A Historical and Economic Geography of Ottoman Greece: The Southwestern Morea in the 18th Century by Fariba Zarinebaf, John Bennet, Jack L. Davis (review)

Book Reviews 193 Zarinebaf, Fariba, John Bennet, and Jack L. Davis. A Historical and Economic Geography of Ottoman Greece: The Southwestern Morea in the 18th Century, with contributions by Evi Gorogianni, Deborah K. Harlan, Machiel Kiel, Pierre Mackay, John Wallrodt, and Aaron D. Wolpert. Hesperia Supplement no 34. Princeton: The American School of Classical Studies at Athens, 2005. 310 pp., 93 figs., 19 tables, CD-ROM. Paperback $45.00: ISBN 978-0-87661-534-8. This is an innovative book, but its structure may puzzle its readers as it is the fruit of the unexpected cooperation of an Ottomanist historian, Fariba Zarinebaf, and two renowned archaeologists, John Bennet and Jack L. Davis. The title of the book itself is somewhat misleading. Inverting its title and subtitle would make more sense. It is truly a captivating research on the Historical and Economic Geography of Southwestern Morea in the 18th Century Greece. In fact, this publication is part of the larger Pylos Regional Archaeological Project (http://classics.uc.edu/prap/) which intends to study the Pylos area in Western Messenia (covering more or less the eighteenth-century kaza of Anavarin) from the Bronze Age to our time. The central aim is a diachronic and multidisciplinary study of the land settlement and use, that is, of the deep structures whose transformations and mutations are better understood if studied in the very long run, comparing developments in eras that have been separated by many centuries. A number of reports, books, and articles have already been published in this program since the mid-1990s (https://classics.uc.edu/prap/publications.html), and this book intends to cover the study of the historical and economic geography in the modern era, when the Peloponnese was under Ottoman and briefly (1685–1715) Venetian domination. Other archaeological regional study projects in Greece had attempted, at times, the same diachronic research, but this is the first one, of which I know, which actually encouraged archaeologists and Ottoman historians to collaborate to such an extent in the study of modern historical geography and socio-economic history. The book is constituted of four chapters and an equal number of appendices and “concordances,” while the facsimiles of the main source used (TT880, 78-101) and of all colored photos and maps are also provided in a separate CD-ROM. The first chapter, by Fariba Zarinebaf, is a socio-economic history of Morea from its Ottoman conquest to the Greek War of Independence, which has the avowed ambition to be the first comprehensive presentation that brings together all the available Ottoman, Greek, and Western sources and sets the stage for the following chapters. The second chapter is the translation, again by Zarinebaf, of the main archival source used in this publication, the excerpt of the Ottoman cadastral survey (TT880) of all taxable properties in the kaza of Anavarin (present day Pylos). This cadastral survey was prepared by the Ottoman authorities just after the reconquest of Morea. It gives in conjunction with the local kanunname (TK71—also translated) the possibility of an exhaustive analysis of the demographic and agrarian structures in 1716. In effect, chapter three, written by Bennet and Davis, is a 194 JOTSA 2:1 (2015) historical geography of the kaza, and chapter four, written by all three authors, deals with the study of its demographic and the agrarian structures in the eighteenth century. This last chapter is certainly the core of the book. In my view it can serve as a model for the use of the late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century Ottoman cadastral surveys in order to study the local demographic and agrarian structures. The authors have demonstrated beyond a doubt that the careful and multidisciplinary use of this rich archival material can produce excellent maps pertaining to the demographic, agricultural, and productive structures of the Ottoman provinces. Economic and social historians will read and extensively use this chapter, in which the structure and productive characteristics of the çiftliks that dominated the coastal plain of the kaza are studied in detail. The findings reinforce the image of small private estates, cultivated by sharecroppers who seldom owned the means of production (oxen and plows) or their houses but who seemed to...