Yonca Köksal Özyaşar and Can Nacar, Anatolian Livestock Trade in the Late Ottoman Empire. Leiden: Leiden University Press, 2024. 220 pages.

The literature on the food provisioning of stanbul and other major Ottoman cities has only marginally addressed Anatolia's role in meat supplies.Even less attention has been paid to the period after the 1840s.Anatolian Livestock Trade in the Late Ottoman Empire aims to fill this gap.By bringing together the events, places, and human and non-human actors with a longue-dure perspective, the book tells a comprehensive story about the formation and functioning of livestock trade networks, emphasizing the economic and environmental factors at play.It covers a broad geographical area, from central to northeastern and northwestern Anatolia to the Eastern Mediterranean ports of zmir, Antalya, Mersin, and skenderun, and thematically, from wars and financial crises to railways and epizootics.The book begins with an introductory chapter that provides an overview of the subject, the methodology used, the questions to be addressed, and the sources used for the research.In the late Ottoman Empire, the stories of the expansion of livestock farming and trade in Anatolia and the population growth in stanbul and other urban centers are intertwined, as the authors argue, "unfolded within the broader framework of economic, social, political, environmental, and technological shifts" (p.14).They suggest that, significantly, two policies shaped the livestock production and trade in the Empire: a shift from provisionist to liberal policies and the sedentarization of nomadic groups.Chapters 2-5 address the livestock trade networks and flow of sheep and goats from different parts of Anatolia to stanbul and other urban centers.Chapter 2 focuses on Konya and Ankara provinces in central Anatolia.As part of its provisionist policies and successive wars in Rumelia, the Ottoman state, by the 1790s, established the quota system to avoid bottlenecks in the meat supply chain.The state granted the Cihanbeyli and affiliated Kurdish nomadic tribes in the region certain rights, such as tax exemptions and free use of pastures, to incorporate them into its provisionist system.The quota system remained in place until the 1860s when the government liberalized livestock trade.Kksal zyaar and Nacar argue that the central government's efforts to resettle nomadic pastoralists for economic, social, and military reasons and the sparking of meat prices because of the Crimean War and subsequent financial crises, as well as the ecological stress caused by the droughts, severe winters, and diseases and epizootics were major drivers of the abolition of the quota system.