ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the degrees to which Tokat's notables remained key investors in the town's agriculture and industry during the later Tanzimat years. The legal and administrative reforms of the Tanzimat Period restructured the political economy of Ottoman Anatolia laid the groundwork for the provincial arrangements of the Turkish Republic in the early twentieth century. Tokat's climate and geography have guided its human ecology for millenia. The chapter highlights the environmental factors that delimited the scope of Tokat's material culture throughout the ages. It reviews the prominence of stock rearing among sedentary Tokat's agriculturalists and explores it as a basis for large-scale investment operations. The chapter focuses on the tribal migrations into Ottoman lands, and the tensions inherent to the fabrication of their grazing route. The steady population growth of the nineteenth century across the Ottoman state implied ever higher demand. Many different types of Tokatlis invested directly in agriculture, but notables were especially prominent in tenancy and sharecropping arrangements.
