulation and long climatic cycles to each other by putting the relations of production, appropriation and distribution at its center.