Ottoman Tax Registers as a Source for Labor Relations in Ottoman Bursa

Abstract Recently, Ottoman labor history and historiography has been moving beyond the “classical” labor history period of the nineteenth and twentieth century, shifting attention from mere wage work to other types of labor relations including unfree labor. Often focusing on one particular region, changes in work and labor relations are being followed over longer period of time. This article wants to contribute to this historiography by discussing tax registers as a possible source to reconstruct labor relations. It takes the province of Bursa, its towns and surrounding villages in the late fifteenth and sixteenth century as a case study to reconstruct labor relations, detect shifts over time and to try to explain these changes within the socio- and economic context of Bursa.