In the seventeenth century, when the modern global economy began to take shape, what institutions governed socio-economic life in the Eastern Mediterranean? Were the region’s traditional economic institutions in flux?
This ten-volume set, 6,431 pages in length, presents original historical sources that are helping to generate answers to the above questions.
The books are the culmination of a data-gathering project initiated in 2003 as part of research that led to The Long Divergence: How Islamic Law Held Back the Middle East.
The set contains Ottoman-Turkish transliterations, along with English and modern Turkish summaries, of thousands of cases found in 15 seventeenth-century Islamic court registers from Istanbul, then the capital of the Ottoman Empire and the commercial center of the Eastern Mediterranean.
The cases are grouped under seven topical headings:
- Guilds and Guildsmen (Vol. 1)
- Communal Affairs of Christians and Jews (Vol. 1)
- Foreigners (Vol. 1)
- Commercial Partnerships (Vol. 2)
- State-Individual Relations, including Taxation (Vols. 3–4)
- Waqfs (Vols. 5–6–7–8)
- Credit Markets and Uses of Interest (Vols. 9–10)
Volume 10 contains several general indexes.
All volumes will be available online through Nadirkitap.com:
- Volume 1 (932 pp.) – Table of contents
- Volume 2 (659 pp.) – Table of contents
- Volume 3 (544 pp.) – Table of contents
- Volume 4 (708 pp.) – Table of contents
- Volume 5 (584 pp.) – Table of contents
- Volume 6 (650 pp.) – Table of contents
- Volume 7 (677 pp.) – Table of contents
- Volume 8 (651 pp.) – Table of contents
- Volume 9 (529 pp.) – Table of contents
- Volume 10 (497 pp.) – Table of contents
