Int. J. Middle East Stud. 40 (2008), 529531.

Printed in the United States of America

NO TES AND CO M M ENTS

A N IN T R O D U C T IO N T O T H E R E S E A R C H O F FA R U K TA B A K , S O C IO L O G IS T

ARIEL SALZMANN
doi:10.1017/S0020743808081300

Faruk Tabak, who died of complications following a stroke on 15 February 2008 at age fifty-four, passed his youth in central Anatolia. A childhood in industrial Eskisehirwhere, he once told me, the Porsuk Rivers color varied with the days textile-dye batchand college winters in smogenveloped Ankara made him (a man of the north) dream of the pristine landscapes and bright tableaus of Turkeys Mediterranean shores. Trained as an architect and later as a planner at the Middle East Technical University, Tabak charted the currents of modern hegemony, capitalism, ecology, and the spatial dispersion of populations through the deep waters of the Mediterraneans past. Our paths first crossed at Binghamton University, after Turkeys third coup d tat (1980) stifled e political and intellectual life in the country and drove many into exile. Tabaks interdisciplinary spirit found an accommodating home in the graduate program of the sociology department. From 1981 until 2000, first as a PhD student and later as a researcher, he collaborated on the grand projects of the Fernand Braudel Center, where he specialized in issues of agrarian sociology and long-term economic change in the Mediterranean and Middle East.1 Our experiences inside and outside the Ottoman archives in the 1980s, as well as his generosity, gentleness, and hospitality in Turkey and in the United States, solidified strong intellectual and affective ties between the social scientist and this historian. It came as no surprise to me that a cosmopolitan scholar and a lover of French cinema and Ottoman cuisine would become the first to hold the chair in modern Turkish studies at Georgetown University, which had been established in honor of Nes hi Erteg n, the great impresario of African American music. At Georgetown, he brought u u macrosociological approaches to his teaching and writing as a faculty member of the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service, where he completed two important compilations. The first, Informalization: Process and Structure (2000) (coedited with Michaeline Crichlow), focused on the rise of nonregulated forms of labor, and the second, Allies as Rivals: The U.S., Europe, and Japan in a Changing World-System (2005), published the proceedings of a conference that he organized on the political economy of the new world order. Despite his strong affinities for the world-systems ecole, Tabak did not hesitate to put its most cherished assumptions to the test. Was the large commercial estate [ciftlik] the harbinger of capitalist relations of productions in the Ottoman Empire or the onset of the second serfdom? was the question addressed by Landholding and Commercial Agriculture in the Middle East (1991), a collection of essays by leading historians that he edited with Ca lar Keyder. Although g it provided no definitive answer, the book did demonstrate the great value of cross-disciplinary deliberations in moving the research agenda forward. His own precocious contributions included Local Merchants in the Peripheral Areas of the Empire: The Fertile Crescent during the Long Nineteenth Century (Review [1988]: 179214), which questioned the impact of incorporation on internal trade linkages and market systems in the 19th-century Mashriq, and Ars longa, vita brevis? A Geohistorical Perspective on Pax Mongolica (Review [1996]: 2348), which
2008 Cambridge University Press 0020-7438/08 $12.00

530 Notes and Comments

emphasized the continuity of the Islamic green revolution through the later Middle Ages. He challenged the prevalent Eurocentrism of historical sociology. Tabaks last years at Georgetown were consumed by the completion of a prodigious analytical and descriptive study that will be read and reread by sociologists and historians for many decades to come. The Waning of the Mediterranean, 15501870: A Geohistorical Approach (2008) transformed a dissertation on Ottoman agriculture into a monumental essay on ecological and economic change in the Mediterranean basin before the Industrial Revolution. In it, Tabak does not simply provide an epilogue to Braudels seminal study of the Mediterranean market at its apogee. Rather, while adopting some of the Annales schools conceits, including the notion of multiple temporalities, he entirely resituates and reinterprets the causal mechanisms affecting the profound and repeated shifts in habitation, cultivation, and trade within the larger Mediterranean basin. Employing a more capacious framework, which begins with the first blasts of the Little Ice Age in the late medieval period and ends only with the Victorian age, he explores a period of sweeping and dramatic structural and environmental change when colder, wetter climates transformed the agrarian landscape and a succession of commercial hegemons made and unmade the Mediterraneans linkages with global markets. Tabaks reformulation of Mediterranean economic history involves several surprising role reversals. Instead of the traditional clash of territorial empires saga (and its clash of civilizations leitmotif), Tabak foregrounds the role of bourgeois seaborne cities. Venice, Genoa, and then Amsterdam are the switches in global economic networks that converge in and then diverge from the inner sea. The rivalry of Genoa, the avatar of the Atlantic system, and the Venetian Republic, the hinge of the MediterraneanIndian Ocean trade, established what Tabak calls the tempo of change in the first part of his story. A radical reordering occurred, he relates, partially as a result of the Italian capitalists, who shifted their commercial investments northward even as the Mediterranean market overall gradually ceded its control over commodity and currency markets to Amsterdam in the 17th century. Despite bourgeois flight, the 17th-century crisis, and the powerful undertow of the Little Ice Age, which scattered settlements and upended industry, Mediterranean peasants and artisans never ceased to adapt to new conditions. The environment, which nonetheless rebounded over the longue dur e in response to climate change, sought its e own revenge for deforestation and abuse. Densely packed with facts, Tabaks comparisons span the length and breadth of the Mashriq and Maghrib, the Midi and Mezzogiorno. The Waning of the Mediterranean seamlessly integrates this world in a manner that eluded both Annales scholars and their recent critics. Instead of the cultural particularism and regionalism propounded by Braudel and more recently Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell in The Corrupting Sea: A Study of Mediterranean History (2000), Tabak describes a pulsating unit that, despite some regional variation caused by the arrival of new crops or proximity/distance to other markets (such as the Atlantic), responded with great uniformity to the dominant rhythms of temporalities and socioeconomic processes. Novel, too, is the manner in which he incorporates a half century of research on agriculture, manufacturing, money, and land use, especially from Turkish-language sources. The rigor of argumentation and weight of evidence leave no way to avoid his conclusion: the Little Ice Age took no prisoners and exempted no culture from its ravages. Rivers, from the Guadalquivir in Andalusia to the Po in Italy to the Meander in Asia Minor, overflowed their banks; both Sicilian and Syrian peasantries retreated from malarial coastlines toward the hills. Cereal crops traveled northward toward the Baltic and Black Sea while the Mediterranean exported to the Americas its agricultural specialties, such as sugar and cotton, along with the slave labor of the Plantation Complex. Nevertheless, waning should not be considered synonymous with decline. Farmers who sought higher altitudes revived the arboreal economy of olive trees, adding vines and fodder cereals, and the Columbian Exchange brought intercropping. Cultivation of maize, string beans, lima squash, and potatoes, as well as more commercial applications, such as tobacco and animal husbandry, helped to prevent soil erosion at higher altitudes.

