Migration and migrant networks in Ottoman İstanbul

Beginning with the early years of Ottoman rule in the city, the ruling elite struggled to resettle Constantinople, forcing large numbers of people – particularly artisans and merchants – from the rest of the Ottoman Empire to migrate and settle in the new capital (İnalcık Reference İnalcık2019, 17–23). As the imperial governments succeeded in re-establishing the capital’s provisional networks and its safety in the following decades, such enforcement became gradually redundant. Throughout the early modern era, the capital became a major destination for the influx of migrants, particularly from various parts of Anatolia, pushed by economic inequalities, environmental catastrophes, wars, or rebellions. As a result, as Faroqhi highlights, the Ottoman governments actively tried to “stem the flow” of immigrants into the capital rather than encouraging it (Faroqhi Reference Faroqhi1998, 163–164).

The Ottoman state’s anxiety towards the presence of immigrants (especially undocumented ones) in the capital notably increased at times when political, economic, or social crises were blamed on immigrants, leading to episodic attempts to curtail such flows (Faroqhi Reference Faroqhi2014, 215; Morita Reference Morita2016, 59). In the seventeenth and particularly the eighteenth centuries, the Ottoman state elites took stricter and more systematic measures against migration as the number of migrants to İstanbul increased dramatically and as their presence became more visible, especially throughout the rebellions in the city. Such measures primarily targeted, but were not limited to, bachelor (bekar) men, i.e. those migrants who did not live with their families and mainly stayed in temporary lodgings (e.g. bachelor inns/rooms or their workplaces). They were expelled from the city if they could not be registered with a kefil (guarantor) during inspections (Aktepe Reference Aktepe1958; Özkaya Reference Özkaya1981).

As for the residential populations, the government left the initiative to control migration to the neighborhoods, assuming that the migrants accepted by the local populations should not be as dangerous. Following a rebellion in 1740, for example, the government ordered all migrants in residential neighborhoods to be detected and recorded by the respective imams. Although those who came in the last three to four years were expelled eventually, such anxiety towards the recent immigrants in a residential neighborhood seems to be incidental. In another inspection in 1745, the government allowed all detected migrants to stay in their place, regardless of when they came and settled, treating them as “potential” residents, also confirming the double function of the role of the neighborhood residents and imams, being to watch these immigrants and integrate them into the neighborhood.Footnote ⁴

Restrictive policies over immigrants, thus, remained primarily focused on the bachelors throughout the long nineteenth century. By the reign of Selim III (r. 1789–1807), the ruling elites had firm views on the relationality between what they saw as social disorder, symptomized by provisional, moral, political, and economic crises, and the unregulated arrival and presence of bachelor immigrants in the capital (Başaran Reference Başaran2014, 55–56). The consolidation of this perceived connection pushed the Ottoman elites to take more established or institutional measures to regulate immigration to İstanbul and to watch bachelors’ movements within the city in the following decades.

These measures had to be in harmony with the capital’s increasing need for labor, especially as İstanbul became increasingly entangled with capitalism as a major port city and a hub of industrial–commercial investments in the mid-nineteenth century. In this period, the political, economic, and urban reforms and transformations, along with the increasing foreign interest in investing in the city, and the conditions created by episodes such as the Crimean War or urban fires, all prompted a continuous demand for migrant labor in the capital (Clay Reference Clay1998, 5). Such demand, coupled with the inflow of refugees in the following decades, also translated into a remarkable increase in the number of migrants and their eventual domination of the city’s demography throughout the second half of the nineteenth century, as documented by population surveys (Karpat Reference Karpat1985, 103–105).

Recent scholarship has primarily focused on the occupational networks and integration of immigrants, thanks to the increasing availability of survey registers, which were products of population controls and rich in occupational data. They have implicitly or explicitly utilized the network perspective for this purpose, concentrating on networks based on belonging to a shared hometown. According to this perspective, when the first wave of migrants arrives without any social or economic ties to hold on to in order to maintain themselves, the cost of living in a big city is at the highest level. Gradually, as these migrants establish themselves, the risks and the costs for their fellows from the same place decrease. Thanks to their access to knowledge, capital, and resources (including employment and housing) through these ties, moving to the big city and surviving there become less risky. More importantly, as new migrants can find jobs and housing more easily, economic–social expectations for a better life increase, further encouraging migration. As a result, migrating to a big city becomes an organic part of household economies in rural areas (Massey Reference Massey, Hirschman, Kasinitz and DeWind1999, 44).

