100 molly greene
Mediterranean in one short chapter. But let us take just one example, the island of
Crete, because, as we shall see, it nicely highlights the issues raised by Tabak’s argument.
In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries Venetian Crete was famous for its sweet
wines which were exported all the way to England.^17 By the turn of the seventeenth
century, however, sweet wine production had begun in places like Madeira and refer-
ences to the Cretan wines drop off substantially in western sources. The Ottomans
took the island from Venice in 1669. A study of Ottoman Crete identifies it as no
longer the island of wine but rather of olive oil and that this was so, the argument
goes, because the olive tree was more suited to a backward economy. This would seem
to be a perfect illustration of Tabak’s thesis but on closer examination the picture
looks a little different.
First, the shift from wine to olive oil was not the result of a change in sovereignty
but in fact began in the seventeenth century, under the Venetians, in response to
rising demand for the oil from the Dutch, the English and, especially, the French.
Second, Cretan wine continued to be produced in the Ottoman period—all of the
travelers remarked on its deliciousness—but its market was now more regional. It was
drunk in places like Alexandria and Istanbul. This is in accordance with post–1453, as
outlined above, in which the formation of a vast imperial space whose center was the
eastern Mediterranean privileged trade within the Empire over international trade
routes. As Ottoman scholars have remarked, Europeans often simply failed to see, and
thus to write about, trade that did not concern them, leading at times to over-hasty
declarations of commercial decline.
Olive oil, on the other hand, became the island’s primary commercial export in the
eighteenth century, destined for the most part for Marseille. French exports from the
island increased by 50% between 1720 and 1740 and by mid-century the French were
complaining that they could not get enough, due to the proliferation of soap-making
factories which used the oil on Crete itself.
What we see in Crete is not a transition from a commercialized to a simple and local
economy, but rather a cycle that took about 150 years for it to work itself out. In the
1570s, the Venetians began forcibly uprooting vines and continued to do so until their
sovereignty on the island ended in 1699. In their place they tried, it seems unsuccess-
fully (since the orders kept getting repeated), to force the islanders to plant wheat.
They did this because, in case of war with the ever-encroaching Ottomans, they feared
that the island would not be able to feed itself. In other words, due to the political and
military situation in this period, the authorities valued self-sufficiency over profits.
In the aftermath of the war Crete became, for a short while, a grain exporter.
This probably indicated a poorer and more backward economy because, in accord-
ance with what Braudel tells us, it was precisely those islands that did not have a
crop grown for export which could at times afford the luxury of exporting wheat.
But, as the international commercial economy began to expand around 1720,
Crete once again began importing wheat. Just as the Venetians had done before
them in the fifteenth and the sixteenth centuries, once conditions allowed it the
Ottomans preferred to have the Cretans take advantage of the island’s fertility to
grow a commercial crop; the wheat could be brought in from elsewhere. The
seventeenth century, then, when the island lacked a major export crop, was not a
transition to a new status quo but rather an aberration, a result of the unsettled
and difficult conditions of the time.