the early modern mediterranean 99
Indies (Rapp, 1975: 502). In addition, Venetian complaints show that the English
fought, and fought hard, to replace Venetian textiles with their own (cheaper) prod-
ucts in Istanbul.^10 This is not just a chapter in the story of England and Venice. It also
shows that Ottoman consumers were still sought after and this was, presumably, for
two reasons. One, the Pax Ottomanica ensured distribution of goods on a wide scale
and, two, the Mediterranean continued to be seen as a rich market. The strategy also
implies a certain traditionalism (admittedly the techniques were very new); the English
appealed to the Ottoman consumer by producing goods that were meant to look as
much like their Venetian counterparts as possible.
It was only in the eighteenth century that English commerce in the Americas
and in the Indies exceeded that of the Mediterranean (Ramsey, 1957: 60). Another
milestone in that century concerns colonial goods. The arrival of cheap sugar, cof-
fee and tobacco from the Caribbean colonies and the subsequent displacement of
their more expensive near-eastern equivalents is often taken (and rightly so) as a
key moment in the weakening of the Ottoman Empire vis-à-vis Europe. It is worth
noting, then, that Yemeni coffee continued as a major export to Salonica right
through 1750; after that French coffee from the colonies began to arrive but it
was a gradual process.^11 When we add to this the explosive growth in world trade
in the eighteenth century—growth that the Ottoman Empire at least did not par-
ticipate in—it seems correct to identify the 1700s as the century when the inland
sea assumed a much-diminished place in the world economy. But in terms of the
Ottoman experience of that marginalization, we must at all times keep in mind the
great self-sufficiency of the Empire, which continued in this century as well. As
one Ottoman historian has put it: “Perhaps the most important single fact about
Ottoman trade with the world in this century was that it was still dwarfed by trade
within the Empire.”^12
Finally, any discussion of the Mediterranean in the eighteenth century must always
keep in mind, as Braudel did, the larger Mediterranean. In the same period in which
the commerce of the inland sea remained somewhat stagnant, the trade routes out of
the Balkans, heading north, exploded as Ottoman merchants rushed to provide
central Europe with raw materials.
The question of declineA related, but nevertheless separate, question is that of Mediterranean decline. The
issue raises itself because Faruk Tabak’s (2008) influential study of the period 1550–1870
is the first to attempt a Braudelian treatment of the post-Braudel centuries, as it were,
and a central concept in the book is that of decline.^13 By decline, Tabak seems to mean
a decommercialization of the Mediterranean.^14 The lucrative commercial crops of the
late medieval period—sugar and cotton—moved to the Atlantic world and what
emerged was a “simplified agricultural regime based on grains for local consumption,
plus olives, wine and sheep/goat husbandry.”^15
Any argument that associates, however indirectly, the arrival of the Ottomans and the
retreat of commerce must be treated with great caution. It conjures up old stereotypes
about Turks as soldiers, almost constitutionally incapable of taking an interest in trade.^16
Obviously we cannot review the entire agricultural record of the early modern