The History of Consumption in the Ottoman Empire and Turkey

New case studies and theoretical approaches to the study of consumption in the Ottoman Empire and Turkey, from the early modern period to the early Turkish Republic.

This open access title offers a comprehensive narrative that spans more than three centuries, from the mid-seventeenth to the late twentieth century. The History of Consumption in the Ottoman Empire and Turkey critically examines changing patterns of consumption across major political, economic, and cultural transformations.
The volume reframes the Ottoman world as an ‘empire of consumption’, arguing that material culture offers a crucial lens for understanding long-term social, economic, and political change. Moving beyond state-centred approaches, this interdisciplinary collection reconstructs the diverse consumer experiences of ordinary and elite Ottomans alike. Drawing on a wide range of underexplored sources, including grocers’ inventories, court registers, estate records, and multilingual advertising, it connects everyday foodways, urban real estate, and courtly luxury to the emergence of mass media and global commodities such as instant coffee. Challenging models of passive imitation, the book presents the Ottoman Empire and modern Turkey as active participants in global consumer transformations. In doing so, it offers important new perspectives on the history of modernity, material culture, and everyday life in a non-Western context.

The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY 4.0 licence on Bloomsbury Collections. Open access was funded bythe Austrian Science Fund (FWF)