About the Project
Charting the Ottoman Empire (COE) is a digital humanities project that explores the economic, political, and financial networks of the Ottoman Empire in the 18th and 19th centuries. By digitizing and analyzing fiscal archives, COE sheds new light on the political economy of Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa under Ottoman rule.
Housed at Stanford University’s Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis (CESTA) and developed in collaboration with Bahçeşehir University’s Center for Ottoman Studies (BAU-OTAM), COE brings together an interdisciplinary team of historians, economists, political scientists, digital humanists, archivists, and data scientists from institutions in the US, Turkey, Italy, the UK, and Greece. The project uses advanced digital tools to analyze untapped fiscal records, offering a fresh perspective on wealth, debt, and state power in the Ottoman world.
Mapping Fiscal Networks
At the heart of COE is the Ottoman fiscal codices, a rich but challenging source that documents interconnected financial transactions, credit relationships, and administrative decisions. These records reveal the Empire’s complex economic structures, where individuals, state entities, and financial agents were linked through intricate debt and credit chains.
A key focus of the project is fenn-i siyaqat, an Ottoman accounting technique used to record financial transactions. By decoding and analyzing this script, COE uncovers the bureaucratic practices that shaped economic governance before the Tanzimat reforms.
From Archival Documents to Digital Analysis
COE combines archival research with cutting-edge digital methods, transforming historical records into a structured relational database. This process involves:
- Data extraction from unstructured fiscal records.
- SQL database design to link individuals, debts, and state transactions.
- Network analysis and visualization to map financial and political relationships.
- AI-assisted text processing to classify and analyze Ottoman fiscal terminology.
By structuring data in this way, COE creates new pathways for historical inquiry, enabling scholars to explore how the Ottoman economy functioned in a global context.
Significance and Impact
Between 1750 and 1850, Western Europe and North America underwent major economic transformations, often framed within the “Great Divergence” debate. While much scholarship has focused on comparisons between Europe and China, COE shifts the lens to the Ottoman Empire, providing crucial insights into alternative economic trajectories.
COE seeks to develop a digital platform that will serve as an open-access research tool, fostering collaboration across disciplines and expanding the scope of comparative economic history. As data analysis progresses, the project aims to create a resource that enables scholars to explore Ottoman fiscal networks through interactive visualizations, structured datasets, and analytical tools.
Through a blend of historical inquiry and digital innovation, COE advances our understanding of wealth, debt, and power in the Ottoman world—offering scholars and students a powerful resource to explore the Empire’s economic and administrative history.