ABSTRACT
This chapter examines two typical instances, political crises and epidemics, when these instruments were recurrently employed to restate and secure public order in the city. Labour migration was a widespread phenomenon in pre-modern societies as a reaction to the general scarcity of labour in their economies. In the Ottoman context, migration was a complex phenomenon, involving at times, different groups of migrants, moving for different reasons from different regions of the empire. Medical progress made more participative measures possible and necessary without, however, rendering obsolete the radical solutions employed in earlier times. At the basis of the phenomenon of labour migration to Istanbul were economic mechanisms that are comparable to those found in pre-industrial Europe. When the Ottoman state in the course of reforms nominally left the framework of ihtisab, this did not mean that the contents of the 'good order', envisioned by urban governance, necessarily also changed fundamentally.
