Slavery and Household Formation in Ottoman Aleppo, 1640-1700
Abstract Focusing on a seventeenth-century Syrian city, this study examines the practice of slavery as a strategy for building elite households in the Ottoman Empire. After an overview of the slave trade and the social and political conditions which sustained it, it constructs a demographic profile of the slaves and slaveholders and concludes with case studies of how slaves were integrated into selected military-administrative, merchant and ulama families. Valued as servants, soldiers, companions, and business agents, slaves were integrated to a wide range of elite households, in some cases providing critical human resources for the households’ continuity.
Capital Formation in the Ottoman Empire
The economic system of the Ottoman Empire and its basic economic principles derived from a traditional view of state and society which had prevailed since antiquity in the empires of the Near East. This theory, since it determined the attitude and policy of the administrators, was of considerable practical importance.
Labor Partnerships in Early Islamic Law
The institution of partnership was one of the chief means in the medieval Islamic world enabling merchants and others to combine their resources and skills for investment in commercial undertakings. According to the various schools of Islamic law, resources could take the form either of a cash investment 1) or of goods and merchandise 2), and skills, of commercial know-how and/or of a particular skill on the part of one or all of the partners in some type of trade or craft. In terms of each party's contribution to the common venture, partnerships fell in several categories. It could be a complete partnership, that is, one in which all partners contributed both capital and services; it could be an arrangement like the commenda (Arabic: muIddraba, muqdrada, qird) 3) in which one party supplied the capital and the other the services and, in Malikite and Hanifite law, it could take the form of a labor partnership, that is, one in which the only investment on the part of all its members was their skill or labor. In this last category of partnership, the capital itself consisted solely or primarily of the labor of the partners.