Agricultural History Review, Volume 69 Part 1 (2021), pp. 1–24

This paper focuses on a perennial subject in agricultural history: land and labour productivity and how they evolve during periods of demographic growth. It provides per capita, per worker, and per hectare output estimates from a region in the pre-industrial Eastern Mediterranean and investigates whether the demographic growth of the sixteenth century brought about a subsistence crisis in Ottoman Anatolia, as many historians have argued. As observed in this study, the evolution of output per worker and per sown area in the Western Anatolian district of Manisa in the early- and late-sixteenth century lends support to the Boserupian view by revealing a negative association between land and labour produc-tivity. Arable acreage remained largely stable in Manisa over the sixteenth century, but agricultural output nevertheless expanded considerably. While labour productivity declined as population grew, land productivity increased, facilitating output levels that could sustain a relatively high population density in the region. 

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