Brokers and Market Microstructures in Black Sea Grain Trade. Preliminary Observations from Varna (Mid-19th – Early 20th Century)

The paper explores the role of intermediaries and market microstructures in Black Sea Grain Trade through the example of the case of Varna and the wider region of the Bulgarian Black Sea coast. It focuses particularly on the transition from the late Ottoman, largely unregulated, regional grain markets to the period of autonomous Bulgaria (1878-1908), when international and domestic, economic and social pressures invited the Bulgarian authorities to intervene in local economies and try to regulate the grain markets and the sales of grain from the hinterland to the port-cities. The case of Varna shows that these efforts for institutional change corresponded to – and were largely provoked in the framework of – struggles for control of the processes of agricultural surplus extraction in the hinterland of the port outlets, struggles, which had a discernible ethnic dimension.