Research Information System
Ünveren B. (Executive), Gökgöz T., Teke Ö., Doygun E., Tok A.
TUBITAK Project, 2022 - 2024
A real estate tax survey was carried out by the
Ottoman Empire in 1874, covering all real estate in Istanbul. The real estate
appraisals by the authorized officers in 1874 were used to determine the real
estate tax to be collected from each property. This project aims at exploring
the factors that affected the authorized officers’ real estate appraisals.
Since these appraisals were used to determine the tax payable by property
owners, the subject has a direct bearing upon the taxation of wealth.
The most substantial original value of the project is that hedonic price analysis based on cliometric techniques for Ottoman Istanbul will be conducted for the first time in the literature. Although such cliometric analyzes are quite common in the literature for other important cities of the period such as Amsterdam, Stockholm and Beijing, a similar analysis has not yet been carried out for Istanbul. In addition, it is another original value to work with real estate tax survey, which include all real properties in Istanbul (including public properties) instead of a sample that reflects a small part of the real estate assets such as purchase/sale records or inheritance documents used in similar studies. For this reason, the number of data to be examined is quite large and it is estimated that there are more than 20,000 observations of real estate in the survey records in the archives. Finally, the intensive use of geographic information systems and the preparation of various thematic maps about Ottoman Istanbul by using many different variables, both quantitative and qualitative, is another source of original value.
The data collection method consists of two stages. Firstly, real estate records in the Presidency Ottoman Archives will be obtained and translated from the Ottoman handwritten rika script to modern Turkish. Then, a database will be designed, taking into account all the queries and analyzes to be made within the scope of the project. Then, cliometric analyzes that include econometric and statistical methods will be conducted to determine the underlying factors of how the cadastral registration officers value the real estate. In addition, various thematic maps will be made showing the results obtained. The previous studies (e.g., a scientific research project supported by the university and international publications) carried out by the project team on the collection of the aforementioned data can be deemed a preliminary study of this project.
The most significant potential impact of this project will be in the field of multidisciplinary studies. Transferring the real estate records that have remained in the archives to a database accessible to researchers will pave the way for new studies in many different fields from spatial informatics to real estate economics. Contribution to the quantitative analysis of the rapidly developing economic history around the world within the scope of Ottoman history will be another widespread impact of the project. In addition, this study, which will be carried out with Istanbul data, will pave the way for international projects such as the EU Project and similar studies with the data of settlements both inside and outside the geography of today's Turkey, such as Trabzon, Bursa, Izmir, Aleppo, Yanya, which are known to have been surveyed in at the time around 1874.