ABSTRACT
Vast numbers of Ottoman subjects worked in either subsistence or commercial textile production, drawing on the ready availability of cotton, wool, silk and flax to make goods both for their own use and for the market. There is little doubt that most rural dwellers spun, wove or embroidered and this likely also was true of urban families. The number of persons spinning and weaving for personal consumption declined with the rise of imported textiles after 1800 (see below) while market production likely increased during this same period. A few crude statistics give some notion of the importance of commercially made textiles in the overall economy at the very end of the Ottoman period. On the eve of the First World War, workers making textiles for the marketplace accounted for about one-half of the enumerated labour force in the total manufacturing sector. 1 Manufacturing overall contributed about 10 per cent of 'national income' while agriculture, according to these very incomplete surveys, reportedly contributed more than 50 per cent. 2 This former figure surely is a gross underreporting since the survey missed many urban locations of manufacture and most of the rural-based industry.