Following this framework, recent studies on late Ottoman migrants in İstanbul have demonstrated the significance of chain migration and regional networks in the arrival and integration of migrants based on evidence extracted from surveys or court registers. They focused on regional belonging as a tie that connected immigrants with their fellows in the city, be they their employers, fellow workers, or fellow immigrants-cum-residents from the same place. These studies have successfully challenged the conventional premise of an ethno-religious division of labor in urban economies, one that assigned a deterministic (and causal) connection between ethno-religious differences and occupational differentiation. Without denying the occasional dominance of certain ethno-religious communities in different urban crafts, they shifted the emphasis to the “multiplicity of social bonds and allegiances,” particularly to the hometown networks that at times cut across ethno-religious affiliations (Kırlı Reference Kırlı2001, 138; see also Kırlı Reference Kırlı and Bilgin2015, 75). Examples that point to the significance of these networks on various crafts in İstanbul abound, particularly for the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: whereas Albanians dominated among bath attendants and gardeners and the Rumelian Orthodox-Christians among grocers, Muslim and Armenian workers from Eastern Anatolia largely dominated among the bakers and millers, port workers, and peddlers (see Başaran Reference Başaran2014; Başaran and Kırlı Reference Başaran, Kırlı and Faroqhi2015; Behar Reference Behar2003; Ergin Reference Ergin2011; Faroqhi Reference Faroqhi1998; Kırlı Reference Kırlı2001).

One strikingly shared characteristic of these studies is that they largely focus on occupations that did not require particular artisanal training. This is not surprising, considering that the labor force in İstanbul, at least until the mid-nineteenth century, largely consisted of shopkeepers and their employees in small-scale shops: Most skilled masters worked in their shops alone or with a few employees, as Kırlı’s study depicted in detail (Kırlı Reference Kırlı2001, 128). That is why migrant networks were mainly shaped through bachelor migrants who migrated in massive numbers in response to the demand for labor, particularly in baths, gardens, bakeries and mills, streets, and docks of the city, where large numbers of seasonal, low-wage workers were employed.

In most cases, such demand did not require specific artisanal skills, technical background, or, at times, even guild membership (due to the dominance of informal labor relations). Indeed, this characteristic also made it much easier for newcoming migrants to enter these trades mostly through personal connections, facilitating their rapid integration into the city’s economic networks (Behar Reference Behar2003, 115–118). Occupational identity was gained chiefly through, and thanks to, chain migration that connected hometowns with destinations. It was through these networks, in other words, that most migrants gained their occupational belonging and skills after they arrived in İstanbul (Başaran and Kırlı Reference Başaran, Kırlı and Faroqhi2015, 270). In effect, such ability also encouraged them (or pulled them) to migrate into the city, as their confidence in surviving in the city likely shaped their decision to relocate as an optional allocation of the household’s labor power in the rural areas. Eventually, these networks perpetuated the domination of specific groups of migrants within specific crafts. They also determined migrants’ settlements, whether in the bachelor inns or residential communities, as we see in the case of the neighborhood of Kasap İlyas (Behar Reference Behar2003, 111).

Be they bachelors or residents, migrants’ experiences and relations in the city were not limited to their occupational and hometown connections, as they could also develop ties that transcended them, particularly at their places of work and accommodation. However, since analyses on the neighborhood (mahalle) or workplace level have not been developed in this scholarship, how people from diverse regional or occupational backgrounds connected at these sites and how these connections shaped their life courses could not be elaborated. In particular, despite a focus on occupational affiliations, how work and production relations and their transformations – a crucial process in the modern era – impacted migration processes and migrants’ networks, settlements, and everyday experiences could not be explored sufficiently. Such explorations are also essential to understanding how these networks were formed and perpetuated at the workplaces and neighborhoods and how these networks connected, intersected, and overlapped.

In the rest of this article, I will focus on a case that involved artisanal groups whose occupations demanded a certain level of training and experience, making it relatively difficult for a new migrant to enter and integrate. These groups were shipbuilding workers, consisting primarily of carpenters (marangoz), hole-borers (burgucu), and caulkers (kalafatçı), as well as some other craftsmen who produced materials related to shipbuilding. The interconnected relations between the Imperial Arsenal, where many of them worked, and the Seyyid Ali Çelebi neighborhood, where many lived, will help us to see the variations regarding the operation of the regional networks in different contexts and to understand how these networks entangled with, crosscut, and were complicated by other networks formed through workplaces or neighborhoods.

Seyyid Ali Çelebi and the Imperial Arsenal in mid-nineteenth-century population registers

Located near the Imperial Arsenal, the Seyyid Ali Çelebi neighborhood was part of the Kasımpaşa quarter (kol), which consisted of twenty-nine neighborhoods (twenty-eight Muslim, one Armenian) according to the population registers prepared in the mid-1840s.Footnote ⁵ The neighborhood, with a dominance of carpenters and caulkers, well suits our purpose of demonstrating the complicated relationship between the Arsenal and the neighborhoods and the significance of these relationships in migration processes. In this survey, in harmony with the Ottoman census efforts of the mid-nineteenth century, only male residents and bachelors were counted. Unlike most other registers of the period, however, they contain valuable information regarding the birthplaces of residents and non-residents and their movements within, to, and from the city. Such distinction points to the decades-long concern of Ottoman administrators to control migrants and migrations into the city, as outlined above.

