Assigned Reading:

Quataert, chapter 7.

Timur Kuran, The Long Divergence: How Islamic Law Held Back the Middle East (Princeton University Press, 2011), chapters 4 and 11.

Primary Source: The capitulations granted to the Dutch Republic in 1612. Translated by A.H. de Groot.

Seminar Questions:

• Can culture explain economic development?
• Why did the Ottomans grant capitulations?

Further Reading:

Sebouh David Aslanian, From the Indian Ocean to the Mediterranean: The Global Trade Networks of Armenian Merchants from New Julfa (University of California Press, 2011).

Edhem Eldem, French Trade in Istanbul in the Eighteenth Century (Brill, 1999).

Kate Fleet, European and Islamic Trade in the Early Ottoman State: The Merchants of Genoa and Turkey (Cambridge UP, 2006).

Daniel Goffman, Izmir and the Levantine World, 1550-1650 (University of Washington Press, 1990).

A.H. de Groot, The Ottoman Empire and the Dutch Republic: A History of the Earliest Diplomatic Relations, 1610-1630 (Nederlands Instituut voor het Nabije Oosten, 2012).

Cemal Kafadar, “A Death in Venice (1575): Anatolian Muslim Merchants Trading in the Serenissima,” Journal of Turkish Studies 10 (1986).

Christine Laidlaw, The British in the Levant: Trade and Perceptions of the Ottoman Empire in the Eighteenth Century (IB Tauris, 2010).

Bruce Masters, The Origins of Western Economic Dominance in the Middle East: Mercantilism and the Islamic Economy in Aleppo, 1600-1750 (New York UP, 1988).