Boğaç A. Ergene

In this book, Malissa Taylor explores how Ottoman land laws changed and stayed the same between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. The book’s primary thesis is that Ottoman jurists and bureaucrats generated a generally uniform legal system of land tenure and taxation over three hundred years in a fashion consistent with how early modern European monarchies consolidated their legal systems and ensured their absolutist control over their economic, including agricultural, resources (p. 33). Taylor identifies the origins of this transformation in Ebussuud Efendi’s attempts to define ‘royal’ (miri), that is, ‘treasury-owned’, land not found in pre-Ottoman Hanafi works of jurisprudence, a formulation that not only enhanced the state’s claims over agrarian plots but also ensured the cultivators’ property rights. This was an invention of (legal) tradition, though Taylor does not use this phrase, which would later come to distinguish Ottoman Hanafism. The classical Hanafi texts limited the state’s ability to claim the land in newly conquered territories, recognizing the latter primarily as milk or freehold of the conquering soldiers or conquered populations.

This article examines the accumulation, temporal variation, and inequality of wealth in the Ottoman judiciary between the late seventeenth and early nineteenth centuries. Using information from the estate inventories, we calculate the gross and net wealth of judges at the time of death. Comparisons against contemporary economic indicators show low to moderate levels of wealth accumulation among the judiciary. Wealth levels varied significantly across judiciary subgroups and they dropped drastically in the latter part of the eighteenth century. Regression analysis shows that differences in motives for bequests and family connections to other members of the judiciary contributed to the inequality of wealth.

Using a distant reading methodology, the article examines the thematic compositions of fetva compilations by four Ottoman şeyhülislams in the early modern era. Our analysis of the fetvas from the late 17th and early 18th centuries reveal that the majority of these opinions concerned a small number of issues, including women, family problems, contractual matters, and disputes and litigations. The article also demonstrates that the representation of fetvas with such concerns increased compared to what we find in the opinions of Ebussuud Efendi, a 16th-century şeyhülislam. But interest in religious issues, non-Muslims, and taxation declined over time. Finally, the article proposes computational procedures to identify the complex contextual characteristics of the şeyhülislams’ opinions.

In this article, we use a mix of computational techniques to identify textual shifts in the Ottoman şeyhülislam s’ fetva s between the sixteenth and twentieth centuries. Our analysis, supplemented by a close reading of these texts, indicates that the fetva s underwent multiple forms of transformation, a consequence of the institutional evolution of the şeyhülislam ’s fetva office ( fetvahane ) that aimed to speed up and streamline the production of the fetva s: over time, the texts appropriated a more uniform character and came to contain shorter responses. In the compositions of the questions, we identified many “trigger terms” that facilitated reflexive responses independent of the fetva s’ jurisprudential contexts, a tendency that became stronger after the second half of the seventeenth century. In addition, we propose in the article a methodology that measures the relative strengths of textual and conceptual links among the fetva corpora of various Ottoman şeyhülislam s. This analysis informs us about possible paths of long-term evolution of this genre of jurisprudential documents.

In their joint essay, Metin Coşgel and Boğaç Ergene make the case for “a pluralistic approach to the study of Islamic legal history,” through the lens of law and economics and other types of quantitative analysis. Regression analysis, they suggest, provides especially useful approaches suited to interdisciplinary studies of historical events. To illustrate, the authors describe the findings of their previous scholarship on Ottoman court records, for which they coded data on court petitions and were able to arrive at generalizable conclusions about access to early modern courts. Noting the uptick in digitized primary sources in the field, they predict an increase in Islamic legal scholarship that integrates quantitative analysis.

"Sharī‘a Scripts: A Historical Anthropology, written by Brinkley Messick, 2018" published on 01 Jan 2019 by Brill.

Economic history is an underdeveloped discipline in Middle Eastern historiography. Within our field, economic history articles are not published often, and books on economic history are rare. It is true that certain topics have been better explored than others, as Maya Shatzmiller's contribution to this roundtable on medieval economic history shows. Previous scholarship on Ottoman economic history has focused on land tenure, fiscal practices and institutions, artisanal production and organization (almost exclusively in urban areas), economic and charitable functions ofawqāf, and, especially for the 19th century, questions relevant to Ottoman incorporation into the capitalist world system. There also exist studies on urban and rural markets, regional and long-distance trade networks, and economic activities of specific individuals (primarily government officials and provincial notables), although these tend to be descriptive. But there are very limited numbers of studies on standards of living; levels, accumulation, and distribution of wealth; productivity in agricultural production and manufacture; demography (especially for the 17th and 18th centuries); credit relations and financial institutions; and economic development. As in the literature on medieval Islamic contexts, sophisticated quantitative research is particularly rare, which makes empirically based comparisons among different parts of the region and with other parts of the world very difficult.

The purpose of this roundtable is to discuss the major methodological and theoretical challenges involved in economic research in the context of Middle Eastern/Islamic history. We asked scholars representing a diverse spectrum of training and specialization to reflect on the state of the field (or the sub-fields with which they are familiar) and to comment on its (their) strengths and shortcomings. The participants had the opportunity to read all papers and modify their own contributions accordingly. The result, we believe, is a focused and critical conversation that reflects the plurality of opinions and approaches in the field. Outside of conference panels and small-scale workshops, exclusively methodological and theoretical exchanges in Middle Eastern/Islamic economic history are rare. We hope that this forum will stimulate further conversation and research on the issues discussed here.

This article offers a quantitative analysis of wealth inequality in the Ottoman Empire, employing data from probate inventories (terekes) of eighteenth-century Kastamonu, a town located in northern Anatolia. Extracting information on wealth levels and personal characteristics of individuals, we estimate aggregate measures of wealth inequality, namely the Gini coefficient, the coefficient of variation, and the wealth shares of the wealthiest 10 and 25 percent of estates. We use regression analysis to identify the time trend of wealth inequality and determine how warfare, significant weather events, macroeconomic variables, and shifts in population characteristics affected it.