Before delving into the register of this residential neighborhood, a reminder is necessary to acknowledge the problematic nature of following the official differentiation in Ottoman state sources: Although the official documents prompt us to isolate the “residents” (yerli) from the non-residents (yabancı) or “bachelors” (bekar) due to the temporary character of the latter, the continuous labor demand for low-wage seasonal migrants secured the regular employment of many “temporary” migrants in the city. This is especially important in understanding the impacts of migration and migrants on the urban history of İstanbul. Many bachelors, living at rooms/inns, or at times within residential communities, spent long years working in the city, thus becoming as integral to the city’s everyday life as its residents (see Hamadeh Reference Hamadeh2013, Reference Hamadeh2017). Although they did not live with their families, many brought along their male family members, sharing their rooms with them. Many of the “residents,” on the other hand, were born elsewhere and settled in residential communities by forming or bringing in families. In other words, whereas the term “bachelor” does not necessarily entail only the “temporary migrants” without family members, the term “resident” does not exclude immigrants either, as we will see below in the example of the Seyyid Ali Çelebi neighborhood.

Still, such official differentiation is vital to comprehend how these bachelor labor migrants could be officially integrated into the city’s residential neighborhoods. In the Ottoman urban context, neighborhoods were politically entrusted zones that should or were assumed to harbor only those who must have the consent of neighborhood people and their imams to settle in the neighborhood as residents. Neighborhoods and neighborhood relations were central to integrating bachelors into residential populations in the city, especially in the context of Ottoman efforts to ensure the capital’s safety against the perceived threats emanating from migration while addressing labor shortages at the same time.Footnote ⁶

The register I use was compiled as part of the Ottoman population surveys in 1844/1845 (h. 1260) and was updated for the next twelve years when a new register was prepared.Footnote ⁷ The Seyyid Ali Çelebi neighborhood in our register enlists 553 males of all ages, all Muslim, who were recorded as the müteehhil (lit. married, hereafter, resident) subjects. Of these individuals, 341 were registered with an occupation. The occupational profile of these individuals points to the dominance of regular shipbuilding workers (no matter whether they were affiliated with the Arsenal or not) in the neighborhood: carpenters, hole-borers, and caulkers, together with architects (mimar), accounted for 117 men, around one-third of all men with available occupational data. One should also include those who were employed, if not regularly, in the production of materials used in ships, including the ropemakers (ipçi), pulley makers (makaracı), and box makers (kutucu), as well as those who were branded as retired/dismissed soldiers, many of whom were affiliated with the navy (see Table 1).Footnote ⁸

Table 1.

Occupational distribution in the Seyyid Ali Çelebi neighborhood

Source: Based on BOA.NFS.d.164.

Family connections were crucial for shaping the occupational profile of many residents in the neighborhood. According to the 1844 register, at least sixteen carpenters, eight caulkers, eight pulley makers, and six ropemakers shared the same occupational identity with another within their families. The profiles of some large families were characterized by the maritime occupations of their members. One of these, for example, had two carpenters, two box makers, and one ropemaker, whereas another had one caulker, two carpenters, and one block maker. In a more specific and striking example, Mustafa bin Ahmed, the mukhtar of the neighborhood, was a fifty-five-year-old pulley maker with three sons – one was a carpenter in the Imperial Arsenal and the other two were also pulley makers. The neighborhood’s vice-mukhtar (muhtar-ı sani) was also a pulley maker whose two sons followed the occupational course of their father.Footnote ⁹

Connections with shipbuilding and the navy were, thus, central to the occupational profile of the neighborhood residents in this period. Considering the proximity of the neighborhood to the Arsenal, such dominance of shipbuilding and related crafts in the neighborhood’s occupational profile may not be surprising. However, proximity alone does not explain such dominance. The Kasımpaşa quarter also housed large numbers of mills, bakeries, and tanneries in this period, and it was also close to the city’s main port in Galata, where large numbers of port workers and seafarers worked. Workers employed in these sectors are either missing or represented marginally among the neighborhood’s residents recorded in the register. Many of them were often accommodated in bachelor inns rather than in residential neighborhoods.Footnote ¹⁰ A more specific factor that explains the dominance of such shipbuilding crafts in this neighborhood is the skilled characteristic of the residents’ occupations and the specific production relations in the workplace they shared: the Imperial Arsenal.

Indeed, highlighting the decisiveness of workplace networks in the neighborhood, the register affiliates ninety-eight individuals directly with the Imperial Arsenal. The overwhelming majority of these were carpenters (fifty-four), who were followed by caulkers (eleven), architects (nine), hole-borers (eight), as well as others that included six naval officers, an ironsmith, a founder, an imam, and a muezzin. Adding to them were those affiliated with the naval rifle factory (five), the office workers in the Naval Accounting Office (Bahriye Ruznamçesi), or naval warehouses (five). Aside from the Imperial Arsenal, the navy also substantially impacted the demography through the former conscripts/officers of the Naval Corps (Asakir-i Bahriye), with at least twenty-seven males.Footnote ¹¹ In short, the residents affiliated with the Imperial Arsenal or the navy comprised almost one-third of those registered with an occupation. These affiliations confirm that employment by the Ottoman Navy characterized the demographic configuration of the neighborhood, which prompts us to focus more specifically on the making of neighborhood relations at the workplace.

