Roots of Global Capital: The Political Economy of Licorice in Late Ottoman Western Anatolia, 1850–1910

This paper will focus on the process by which naturally-grown licorice roots became a global capital in Late Ottoman Western Anatolia. The licorice plants that grew in the often-flooded river basins of the region were considered to be of the best quality, thereby attracting the interests of local, transregional, and global capitalist entrepreneurs. Drawing on research in Ottoman, Turkish, Greek, British, and American sources, this paper zooms in on a British (after 1902, American) company, MacAndrews & Forbes, and the strategies it used to monopolize the licorice economy. The Forbes company managed an agro-industrial licorice complex, including lands where licorice was collected by villagers, factories to process the collected roots before exportation, coal mines to fuel the factories, and shipping, almost exclusively, to the US. This paper argues that what enabled the company to (almost) monopolize the licorice economy by the end of the 19^thcentury was its capacity to enroot in local material and ecological relations via a system of labor contracts and access to local means of violence. The long-term contracts with the already-impoverished villagers, involving the distribution of advances to collect the roots from their lands for a specified factory, allowed the company to claim the commodity as its own, and subordinate land and labor into its globally-circulated capital. Furthermore, the company’s arrangements with local entrepreneurs—those who also accumulated local power—to manage the complex cycle of the licorice economy from the land to the port allowed the company to access local means of violence, which enforced contracts with the villagers. Overall, this paper approaches the formation of global capital in the Ottoman Empire not as an external imposition as it has been assumed in the historiography but as a product of the local order of