The everyday life of Istanbul and its artisans, 1808--1839

This dissertation explores artisans of Istanbul during the reign of Mahmud II (1808-1839). It examines artisans' activities, relations, and conflicts within a specific historical context and shows how artisans were able to change, restructure, and [re] adapt themselves to their new conditions. It focuses on daily practices of artisans to defy the argument that craft guilds had rigid and centrally controlled structures. This dissertation also asserts that artisans were not hapless victims of the state regulations and external factors. It emphasizes the internal needs of the artisans and of various other urban actors and challenges the language of power and its supposed permeation in every aspect of human relations to argue that the state and its institutions did not produce changes from above. At the same time, however, this dissertation does not ignore the role of institutional changes of the time.;Since modern state practices, such as direct taxation and censuses, became visible in the nineteenth century, this dissertation acknowledges the role of institutional changes as long as they were related to artisans. It emphasizes the activities of two particular institutions, the Ministry of the Imperial Pious Foundations and the Ministry of the Marketplace to suggest that the different yet complex relationships between the state and society resulted in centralization of the nineteenth century. Accordingly, it aims to demonstrate how urban economies provided new avenues for private property development, which occurred along with the increasing standardization, uniformity, and bureaucratization as part of the process of societal change.;Studying artisan-janissary relations is important for the identification of artisans. In addition to identifying artisans through their relationship with the janissaries, this dissertation also investigates guild wardens, their social and economic activities and then examines guild wardens' election and appointment procedure to understand the level of the guild autonomy during the period under study. In general, this dissertation contends that the guild was permeable and changeable despite the fact that guild members tended to protect their monopolistic rights and as a result, their autonomous spaces. This dissertation also focuses on the artisan's ambiguous situation, in which artisans worked both with and without a monopoly. Thus, it shows how an open economy could co-exist with a monopolistic one as well as an opposition between the two was an inevitable outcome of their daily relations and activities.