Ottoman Trade, Ports and Markets

From its emergence around 1300 until its dissolution in 1922, Ottoman rule joined agricultural districts, market towns and seaports across southeastern Europe, Anatolia, the eastern Mediterranean and western Asia. Merchants connected producers with consumers, but different stages of trade involved different people and rules: a cargo entering a capital’s wholesale market fed urban households, while goods bought for export passed through customs and foreign shipping networks. In most Middle Eastern regions, traffic within the empire remained a major part of commerce even as foreign trade grew.

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Supplying the capital

Istanbul’s population depended on grain brought in from outside the city. From the mid-fifteenth century until the mid-nineteenth, a principal landing and distribution site was the Unkapan, a square beside the Golden Horn wharves. Grain arrived by water at the landing, where a great magazine housed the public weighing scale. There officials measured and stored it before it moved through the city toward its consumers. A mosque and a council house for the grain merchants stood within the same complex. The arrangement connected ship unloading, wholesale measurement and urban distribution in one place, supplying the court, military, religious institutions and residents.

In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, officials also used the narh, an official price schedule, to manage selected goods. Grain shortages, hoarding and unfair dealing could drive prices sharply upward, so the government set prices and restricted practices that disrupted supply. The schedule also set prices for artisans’ products and the price of materials supplied to them. A baker’s bread price, for example, depended on grain and flour reaching the city as well as on the price at which the finished loaf could be sold. These measures linked wholesale supply with the goods available in neighbourhood markets.

Market streets, secure stores and inland trade

A çarşı was a shop-lined street or group of streets where customers bought goods and services. A bedesten was a different kind of market building: a secure masonry structure in the commercial centre used for valuable wares such as textiles, jewellery and weapons. Urban hans offered merchants lodging and space for their goods and animals; some also housed workshops and shops where traders sold stock. Keeping merchandise in a han or bedesten made storage part of the commercial system, not just a pause between journeys. In some cities, shop-lined markets near charitable endowments provided rental income for the supported institution.

Caravans connected inland producers and market towns with larger centres and ports; merchants could unload goods at a han, store them, and arrange a further sale or shipment. In southern Syria under early Ottoman rule, villages held weekly markets throughout the year, alongside seasonal pilgrimage markets and daily urban markets. These gatherings linked neighboring villages, Bedouin traders and towns, while grain brokers sometimes bought and sold cereals at threshing floors.

On longer routes, fifteenth-century Persian merchants carried silk from Tabriz in northwestern Iran to Bursa in northwestern Anatolia. In the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, silk caravans reached Ottoman territory by way of Tabriz and Erzurum, or by southern routes from Hamadan through Baghdad or Mosul to Aleppo in Syria. For details of the journeys themselves, see Caravans.

Partnerships and long-distance payment

A merchant did not always risk all the capital personally. In a mudaraba partnership, an investor entrusted money or goods to an agent who conducted the trade and returned the original capital. They divided any profit according to an agreed share; if the venture lost its capital, the investor bore that loss while the agent lost the time and effort spent trading. Such an arrangement allowed one partner to supply funds while another supplied commercial knowledge and labour.

Merchants also used written payment instruments to arrange long-distance payments. A suftaja, similar to a bill of exchange or letter of credit, instructed a payer at another place to transfer funds or provide payment to its bearer. Fifteenth- and sixteenth-century court documents from Bursa in northwestern Anatolia, a major trading city, record frequent use of these instruments; judges helped enforce payment. Credit and partnership made the caravan and sea routes viable for merchants who had to settle accounts far from the original buyer or investor.

İzmir’s port trade

In the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, İzmir (Smyrna) connected western Anatolian goods with Mediterranean shipping. European merchants brought European and colonial wares into the port and bought Ottoman goods for export to western Europe. Ottoman merchants also participated in overseas commerce, including as commissioners and brokers linking local producers to foreign buyers. As European demand for Ottoman raw materials grew during the eighteenth century, European firms strengthened their position in the port’s export trade.

Elena Frangakis’s study of İzmir from 1695 to 1820 describes specific commercial roles within that port. Some Jewish merchants worked as commissioners and moneylenders; Armenian merchants took part in caravan commerce from the east and the silk trade; Greek merchants sold cloth wholesale and retail in the city and its surroundings. Muslim merchants handled much of İzmir’s trade with other Ottoman provinces by land and sea. Customs and local taxes remained under Ottoman administration. The port therefore joined internal Ottoman exchange to overseas commerce, with merchants, brokers, lenders, customs officers and shippers handling different parts of a transaction.

Ports and sea routes

Alexandria’s late-eighteenth-century records show sea links with Smyrna (İzmir), Salonica (now Thessaloniki) and Istanbul. In Alexandria’s 1782 trade with other Ottoman ports, Ottoman vessels carried about 60 percent of the cargo value, while European ships handled routes from Alexandria to Europe.

Customs and nineteenth-century integration

The 1838 Convention of Balta Liman reaffirmed earlier British capitulations, agreements that set foreign merchants’ rights and privileges. It also changed how British traders could buy and move Ottoman goods. It abolished state monopolies over Ottoman produce and local governors’ permits for its purchase and transport, opening those transactions to British merchants and agents throughout the empire. Goods bought for consumption within Ottoman lands paid the same duties as for the most-favoured Ottoman subjects. For Ottoman goods bought for export, the treaty set a nine per cent interior duty at the place of shipment and a three per cent export duty. It applied these terms across Ottoman territories and allowed other foreign powers to adopt the arrangement. The change removed a barrier to buying and moving produce, while customs duties still shaped each export shipment’s cost.

During the nineteenth century, railways linked selected agricultural regions with export ports, while the Suez Canal, open to navigation from 1869, joined Mediterranean and Red Sea shipping. Falling transport costs and expanding overseas commerce brought many Ottoman markets into closer connection with international trade. Internal exchange remained central in much of the region. In 1862, Ottoman imports into the province of Damascus in present-day Syria were worth five times as much as imports from outside the empire; in 1892, four-fifths of Damascus’s exports went to other Ottoman provinces. A merchant in İzmir could sell into a European market while a Damascus trader relied mainly on buyers elsewhere in the empire. Ottoman trade combined both kinds of commerce, and the balance depended on the place and period.