Title Of Article :
Book Review: Fatih Ermiş, A History of Ottoman Economic Thought: Developments before the19th Century. Routledge, 2014. 212 pp.
Abstract :
In this impressively extensive analysis of a variety of Ottoman narratives from the 16th through the 18th centuries, Fatih Ermiş has done a great service to the study of early modern Ottoman thought. Although the book is titled “Ottoman Economic Thought,” it would not be wrong to see this study more comprehensively as an historical analysis. To quote, the basis of the book is, “an understanding of Ottoman mentality of economic issues [that] presupposes an understanding of the total social view of the Ottomans” (p. 32). In setting the framework as such, Ermiş is indeed positioning his work with respect to several traditions of Ottoman history and historiography at once. Such a variety of traditions, stretching from the impact of Polanyi more generally to the overwhelming heritage of the concept of the ‘circle of justice’ in the study of early modern Ottomans more particularly, enables the author to not disassociate economic thought from the society at hand. “[S]ince economics was not a separate sphere in the Ottoman empire, ideas about economic matters should be searched for in its political, social and religious writings” (p. 2). As such, both his work and the subject of his work, i.e., early modern Ottomans, represent a very Polanyi-esque approach: the economic as embedded in the social (Polanyi, 1944). Indeed, Polanyi’s distinction between formal and substantive economics is useful to Ermiş as an “instrument for understanding how people interpreted economic events in non-capitalistic societies” (p. 2). Moreover, Polanyi’s “emphasis on the instituted character of economics” helps explain the uniqueness of the Ottomans as “each society has its own institutions and these are not identical to those in any other society” (p. 3).
