This panel approaches the history of the Ottoman Empire through the prism of commodities and commodification. Following the lead of the recent comparative historiographies of commodification, commodity regimes, and commodity frontiers, the papers in this panel examine the history of the empire through the transformation of things into commodities. This approach shifts the emphasis from grand processes such as capitalism or state formation and meta actors such as the state or the market to a granular account of the production, circulation, and exchange of things. After all, behind the creation of even the simplest commodities, as Rockman argues, “there is an entire universe to be revealed” (Rockman 2014). Examining the history of the empire through commodities and commodification reveals the interconnection of social, cultural, institutional, and ecological factors driving historical transformation at all levels of society. This inquiry also opens room for analyzing the cultural practices, knowledge regimes, ideological frames, and institutional infrastructures underlying the commodification of things.

The analysis of Ottoman history through commodities allows us to combine ecological/environmental and labor histories with the social and economic accounts of the empire. In Ottoman historical writing, there has long been a clear demarcation between the fields of social and economic history, labor history, financial history, and budding environmental history. These fields —their problématiques, analytical frameworks, and methodological tools—have evolved mostly in isolation from one another. The lens provided by commodities, however, transcends the thick borders between these subfields and demonstrates the profound changes in land use, energy resources, labor structures, knowledge regimes, and cultural norms and social relations in the Ottoman Empire in an interrelated fashion.

Each paper in this panel situates a specific commodity (charcoal, sheep, timber, wheat, and cotton) at the center of its analysis and examines the social, economic, ecological, and cultural factors and networks surrounding the production, circulation, and consumption of it. In doing so, each paper showcases the methodological possibilities that focusing on a commodity can provide to the historians of the Ottoman Empire. A focus on commodities produced and circulated in the seemingly-peripheral economies (e.g. sheep) can help us reconsider the long-lived tendency in the literature to take port cities as representative of the Ottoman experience of the commercialization of the economy. Similarly, redirecting our attention from the questions of proletarianism and labor activism in the big cities to local economies and regional markets of certain commodities can show the protean nature of labor structures and relations in the Ottoman world. Finally, considering inter-communal relations in the late Ottoman Empire from the vantage point of export-oriented commodity production helps us challenge essentialist notions of ethno-religious conflict and violence. In this way, the papers collectively revisit some of these most widely-accepted perspectives in Ottoman historical writing, demonstrate possibilities for considering Ottoman history from a comparative-global perspective, and incorporating the micro-scale experiences of Ottoman subjects into historical narratives.