104 molly greene
14 And here we are speaking mostly of the Ottoman Empire; outside of his treatment of
Venice and Genoa, he concentrates heavily on the eastern Mediterranean.
15 Goldstone (2009: 760). He continues
This replaced a far richer and more complex regime including extensive wheat cultivation
for export, plus commercial plantations to produce sugar, cotton, tropical fruit crops,
and specialty crops (dyes, spices), that—along with imports from China, India, and
Persia—had made the Byzantine and early Ottoman empires the economic dynamo of the
Mediterranean.16 See Kafadar (1987) for a forceful critique of these stereotypes. Let me be clear. Tabak does
not say anything of the sort about the Turks. But his model has more than an echo of older
ideas. See, for example, Detorakes (1986: 271–272), who writes this about the consequences
of the Ottoman conquest of Crete:
The desertion of the cities, now inhabited mostly by Turks, destroyed urban life and hence any
possibility of cultural advance. The Cretan economy fell back on underdeveloped forms of
agricultural and pastoral life. Trade, at least in the first fifty years of the occupation, was essen-
tially nonexistent.
17 This section draws heavily on ch. 4 in Greene (2000).
18 The following account draws heavily on Eldem (1999).
19 On parle de concurrence et on ne fait pas attention que les étrangers dont il s’agit ici sont
principalement les Arméniens, les Grecs et les Juifs ... on n’ignore pas sans dout avec quelle
patience et quelle subtilité ils savent se répandre, dès que l’occasion leur en est offerte, dans
toutes les routes du commerce, pour l’asservir leurs speculations.
(We speak of competition and we don’t pay attention to the fact that the foreigners we are
speaking of are principally the Armenians, the Greeks and the Jews. As soon as the opportunity
is offered to them, they take over, with great patience and subtlety, all the commercial routes
and subjugate them to their needs.) (Perron, Pierre et al., 1793)
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