Labor history

Abstract

This chapter places the history of late Ottoman labor within critical histories of empire, industrial development, and class/social movements. Departing from earlier perspectives dominant within the field that highlighted the politics of male, industrial, urban workers, it argues that the history of Ottoman labor encompassed a broader segment of the Ottoman population, including artisans, peddlers, female and child outworkers, and enslaved people. Although a substantial majority of those who worked in the late Ottoman world did not call themselves factory workers, they nonetheless experienced the full effects of wage labor, including dispossession, loss of control over means of production, and precarity. Ottoman women and children in particular bore the brunt of economic change through their involvement in seasonal and extremely exploitative sectors. In surveying recent studies of Ottoman labor, the chapter introduces the latest perspectives on Ottoman guilds, industrial survival, and labor unrest. It also discusses the role played by ethnicity and religion in shaping the politics of Ottoman laborers.