Coercion, migration, and settlement

Throughout the sixteenth century, the surrounding neighborhoods of the Arsenal were settled through the forceful transfer of shipyard workers and their families from Gallipoli and Anatolia to different parts of Kasımpaşa (Kuban Reference Kuban2010, 281; Mantran Reference Mantran2020, 216). Although throughout the following centuries, the Ottoman state strived to prevent immigration to these neighborhoods from time to time, particularly its navy kept bringing provincial subjects, including those employed in shipbuilding in the Arsenal.Footnote ¹² Especially in times of war, like other military sites, the Imperial Arsenal brought hundreds of workers, mostly from provinces in proximity to İstanbul, the coasts of the Black Sea, Marmara, and the Aegean islands. These workers were often brought for temporary purposes, kept either in the Arsenal or the bachelor inns nearby, to be released at the end of their assignment. In cases where labor was needed on a more regular basis, workers were periodically replaced with their fellows from the same town or community.Footnote ¹³

In the late eighteenth century, the Arsenal’s labor organization changed, through a process that would shape the demography of the surrounding neighborhoods in particular ways. Under the reign of Selim III, the Ottoman state initiated naval reforms, which attempted to create a regular and reliable workforce, as opposed to the irregular patterns of recruitment that marked the previous era. On the one hand, a new permanent workforce of skilled carpenters and hole-borers was created. Before this period, such workers used to work on a task basis and were released when the demand for them in production ended. The naval administration gave many of them gediks (regular slots) to discourage them from switching their jobs, against the occasional incentives to pull them to other worksites in İstanbul and elsewhere. On the other hand, a new regular corps of caulkers was formed, consisting of workers from Alexandria and the Nile Delta, who were well known for their caulking skills at the time (Shaw Reference Shaw and Harding2006, 289).

The level of coercion used for recruiting these workers might seem vague if only we limited our focus to the coercive practices used in the recruitment process. Whereas it is possible that some indeed may have volunteered to come to the Arsenal, the obligation of local officials to send the required number of workers still necessitated some level of coercion. In either case, they were not to be allowed to leave their jobs officially, and those who did were labeled as “runaways” (firari). The discourse of the reform regulation justified the necessity of a new labor organization by underlining how workers often switched to higher-paid jobs in the capital, thus prompting the administration to send officers to bring them back forcefully. Thus, one of the main purposes of such reorganization was to tie workers to their workplace and to create a regular labor force compatible with the requirements of production.Footnote ¹⁴

The use of such coercive practices had direct impacts on the settlements around the Arsenal, as regular employment meant workers’ increasing likelihood to settle in these neighborhoods, where they would bring their families (if they left them behind in their hometowns) or form new families in the city. Striking evidence of such a transition from forced employment to residential settlements can be identified by following the shipbuilding workers and their hometowns on our population register. Among these groups, one immediately notices the dominance of two regions: the Black Sea and Egypt/Alexandria. Such dominance reflects the dominant regional profile formed through the navy’s specific recruitment policies for the Arsenal. In effect, aside from the caulkers who were brought from Alexandria and its environs (e.g. Rashid and Damietta) starting with the 1790s, carpenters, hole-borers, and caulkers were often brought from the Rumelian and Anatolian coasts of the Black Sea, particularly from the Western and Central Anatolian coasts.Footnote ¹⁵

The geographical distribution of residents in the Seyyid Ali Çelebi neighborhood demonstrates how these geographies of labor recruitment had particular impacts on the neighborhood’s demography. The population register of the neighborhood gives us the birthplace data of 507 male subjects registered as residents, more than half of whom were born in the intramural İstanbul (Asitane) with another few in its environs (e.g. Kasımpaşa and Üsküdar). Besides, the register recorded at least fifty-four different provincial locations, at least twenty-four of which (comprising more than half of the immigrants) were located along the Anatolian coasts of the Black Sea, being mainly concentrated on the Central Black Sea, the geographically close towns along the coastal line between Alaplı and Sinop.Footnote ¹⁶ This coastal line also included Gideros and Amasra, which provided the largest immigrant groups in the neighborhood on the register (see Table 2).

Table 2.

Distribution of the birthplace records of the Seyyid Ali Çelebi residents

Source: Based on BOA.NFS.d.164.

