Poverty, law and labour in the Ottoman Empire

Abstract

This chapter provides an overview of the history of poverty and charity in the Ottoman Empire, focusing in particular on the way understandings of poverty were shaped through Islamic law, and argues that focusing on extraction of labour offers new insights into the history of poverty in the early modern Ottoman Empire. As a social fact in the Durkheimian sense, charity was probably one of the most pervasive phenomena in the Ottoman Empire as virtually everybody in the imperial realms could be touched by it, as a recipient or donor. The uneducated blind and disabled who could rely on familial support or some kind of professional asset resorted commonly to mendicancy: urban scenes from the Ottoman Empire, depicted by local miniaturists, European painters and travellers, are replete with disabled and amputated beggars. If being poor extended certain rights to some extent within the Ottoman Empire, it most certainly also produced exclusion, radical solutions and vulnerability to different forms of exploitation.