Reading and mapping mid-nineteenth century Ottoman tax registers: an early attempt toward building a digital research infrastructure for Ottoman economic and social history

Abstract

This proposed paper would use advanced methods of cluster analysis and multiple correspondence analysis (MCA). It will present some outcomes of a three-year research project An Introduction to the Occupational History of Turkey via New Methods and New Approaches (1840-1940), funded by the Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey (TUBITAK) (Nr. 112K271), which will be completed in September 2015. Kabadayi is the principal investigator and Güvenç is the advisor of this project. Especially in recent years, MCA has gained popularity among social scientists, but to the best of our knowledge, it has not yet been used in economic or social history in the international literature in English. We will present the preliminary results of our application of MCA to the 1845 Ottoman tax registers (temettuat) focusing on Bursa. For this city, we have been able to locate 126 of the 145 neighbourhoods listed in the records. 7,914 individuals were recorded. 5,662 identified as household heads and 2,252 not. An important aspect of this work involves identifying patterns connected to ethnoreligious affiliations.