Intergenerational wealth accumulation and dispersion in the Ottoman Empire: observations from eighteenth-century Kastamonu

Inheritance and intergenerational wealth transmission in eighteenth-century Ottoman Kastamonu: an empirical investigation.

This article investigates the relationship between inheritance and wealth in the context of eighteenth-century Ottoman Kastamonu. Based on the estate inventories of the deceased (sing. tereke) as recorded in Kastamonu court records (sicils), the article introduces a variety of quantitative techniques to measure the impact of Islamic inheritance practices on wealth accumulation across subsequent...

Inequality of Wealth in the Ottoman Empire: War, Weather, and Long-term Trends in Eighteenth Century Kastamonu

This article offers a quantitative analysis of wealth inequality in the Ottoman Empire, employing data from probate inventories (terekes) of eighteenth-century Kastamonu, a town located in northern Anatolia. Extracting information on the wealth levels and personal characteristics of individuals, we estimate aggregate measures of wealth inequality, namely the Gini Coefficient, the coefficient of...

Hijra and forced migration from nineteenth-century Russia to the Ottoman Empire

Agricultural Productivity in the Early Ottoman Empire

This paper provides standardized estimates of labor productivity in arable farming in selected regions of the early Ottoman Empire, including Jerusalem and neighboring districts in eastern Mediterranean; Bursa and Malatya in Anatolia; and Thessaly, Herzegovina, and Budapest in eastern Europe. I use data from the tax registers of the Ottoman Empire to estimate grain output per worker, standardiz...

Military Transformation in the Ottoman Empire and Russia, 1500-1800

By the early 16th century, the Ottoman Empire had emerged as a major military power in Southeastern Europe and the Middle East. The Ottomans were feared and admired by contemporaneous Europeans from Niccol6 Machiavelli to Ivan Peresvetov. The latter regarded the empire of Sultan Mehmed II (r. 1444-46, 1451-81) as a model to be emulated by his own ruler, Ivan IV of Muscovy (r. 1547-84), and inde...