The data in the register confirm the previous scholarship regarding the significance of chain migration processes in the overlap between occupational and hometown networks. There are at least two examples in the neighborhood of people who brought their townspeople as apprentices, suggesting that at least some acquired their skills at the place of destination, i.e. in İstanbul. In one of the examples, a sixty-five-year-old caulker, Osman bin Ali, from Tekkeönü, a coastal village near Gideros, had three apprentices, two from the same place and the other from Gideros. In the other one, this time a caulker from Gideros had an apprentice from Tekkeönü.Footnote ¹⁷

However, the scarcity of such examples suggests that the dominance of certain regional groups in the neighborhood cannot be explained merely by chain migration processes. Besides being close to the second largest shipyard of the Ottoman Navy, the Sinop Arsenal, the aforementioned towns also overlap with the traditional targets of forced labor recruitment for the Imperial Arsenal in İstanbul for centuries.Footnote ¹⁸ Indeed, if we look at the two largest groups of immigrants, those from the nearby towns of Gideros and Amasra, we see the dominance of shipbuilding workers, with most being affiliated explicitly with the Imperial Arsenal. Of the thirty individuals from Gideros, eighteen were carpenters and four caulkers. Seventeen out of the thirty were employed in the Imperial Arsenal, aside from another four who were affiliated with the navy or the naval rifle factory. Similarly, of the twenty-nine individuals from Amasra, eleven were carpenters, three caulkers, in addition to a pulley maker and a ropemaker. Twelve of these were directly affiliated with the Imperial Arsenal, aside from five former members of the navy and a rifle factory worker.Footnote ¹⁹

Furthermore, the population register of the neighborhood points to the dominance of the Alexandrian/Egyptian workers, who totaled thirty-seven men (7 percent of the total with birthplace). Of the sixteen who were recorded being from Alexandria, ten were caulkers, and of the rest whose hometowns were recorded simply as Egypt (without specifying their districts),Footnote ²⁰ there were three carpenters, three hole-borers, and a caulker. Twenty of these Alexandrians and Egyptians were employed in the Imperial Arsenal or the navy. This profile suggests that many of the Alexandrian workers, who had been brought with their families to work in the Arsenal starting with the 1790s, and who were first accommodated in barracks within the Arsenal, gradually moved into the residential neighborhoods of Kasımpaşa, Seyyid Ali Çelebi being among them, throughout the early decades of the nineteenth century.

However, it seems that those who moved into the residential neighborhoods were not limited to the married Alexandrian workers who had been accommodated in the barracks. Some settled in after they were accommodated as bachelors, most likely either by bringing in their families or getting married in İstanbul. One of these workers was Davud bin Abdulhadi, a thirty-five-year-old caulker born in Alexandria, who primarily was registered among bachelors in the register dated 1844 (h. 1260), before moving to the Seyyid Ali Çelebi neighborhood in 1847 (h. 1263).Footnote ²¹ He was not affiliated with the Imperial Arsenal in the population registers, but in the Imperial Arsenal’s wage registers, he appeared first as a başnefer (foreman) in 1843, being upgraded to a journeyman caulker by 1849.Footnote ²² Besides these shipbuilding workers, there were many residents from Alexandria or Egypt, who most likely followed their family members or fellows to work in other sectors. Among those registered as Egyptians, there was a boatman (salcı), a stableman (seyis), a rifle factory worker, a seller of secondhand shoes or clothes (eskici), and a sherbet maker.Footnote ²³

Such dominance of immigrants from Egypt and Alexandria, on the one hand, and the Black Sea towns, on the other, prompts the question of whether or to what extent the dominance of these groups in İstanbul neighborhoods had precedents in earlier periods. Unfortunately, no study has been made (to my knowledge) on possible registers demonstrating the demographic profile of Seyyid Ali Çelebi or the other residential neighborhoods of Kasımpaşa in earlier centuries. The documentary evidence from the current scholarship on the larger İstanbul suggests that neither the aforementioned Anatolian coasts of the Black Sea nor Egypt and Alexandria were among the primary sources of chain migrations to the city in earlier periods. Şeker’s study, for example, which aims to understand voluntary migration throughout the eighteenth century based on the Ahkam Registers and the Şikayet Registers, found that the overwhelming majority of immigrants from Anatolia (92.6 percent) came from Central and Eastern Anatolia, primarily from Kayseri, Divriği, Eğin, Niğde, Sivas, and Arapkir (Şeker Reference Şeker2007, 49; see also Şeker Reference Şeker2013). The mid-eighteenth-century registers, analyzed by Morita, did single out the Western parts of the Black Sea, but they mostly included the inland districts of Kastamonu, Kengiri, and Safranbolu (rather than coastal towns) among the detected migrants in neighborhoods across the Golden Horn from Kasımpaşa (Morita Reference Morita2016, 80–81). The late eighteenth-century surveys that aimed to identify undocumented migrants in the city, covering the workforce employed in production and retail, demonstrate that the migrant workforce of İstanbul came from a limited number of towns from Central Anatolia, Central Balkans, as well as inland Black Sea districts of Kastamonu and Bolu (Kırlı Reference Kırlı2001, 136). Overall, the two specific geographical sources of immigrants in Seyyid Ali Çelebi that are the Black Sea coastal towns such as Gideros and Amasra, on the one hand, and Alexandria and Egypt on the other, do not seem to be central to the formation of geographical networks of immigrants in the capital city in the early modern era, at least according to the historical studies based on these earlier registers.Footnote ²⁴

