Sugar production in the Ottoman Empire (1840-1908)

Historically only sugar source plant was sugar cane. For the Ottoman Empire, this situation did not also differ. Especially sugar cane cultivator southern provinces were main sugar providing areas of the Ottoman Empire. But with 17th century, strong American competition considerably diminished Ottoman sugar production. Hereafter, sugar became imported goods for Ottoman people. But invention of sugar extraction from beet took attention of many entrepreneurs to this sector. Primarily sugar had already great market in the Ottoman Empire. Moreover sugar beet cultivation has much more advantages than sugar cane. Beet requires less irrigation and it was resistant to lower temperatures. That means many regions of the Ottoman Empire could be opened sugar production. In this article, time period was held quite a long; because sugar manufacturing was not very common activity in the Ottoman Empire in this period. In general, sugar production entrepreneurs could be divided in to two parts. In the beginning, Dimitri Efendi, Davutoğlu Karabet and Monsieur Michel planned to establish their factories in İstanbul and İzmir for transportation facilities and closeness to main consumption centers. But after 1890’s, new entrepreneurs took into account raw material needs in their investment plans. All newly chosen places were either former cultivation centers or very convenient places for sugar cane or beet agriculture. This attitude was very important, because sugar production was completely dependent to rapid raw material flow in that time and also today. The Ottoman Empire granted every possible facility to sugar producers to decrease trade deficit. As to entrepreneurs, some of them remained on paper. But Monsieur Michel founded a factory for experimentation. Rauf Pasha started beet cultivation and sent them to analyze for learning sugar * Assi. Prof., Gümüşhane University, Faculty of Economics and Administrative Sciences, Department of Economics, e-mail: fdamlibag@gumushane.edu.tr.