the early modern mediterranean 101
From traders to imperialistsAssessments of the changing balance of power between “the West” and the Ottoman
Empire usually have western Europeans, and the Mediterranean, in mind. But the first
significant reversal actually came in the Black Sea at the hands of the Russians. Its
significance is amplified by the great efforts, described earlier, which the Ottomans
had traditionally undertaken to make this body of water an exclusive zone, efforts
which they never made in the eastern Mediterranean, let alone further west. The
Treaty of Küçük Kaynarca was signed in 1774 at the conclusion of the Ottoman–
Russian war of 1768–1774 and the Ottomans were on the losing end. Among other
concessions, they had to grant the Russian navy and merchant marine free navigation
in the Black Sea; the Ottoman lake was no more. This was but the first step in a series
of measures (not all of them taken by Russia) which gradually broke the enforced link
between the Black Sea and the provisioning of Istanbul.
This path of military power, followed by diplomatic concessions extracted from the
defeated party, which were then used to further commercial advantage, is a critical
turning point in the transition from trade to imperialism. We do not see this in the
eighteenth-century Mediterranean.
The country to consider with regard to this picture is France. That is because the
eighteenth century was the French century. The French dominated Ottoman trade
with the west throughout; at times they accounted for as much as 60% of all commer-
cial transactions.^18 This dominance was itself an artifact of Mediterranean marginaliza-
tion after 1700. France had relatively free rein because the interest of the English and
the Dutch had been drawn elsewhere and France, relatively unsuccessful on the world
stage, decided to focus on the Mediterranean. The relative torpor which settled over
the region stands in sharp contrast to Catherine the Great’s ambitious “Greek Project”
for the Ottoman Empire and helps to explain the divergence between the fates of the
Black Sea and the Mediterranean at this time (although we must not forget that
Catherine went so far as to send her navy into the Mediterranean in 1770, during the
war with the Ottomans).
The French had something to sell—the highly successful cloth known as londrins
seconds which was the fruit of Colbert’s labors—and they were even more interested
in Ottoman raw materials, such as olive oil, cotton and silk. Neither imports nor
exports, however, were extensive enough to upset traditional arrangements within the
Empire. The market for French textiles, for example, did not extend beyond the mid-
dle and upper classes in urban areas and even there they were easily challenged by local
production, as well as the traditional import of luxury cloth from the east. Consular
reports are full of frustration at the resiliency and cohesiveness of Ottoman society.
The market folk in Istanbul would dispatch informers to the Dardanelles in order to
let local traders know that French ships were approaching. The city’s cloth traders
would then stop their purchases and surplus product would pile up amongst the
French. This is not to deny the rapid growth of certain port cities—most spectacularly
Izmir and Salonica—due to increased trade with Europe. They were, however, small
appendages on a vast Empire.
But to consider only the equilibrium between east and west, as it were, is to miss
one of the most important developments in the eighteenth-century Mediterranean,
and that is the success of Ottoman non-Muslim subjects, the Greeks and the Armenians