Fariba Zarinebaf, associate professor in the Department of History at University of California, Riverside.
Historians have argued for a long time that the Ottoman government was an absolutist state without an "economic mind" that only cared about revenue collection and provisionism and did not promote trade and merchant activities. They have blamed the government for granting treaties to foreign merchants that opened up Ottoman markets and harmed local producers and traders. This paper will offer a critique of this paradigm by focusing on merchant interactions in the port of Galata and tackling Ottoman economic policies in the eighteenth century.