Still, the absence of evidence regarding the earlier periods should make us cautious to argue that these two regional networks owed their formation exclusively to the state’s labor policies at the turn of the nineteenth century. This seems to be more likely especially in the case of the Egyptian/Alexandrian network, as we can clearly date this network back to a specific state policy under the reign of Selim III in the late eighteenth century. But, in the case of workers from the coastal towns of the Central and Western Black Sea, one needs to clearly differentiate the formation of their networks in Kasımpaşa, as well as their likelihood to integrate into the residential population in İstanbul, from that of the Egyptian/Alexandrian one. Although the previous studies did not specifically mention these towns as primary sources of migration, they still demonstrate that the Central and Western Black Sea region, in general, had always been among the most important geographical sources of temporary migration to İstanbul. It was highly likely that many of these temporary migrants had settled in different parts of the city, following their networks formed around belonging to the same province or region, if not the same town. Already in the first half of the eighteenth century, Morita observed that immigrants from the same provinces tended to settle in the same neighborhood: A major group among such immigrants consisted of immigrants (including married couples) from the province of Kastamonu, many of whom settled in specific neighborhoods in Fener and Kapan-ı Dakik on the Golden Horn (Morita Reference Morita2021, 153).

There are also signs that Central and Western Black Sea districts were among the sources of migration that created regional concentrations within certain occupational groups, especially those affiliated with Janissaries, which likely facilitated one’s prospect of settling in the residential neighborhoods. Altıntaş shows that, in the mid-eighteenth century, the presence of the Janissary-affiliated boatmen was particularly strong throughout the Golden Horn piers of Galata, and many of these boatmen came from Central and Western parts of Anatolia, such as Gerede (Altıntaş Reference Altıntaş, Yıldız, Spyropoulos and Sunar2022, 155). Men from the Black Sea region were also present in considerable numbers among the soldiers (yamaks) who served in the fortresses along the Bosphorus, around which they settled with their families, as well as among the Janissary rebels, in the early nineteenth century (Yıldız 2012, 300; Reference Yıldız, Yıldız, Spyropoulos and Sunar2022, 257). According to an inspection register prepared immediately after the abolition of the Janissaries in 1826, of the Janissary-affiliated firefighters who were expelled from the city, the overwhelming majority had originally come from towns within or close by the province of Kastamonu (Savan and Uzun-Pekşen Reference Savan, Uzun-Pekşen, Yıldız, Spyropoulos and Sunar2022, 355). All of these point to the possibility that there had already been established regional networks formed through immigrants who came from Central and Western parts of the Black Sea. The current state of research does not allow us to assess whether the aforementioned geographical sources of shipbuilding labor along the Black Sea coast were important sources of immigration, or to what extent workers from these towns ended up as permanent migrants in earlier periods as well. Still, it was highly likely that the presence of larger regional networks of Black Sea migrants, especially those with Janissary connections, might have facilitated such workers’ integration into the city as permanent residents in comparison to other regional groups.

The occupational, workplace, and regional data concerning the inhabitants of Seyyid Ali Çelebi in the mid-nineteenth century suggest that the concentration of people from certain coastal towns in a specific neighborhood owed much to their connection with the Arsenal and, thus, with the specific transformation processes in production relations in this site in the first half of the nineteenth century. People who migrated from these towns came mostly for employment in the Arsenal, or in connection with those who were employed there by the mid-nineteenth century. Thus, the argument that people came to work following their family members may not always exclusively explain the migration patterns in Ottoman İstanbul, as the dominant migration patterns in this particular neighborhood were largely (if not exclusively) dependent on (coerced) employment in shipbuilding in the Arsenal, which in turn demanded highly skilled labor from traditional draft districts, and required regular employment in the nineteenth century.

Relations at the workplace and beyond

The Imperial Arsenal’s decades-long struggle to address the labor shortages through reforms suggests that people did not necessarily follow their townspeople voluntarily to work at this site.Footnote ²⁵ However, even when they did so, they were still subject to enforcement during production or at the exit phase, as the Ottoman naval administration imposed particular policies to prevent workers from running away from the Arsenal.Footnote ²⁶ Still, coercing shipbuilding workers, at times with their families, should be seen as only perhaps the beginning of the making of the particular profile of the Seyyid Ali Çelebi neighborhood in the nineteenth century. Shared family belonging overlapped with shared occupational and workplace affiliations to immediately connect the neighborhood with the workplace, pointing to the intersection of coercive processes with chain migration. What seems to explain such an overlap is the likelihood that as they settled down, many of these workers did not only bring their families from their hometown but also actively recruited or integrated their immediate family members or relatives into the same worksite, which strengthened and further consolidated the dominance of certain occupational and workplace relations in the neighborhood.

