Quantitative Data and the Economy

Economic historians of the Ottoman empire have recently made great progress in the study of quantitative data and the economy. They have used data from various sources, including tax registers, court records, and other types of surveys and financial accounts. Applying state of the art analytical techniques to the data, they have examined numerous interesting questions regarding the Ottoman economy, population, and institutions in regions ranging from Anatolia and the Balkans to Syria, Palestine, and Egypt in the south, Georgia in the east, and Hungary and Poland in the north. We offer a basic introduction to the literature by surveying important developments since the beginning of the twenty-first century. The survey shows that this area of research has become a mature subfield of both Ottoman history and economic history.