A good portion of the literature on late Ottoman economic history examines the integration of the empire into to the capitalist world economy. Studies on this topic draw attention to the role of major port cities such as Istanbul, Izmir, Salonica, and Beirut as nodes connecting their peripheral hinterland to colonial metropoles in Europe. Yet, while doing so, they often underemphasize the commercial and economic dynamism of the Ottoman interior. One senior scholar, for example, has recently asserted that Eastern Anatolia region “remained largely excluded from domestic and foreign markets.”
[1] Approaching the history of the inland regions through a commodity, sheep, our paper seeks to challenge this dominant view in the literature. It argues that the empire’s Eastern Anatolian provinces maintained and even reinforced their position as a major supplier of sheep, which were the main source of meat for most Ottoman urbanites, in the 19
th and early 20
th centuries. There hence developed lucrative trade networks connecting these provinces, particularly Erzurum, with major urban centers stretching from Istanbul and Damascus to Cairo and Alexandria.
Drawing on Ottoman and British archival sources, the paper explores how a broad range of human actors (tribes, sheep merchants, drover, moneylenders, and state officials of various standings) and nonhuman actors (climate, geography, and technology) interacted to build and sustain the networks of sheep’s trade, which provided some in the former group with considerable economic power and some political influence. However, it will also highlight the fragility of these networks by discussing how they were from time to time disrupted by environmental calamities such as droughts, epizootics, and famines. In doing so, it will stress non-human actors’ agency in shaping the actions and reactions of humans.
[1] Şevket Pamuk, Uneven Centuries: Economic Development of Turkey since 1820 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018), 124.
