Considering Famine in the Late Nineteenth Century Ottoman Empire : A Comparative Framework and Overview

Abstract

This article analyzes the Ottoman famines of the 1870s – that killed tens of thousands of people in Anatolia due to starvation and disease – from a global comparative perspective. It focuses on two famines in particular that struck the central and eastern provinces of the empire in 1873-75 and 1879-1881 (just following the Russo-Ottoman War of 1877-78), respectively. They were triggered by climatic causes, yet their devastating effects were also a product of the global and domestic economic and political environment of the decade. Local, imperial and global man-made reasons exacerbated the severe impacts of nature and climate. The article addresses these famines as significant traumatic disasters, the memories of which were overshadowed by later catastrophic events in Ottoman history and historiography, and which have been almost invisible in European and global famine historiography of the nineteenth century. It summarizes the political-economic environment of the decade, attempts to investigate Ottoman famines in a global historical context and outline a comparative research agenda for an Ottoman history of famine and empire in the late nineteenth century