Guilds and Cooperative Community Networks in the Eastern Mediterranean: Evidence from Greece Under Ottoman Occupation

During the post-Byzantine period of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in certain areas of Greece, back then, under Ottoman occupation, a particular form of cooperative organization was developed. Rural regions—networks of adjacent communities—having secured a special privileged status of community administration—were organised as a local production system designed to produce specific agricultural or craft products which were then destined for international markets. The present paper aims, first, to bring to light the Greek guild, its internal organization and its geographical impacts; and, second, to investigate the phenomenon of the cooperative community networks. In particular, it presents successful historical examples of cooperative organization, their deeper values and operational rules developed in Eastern Mediterranean during the post-Byzantine period. At the same time, it aims at the study and prominence of the deeper values and motives and main operational rules, firstly on regional micro-level of professional guilds and latterly on a peripheral macro-level of cooperative forms in between in the wider regions of Greek territory. Four historically successful cases of cooperative organization in the Greek territory thrived during the Ottoman occupation, aspects of which offer useful proposals for the founding and operation of today’s cooperative initiatives. The success of these cases is in line with the exploitation of specific political and socio-economic conditions; the parallel growth of an expansive, international commercial network; monopolies’ function; and the invention of innovative operation rules of cooperative organization.