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For some, the Waning of the Mediterraneans revelations may actually prove unsettling because they demonstrate how many of the phenomena that we Middle East specialists have been trained to view in isolation or as regional peculiarities are anything but. The downturn in urban industry was not the fault of irrational Eastern state policy or traditional discrimination against minority producers. Rather, it was part of a general shift in the pattern of manufacturing toward new draperies and mixed-cotton cloth (fustians) that forced proud citiesfrom Ankara to Amsterdam, Safed to Veniceto cede their wealth to smaller towns and the countryside (pp. 15760). The flexibility of property arrangementswith names such as mezraa, grange, or mas (pp. 27679) permitted adjustment to changing market and climatic conditions and helps us understand that the Ottoman ciftliks. . . . [are not] poor replicas of the second serfdom but . . . a manifestation of the basic ecological and economic traits of the Mediterranean landscape during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (p. 227). Above all, we learn that the seemingly static regions and depopulated valleys that greeted travelers from the north were not evidence of sloth or poor government but actually of the triumph of new agricultural techniques that allowed the peasantry from Lebanon to Lombardy to survive and prosper away from precarious coastal areas. Examples like these highlight how Tabaks revision of the standard narrative of economic decline may well transform the historic narrative of early modernity. For those who have argued for such a reappraisal of the Middle Easts past, he has furnished us with a material and macrosociological framework for the analysis of regional trends as well as new insights into socioorganizational change. If the late medieval epoch of imperialist wheat witnessed the rise of territorial states, it is little wonder that during the Mediterranean grain markets heyday, at a time when Ottoman producers contributed nearly a quarter of the total cereals in circulation, the Ottoman state apparatus wielded considerable infrastructural power, which it used to resettle populations (s rg n, senlendirme) in lowland areas of the Balkans (pp. 108, 12324). As climate worsened in u u the late 16th and 17th centuries, Ottoman peasantries retreated to relatively inaccessible (from the perspective of the timariot and tax collectors) hillside settlements; the central state then devolved its duties on local agents and tax farmers. A new wave of state centralization followed on the heels of climate change, signaled by attempts to settle pastoralists, the reappearance of ciftliks, and the rise of entrepreneurial gentry such as Ahmad Jezzar Pasha in Sidon and Mehmet Ali Pasha of Egypt. The modern age was capped by climate change and the multiplier effect on grain markets of the British Empires repeal of the Corn Laws (1846), which also provided the stimulus for Tanzimat reforms, including the Land Code of 1858. How many of Tabaks brilliant observations and their correlations in institutional and political history will actually rewrite the Middle Easts past will now be left to other scholars to determine. Knowing him, he would not have wished otherwise. In his last work he repeatedly asked colleagues to return to the archives to take up questions pertaining to the material underpinning of the modern world, questions that many have abandoned with the cultural turn. He urged European and Middle Eastern specialists to consider whether we have grown far too complacent with our allotted corners of the Mediterranean, having forgotten that we owe our frameworks of analysis not only to cherished disciplines and schools but also to an historical geography that is itself the legacy of colonialism and blinkered nationalisms. Tabaks writings will continue to teach us about the past and its connection with the present, but his death deprives Middle Eastern scholarship of one of its most uncompromising commentators and sage interlocutors.

NOTE
1 For a comprehensive bibliography of Faruk Tabaks scholarly writings, see Ravi Palat, Faruk TabakA Tribute, New Perspectives on Turkey 38 (2008): 1315.