Cities of rice: risiculture and environmental change in the Early Modern Ottoman Balkans

Abstract

The evolution of a global market for rice is associated with the rise of capitalism. However, the expansion of rice farming in the Ottoman state during the Early Modern Period has not been accounted for in the formation of this global market, nor have its environmental effects in the Ottoman Eastern Mediterranean been explored. This article traces the history of rice production in the Ottoman Balkans in the 15th through 17th centuries. Focusing on the case of rice agriculture in the city of Filibe (Plovdiv, present-day Bulgaria), it traces the causes and implications, both environmental and economic, of the new waterscapes that arose in this region with the spread of rice agriculture. It argues that the appearance of these new waterscapes was connected to a process of agricultural change throughout the region, new forms of control over land and in some instances the introduction of wage labour. Of particular interest is a government order of 1583 that repeats a complaint from Filibe’s elite residents about the city’s bad air and the prevalence there of fevers, which the residents explicitly blamed on the local rice fields. The article examines how responses to rice agriculture were part of an emerging awareness in the Early Modern period of the relationship between economic activity and environmental change. It also frames local environmental change within a global economic transformation.