Indeed, family networks played an important role in shaping the employment patterns in the Arsenal. There were eighteen employees in the Imperial Arsenal (distributed to nine families) who shared the same workplace with another family member. Except for two caulkers from Alexandria, all of them were carpenters or architects from the Western Black Sea districts of Kastamonu, Ereğli, Amasra, and Gideros.Footnote ²⁷ These examples suggest that family connections, in addition to hometown networks, became important in the recruitment processes in the Arsenal at some point, and likely contributed to the specific regional profile of not only the Arsenal’s labor force, but also the profile of the quarter in the long run.

Family was only one of the connections that linked the neighborhood with the Arsenal, along with the networks of immigrants from the same town or region. Another connection that more specifically linked the production relations in the Arsenal with the neighborhood is highlighted by the diversity of the hometown networks in the neighborhood. As demonstrated above, a significant characteristic of the demographic profile of the Seyyid Ali Çelebi neighborhood is the dominance of hometown groups that belonged to two distant regions: Egypt/Alexandria and the Black Sea.

How could people from two such particular but distant regions, with not closely related cultures and speaking different languages, be integrated in a way that allowed them to share the same neighborhoods? Of course, this was no exception, as neighborhoods in Ottoman İstanbul often housed people from different ethnic, religious, or regional backgrounds who lived peacefully together, a striking example of which was Kasap İlyas (Behar Reference Behar2003, 109–110). Still, why particularly these two regional groups, rather than others, were more visible and dominant in Seyyid Ali Çelebi requires an explanation. As many of these Black Sea and Egyptian men worked in the Arsenal, this question should take us back to the workplace and the specific production relations that dominated the Imperial Arsenal.

For this purpose, we have the opportunity to use the wage registers of the Imperial Arsenal, which were compiled on a monthly basis, if not regularly, at least based on the archival documents preserved in the collections of the Maritime History Archives (Deniz Tarihi Arşivi).Footnote ²⁸ These registers present data on both regular and irregular workers employed in the Imperial Arsenal, categorized across different occupational groups in the early to mid-nineteenth century. Gradually, throughout the second half of the century, they were categorized across departments/worksites within the Arsenal, rather than mere occupations, in a way that points to the increasingly complicated division of labor throughout the nineteenth century. The registers contain not only workers’ names and daily wages (or salaries) but also the total number of workdays in that month, and, at times, their physical/facial characteristics and hometowns. In other words, these registers consistently, and in a standardized manner, give valuable information about migrant workers and the possible connections between mobility and production relations.

The wage registers of the Imperial Arsenal suggest that, in contrast to the relative homogeneity of the day laborers (rençber), who overwhelmingly consisted of Armenians and, to a lesser extent, Kurds from Eastern Anatolia, the regular corps, who dated back to the reforms in the 1790s, largely consisted of workers from the Central Black Sea and Egypt/Alexandria by the mid-nineteenth century. These two groups dominated the regular corps due to the specific preference of the Ottoman naval elites to draft skilled shipbuilding labor. The populations of the Black Sea coast and Egypt were entrusted to provide maritime workers due not only to their familiarity with and distinctive skills in maritime work, but also to the perception that they were politically more reliable than the Greek residents of the Empire’s coastal towns and islands, who had been preferred due to their well-known shipbuilding skills but largely dismissed from naval posts throughout the Greek Revolution in the 1820s.

The wage register of October/November 1846 (Teşrin-i Evvel 1262), for example, lists the names of 239 workers under the title of Kalafatçıyan-ı İskender (Alexandrian Workers).Footnote ²⁹ We learn from the note at the beginning of the list that the corps was then divided into sub-groups, between those with civilian status, and the ones with military status. Such an arrangement reflected a transition period when the Ottoman Navy decided to gradually transform all civilian workers in the Arsenal into regular labor battalions.Footnote ³⁰ In our register, we see that there were 150 workers in the first group, all civilians, divided into eighteen columns. In this all-civilian group, the workers were paid between one and a half piasters (kuruş), the lowest paid to apprentices, and eight piasters paid to journeymen, with most workers receiving between four and six piasters. The second group, which involved what the aforementioned note refers to as “the conscripts of the Naval Corps under the supervision of the regular workers” (esnaf maiyetlerinde çalışan asakir-i bahriye neferatı), numbered eighty-nine, being divided into six columns.Footnote ³¹ The civilians and the conscripts are mostly differentiated through their wages, as the conscripts received half a piaster or one a day, in line with other naval conscripts in this period. The register also differentiates these “Alexandrian” workers from another body of temporary workers, called the Turkish Caulkers (Kalafatçıyan-ı Etrak), which numbered 134, with the overwhelming majority working for a few days, receiving between four and six piasters a day.

