UNIVERSITY OF THESSALY
2nd International Conference on Economic and Social History
"Markets" and Politics
Private interests and public authority (18th-20th centuries)
Volos, 10-12 February 2012
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Abstracts
- Onur Yildirim & Seven Ağır Asset Ownership and Legal Change in the 19th c. Istanbul
The form of the ownership of capital assets is crucial to understanding how private interests in using and disposing of property are defined. This paper aims to study how ownership of the capital assets was defined and contested in the early nineteenth-century Istanbul with a special emphasis on its potential implications for different interest groups’ rights to production and management. The study is motivated by the recent work on a particular institution, which provided extensive documentation about the ownership and transfer of capital assets in various trades and crafts during the late eighteenth century. This institution known as gedik, which enabled master craftsmen to control and transfer their rights to workplace, has been primarily studied with a focus on its original rationales (i.e. guild members’ desire to limit outside competition) and its implications for the relations between the foundations (ewqaf) and the guilds (i.e. the guild’s ability to curb rent increases). This study approaches to the question of gedik from a different angle. Examining a large number of contracts that deal with gedik transfers and partitioning (i.e., fragmentation of gedik into multiple shares) located in the court registers from early nineteenth-century Istanbul, we aim to shed light on how the asset ownership in the urban workshop was redefined in the realm of law and thus shaped the limits to the rights of ownership.
