The Ottoman government obtained current information on the empire's sources of revenue through periodic registers called tahrir defterleri. These documents include detailed information on tax-paying subjects and taxable resources, making it possible to study the economic and social history of...

New technologies have not always been greeted with full enthusiasm. Although the Ottomans were quick to adopt advancements in military technology, they waited almost three centuries to sanction printing in Ottoman Turkish (in Arabic characters). Printing spread relatively rapidly throughout...

Until the seventeenth century, the Ottomans used fines extensively for law enforcement and employed agents to collect the fines. Fines can be costly to implement because of agency problems and corruption. To solve the problem of corruption, the Ottomans implemented a variety of mechanisms,...

This article studies temporal variations in wealth levels and distribution in an Ottoman context during the eighteenth century. By analysing the probate estate inventories of the Muslim deceased in Kastamonu, located in north-central Anatolia, we demonstrate that real wealth levels generally...

Court records are used extensively in historical research. Preserved as summaries of daily legal proceedings, they give historians a unique opportunity of access to the information about the names, personal characteristics, and socio-economic status of individuals and about the laws, local...

This article considers the relevance of hypotheses developed in the "law and economics" literature regarding settlement/trial decisions in the Ottoman Empire. In particular, it explores the applicability of the "selection principle" and "50 percent plaintiff win-rate" formulated by George Priest...

This paper provides standardized estimates of labor productivity in arable farming in selected regions of the early Ottoman Empire, including Jerusalem and neighboring districts in eastern Mediterranean; Bursa and Malatya in Anatolia; and Thessaly, Herzegovina, and Budapest in eastern Europe. I...

New technologies have not always been greeted with great enthusiasm. Although the Ottomans were quick to adopt advancements in military technology, they waited for almost three hundred years to allow the first book to be printed in Arabic script. We explain differential reaction to technology...

Risk and transaction costs often provide competing explanations of institutional outcomes. In this paper we argue that they offer opposing predictions regarding the assignment of fixed and variable taxes in a multi-tiered governmental structure. While the central government can pool regional...

Governments can tax productive activities with either uniform or discriminatory rates among taxpayers. Although discriminatory rates can cause productive inefficiency and require high cost of administration, they can be preferred because of their advantage in distributional flexibility. This...