Such categorization in the titles should not mislead us into concluding a geographical or ethnic differentiation of these workers. This indeed might have been the case initially, as we discussed above, when the Alexandrian corps was formed in the late eighteenth century, as all of them were Arabs brought from Alexandria and all were associated with skilled labor (as opposed to the Turkish caulkers). However, by the mid-nineteenth century, the categorization rather was pointing to the work status of these workers, as the “Alexandrian” corps had, in fact, become an ethnically mixed body of regular workers. Throughout the early decades of the nineteenth century, and particularly after the Egyptian Crisis in the 1830s, it likely became harder for the Ottoman Navy to replace the Alexandrians with their Arab fellows from the same region. As a result, this regular corps started to involve those caulkers who were not from Alexandria. Under the title of “Alexandrian caulkers” on our register, the civilian group included at least twenty-eight workers from the Black Sea area, almost all being coastal towns along the Central Black Sea, with five workers from Gerze and Gideros each, and another four from Sinop and Bartın each.Footnote ³² The second group under the same title, which is expectedly more geographically diverse due to the involvement of naval conscripts, still mostly consisted of those from the same coastal towns of the Anatolian Black Sea, including those from Sinop, Gideros, Ereğli, and Filyos, perhaps with the major exception of those seven conscripts from Amasya.

The particular integration of Black Sea migrants into the “Alexandrian caulkers” was likely due to the fact that the Black Sea workers were deemed to be the only reliable and feasible alternative to the Alexandrians. The long history of established forced labor draft from the region and its proximity to the capital made workers from these regions more accessible to the Ottoman authorities, along with the same logic that made these areas the main pool of recruitment for the newly introduced naval conscription system in the Tanzimat era.Footnote ³³ Considering the distrust towards the maritime skills of the Turks among the Ottoman bureaucracy (which prompted the Ottoman Navy to replace the dismissed Greeks with their Arab counterparts from North African coasts in the 1820s),Footnote ³⁴ it is highly likely that the administrators intentionally placed Black Sea workers into the Alexandrian corps. When they foresaw the increasing inability to reproduce these corps with fellow Egyptians, perhaps the only option they had was to train workers from the Black Sea as quickly as possible, as among the coastal populations of the Empire, the Muslims along the Black Sea became the only reliable alternative to the Greeks and the Arabs at this point. Such training of workers alongside the skilled Alexandrians, to decrease the Arsenal’s dependency on the latter, was in harmony with the customary efforts to raise skilled local workers to decrease dependency on foreign workers by placing local workers under the supervision of the former, so that they could acquire the necessary level of skills to replace the foreigners in the long run.Footnote ³⁵

It seems that one significant outcome of this process was the long-lasting experience of working together on the part of workers from Alexandria and the Black Sea. Indeed, the dominance of the Black Sea and Egyptian/Alexandrian workers in the regular corps of the Arsenal holds true for the regular corps of carpenters and hole-borers listed in this register, which named 1,324 of such workers, 1,006 of whom being marked with a hometown. Among them, the largest groups were from Sinop, Gideros, Amasra, Bartın, and Hoşalay, all coastal towns of the Central Black Sea, being followed by the Egyptians.Footnote ³⁶

Such collective experience and familiarity across these two regional groups seem to have directly impacted the demographic profile of the residential neighborhoods, particularly Seyyid Ali Çelebi. As other scholars have shown, the neighborhoods in İstanbul were largely dominated by specific ethno-religious and/or regional networks: Moving into a residential neighborhood first required the approval of the neighborhood’s imam (and, later, mukhtar), who would be reluctant to accept those who did not belong to the networks that dominated the neighborhood. Such attitudes were also encouraged by the state officials who entrusted the responsibility of maintaining public order collectively to the neighborhood residents, as mentioned above (Başaran Reference Başaran2014, 173–174). In that sense, the integration of Egyptians/Alexandrians into Kasımpaşa’s residential neighborhoods is remarkable, especially when one compares them with the status of Eastern Anatolians, who figured marginally in the residential neighborhoods in spite of dominating the bachelor inns of the district in the mid-nineteenth century. Despite the geographical, linguistic, and overall cultural differences between the Black Sea and Egyptian immigrants, they were able to integrate into the same neighborhood networks, thanks to their familiarity with each other through long years of working together in the same worksites of the Arsenal.

Indeed, the high level of mobility among these two groups across different neighborhoods of Kasımpaşa also points to their high level of integration, as it proves their ability to have the consent of the neighborhood in which they wanted to move. The population register recorded eighty-three individuals who moved to another neighborhood over the twelve-year period between h. 1260 (1844/1845) and h. 1272 (1855/1856). Among the seventy-nine of them with a recorded birthplace, the largest group after those affiliated with Asitane was composed of Alexandrians (six) and Egyptians (six); all except one relocated to another neighborhood within the Kasımpaşa quarter. The rest of the seventy-nine predominantly came from the Central Black Sea districts, including Amasra (five), Gideros (three), Kastamonu (three), Hoşalay (two), and Filyos (two). Similarly, of the 105 individuals who moved into our neighborhood during this period, the largest groups were Egyptians (nine) and Alexandrians (four), accompanied by Central Black Sea immigrants from Gideros, Amasra, Hoşalay, and Alaplı. These figures regarding the transfers of families across different neighborhoods demonstrate that these two immigrant communities had particular advantages over the others in terms of their mobility within the city, thanks to the networks they were able to develop beyond their hometown connections, particularly in the Arsenal.