Early-modern commodity routes: Ottoman silks in the webs of world trade

Abstract

Silk was particularly important to intra-empire/inter-regional commerce across the vast Ottoman empire, in addition to trade with bordering polities. Historians have approached the interrelated issues of import substitution, political control of trade, trade linked to manufacture, and consumption through Braudel and Wallerstein’s concepts of ‘world economy’ and ‘world-empire’—in which significant sections of the late-eighteenth- and nineteenth-century-Ottoman Empire were incorporated as peripheral territories into a world economy dominated by Europe. Yet, this approach has been little used for the early-modern period, when Ottoman manufacturers supplied luxury silks to Poland, Russia, and the principalities forming present-day Romania, while artisans from the island of Chios successfully substituted their own silks for costly imports from Venice, Iran, and India. Well into the eighteenth century, Ottoman strength derived from control of overland trade routes, more secure than the pirate-infested Indian and Atlantic Oceans—and the war-torn Mediterranean.