AG36 - Les ressources naturelles et l’histoire du travail en méditerranée sous domination ottomane et vénitienne à l’époque moderne (xvi e -xviii e s.)

The workshop presents different stakes of undertaking a new labour history in the Mediterranean area shared between the Ottoman and Venetian empires, along the dār al-islām’s Western confines. By studying raw materials (fish and seafood, salt, bitumen), the participants detect and consider as exhaustively as possible archival records that are rich, albeit sometimes extremely dense and taciturn. Our main objective is to commit to a social and economic history between two imperial spheres around the Adriatic Sea, knowing that commercial dynamics in place widen the geography under question to the Aegean, Maghrebi coasts of the Ottoman Empire and to the Eastern Mediterranean more generally. Our interest in natural resources of which the strategic importance and value are strongly invested by the respective states under review allow us to tackle at once labour relations, trade, logics of logistics and supply, state’s grip on the market, as well as competition and partnership between the two imperial sides. The Republic of Ragusa (tributary state of the Ottoman Empire, that also is in the Venetian zone of influence), as a key actor of Mediterranean trade, was the main institutional intermediary between the two empires who converging and antagonistic interests were underlined by several variables such as the fixing of prices, customs duties, cost of labour and different needs expressed for the provisioning of foodstuffs and nonedible staples.

Responsable: Hayri Gökşin Özkoray, Aix-Marseille Université, TELEMMe, France

The Venetian politics of salt is a well-known chapter in the history of the Adriatic. Therefore, this presentation aims at shifting the traditional focus on capital-cities to examine how the transformations due to the rapid expansion of the Ottoman Empire triggered decades of salt wars on the new borders of the South-Western Balkans. The confrontation of different Venetian and Ottoman sources, among which the archives of Dubrovnik and Kotor in Southern Dalmatia, enables us to shed light on the local dimensions of the larger imperial trade competition between Venice and Istanbul at the turning point between the 15th and 16th centuries.

This paper’s objective is to understand how the development of halieutic exploitation was conceived in the Dalmatian coast throughout the 17th and the 18th centuries. During this period, these territories were amongst the last Venetian possessions in the region and formed a frontier zone with the Republic of Ragusa and the Ottoman Empire.

The bitumen mines of Selenicë (in Southern Albania) came under Ottoman control in the 15th century. In activity since ancient times, these mines had guarded the secret of a Byzantine and Venetian know-how that was later inherited by the Ottomans. Archival documents hailing from the Porte’s chancery inform us mainly on the strategic importance attributed to supplying Istanbul and Anatolia with bitumen, as well as apropos of military and diplomatic incidents between Ottomans and Venetians (alternately in peace and war time) related to bitumen trade in the Adriatic and the rest of the Mediterranean. The organization of the workforce mobilized and displaced populations for the sake of extracting bitumen on an uninterrupted basis also come along frequently in these administrative sources. The workforce was organized and incentivized in different manners: fiscal exemptions for attracting free peasants, slave purchases, use of common law convicts. Furthermore, the mine management also sheds light on different jurisdictions: governors, kadis, tax-farmers, private investors.