A 16th-century Ottoman tax official’s ledger is helping researchers map how market demand reshaped farming across the Eastern Mediterranean. Most accounts of pre-industrial agricultural development focus on Western Europe, leaving the Balkans, Anatolia, and the Levant as a blank spot in the story of why some regions grew rich while others did not. This project fills that gap by digitising thousands of entries from Ottoman tax registers to build the first comprehensive picture of what farmers grew, where, and how those patterns shifted during a 16th-century population boom. The researchers then use quantitative analysis and maps to test whether urban markets or the agricultural sector itself drove long-run change. If successful, the project will produce a unified, non-Eurocentric framework for understanding agricultural transformation—one that could inform contemporary debates about how to make farming sustainable while meeting rising food demand. The work is primarily fundamental historical research, but its insights into how markets, geography, and policy shaped pre-industrial farming could help modern planners think more carefully about the long-term consequences of agricultural choices.
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AGRDEMAND seeks to understand determinants of long-run agricultural change and its relation to wider economic progress. It focuses on the pre-industrial Eastern Mediterranean, a region that has been conspicuously absent from the discussions around global divergence in agricultural development. Firstly, using a large original dataset from Ottoman tax registers, the study provides the first comprehensive picture of various regional agricultural production systems in the Balkans, Anatolia, and the Levant, and examines how these evolved during a period of demographic expansion in the 16th century. Secondly, through quantitative and comparative analysis, the study explores the role of market forces in shaping the geography and trajectory of pre-industrial agriculture. The project also produces maps of key indicators and provides a compelling visual representation of the relationships between these variables. The study breaks new ground in quantitatively investigating the impact of market forces beyond core Europe for the first time. Doing so, it addresses two vital aspects of global divergence. Was pre-industrial growth driven by the agricultural sector or urban economies and trade? Can a unified, dynamic, and non-Eurocentric framework explain agricultural change and its uneven diffusion both in and outside Europe? The interdisciplinary research utilizes quantitative methods and Geographical Information Systems while integrating historical geography to study pre-industrial agricultural economies. It yields new empirical evidence and high-quality knowledge in an understudied field, also bolstering EU's and UK's social science with unique expertise. By exploring the historical drivers of agricultural innovation and change, AGRDEMAND integrates historical perspectives into contemporary discussions about transforming agriculture into a sustainable sector that can meet rising food demand and enriches both theory and policy considerations.
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