Timber Merchants, Villagers, and Mountain Forests in the Late Ottoman Mediterranean

This paper aims to examine overlooked forms of capital accumulation in the Ottoman Mediterranean and how they changed the human relationship to the environment by tracing the production of timber as a commodity. The expansion of railway networks in western Anatolia during the second half of the 19^th century brought formerly remote mountain forests into the extractive remit of timber merchants. The demand from European markets for forest products, the reliance of growing industrial production and railways on wood as a source of fuel, and the demand for timber for construction in the rapidly growing port-city of Izmir provided ample opportunities for timber merchants to open mountain forests to commercial usage by means of forest concessions from the state. Focusing on the struggles between villagers, timber merchants, and the state in the mountain forests of Western Anatolia, this paper demonstrates that lumbering contracts and advance credit distribution were the two major technologies of capital accumulation deployed by timber merchants to incorporate the labor of mountain villagers into commercialized timber production. This incorporation, however, relied on the exclusion and the dispossession of the villagers of their free access to, and control over, mountain forests. Through an analysis of contracts, records of credit and debt, court records, and petitions, this paper challenges conventional narratives that have associated capitalism with free wage labor, and approached the existence of different forms of labor as the reflection of pre-capitalist economy and society, demonstrating instead that the spatial expansion of capitalism in the Late Ottoman Mediterranean relied on the integration of different forms of labor which was accompanied by the erasure of rural commons.