Saltpeter Contracts and Rival Contractors in the 18th-Century Niğde, 1696–1774

In the early modern Ottoman Empire, saltpeter (natural potassium nitrate) was extensively extracted in and around the city of Niğde in Central Anatolia for cooking gunpowder for the imperial military. Economic and military historians have argued that the Imperial Gunpowder Mill in Istanbul had made a series of yearlong and on-site purchases by entrusting the Mill’s money-capital to its appointed officials before the 1700s. In these accounts, saltpeter provisioning, coupled with the import ban on saltpeter, was often treated as a series of transactions inhibiting or significantly restricting capital accumulation. I instead show that the portion of Mill’s capital allocated to saltpeter purchases was less than 20% while the remaining portion was privately invested by wealthy saltpeter contractors in the eighteenth century.

In this paper, I discuss saltpeter provisioning as a relation of capital mediated through debt bondage and orchestrated by both local and absentee investors. Peasants, whether free and bonded, scraped and sold the nitrate-rich soil found on land with various legal statuses, exchanging it for minimal compensation from contractors. Men in contractors’ service collected and stored the soil in their own cellars and delivered it to local mills where it as refined into saltpeter. Resembling putting-out merchants to some extent, the contractors made the mill owners sign debt contracts, acknowledging both the soil and cash provided by contractors and the mill owners’ agreement to sell saltpeter to the contractors at predetermined rates. This arrangement, characterized by forced commercialization and debt accounting, provided contractors with highly desirable profit margins. Finally, Niğde and its war economy witnessed the emergence of rival contractors who fiercely competed to secure contracts and deplete each other’s economic sources amidst the increasing demand for saltpeter during the long and frequent Ottoman wars in Eastern Europe and the Mediterranean since the mid-seventeenth century.