JOBS IN ÇORUM COUNTY: ACCORDING TO BOOKS OF DIVI-DENDS (1844-1845)
ÇORUM KAZA MERKEZİNDE MESLEKİ YAPILANMA ÜZERİNE BİR İNCELEME: 1844-1845 TEMETTÜAT DEFTERLERİNE GÖRE

Author : İlyas AK
Number of pages : 426-449

Abstract

The word “job” (“meslek” in Turkish) is an Arabic Word, and is derived from the root “silk”, which means “order, series, way, job, the route followed”. Ever since organized societies, the job and the activities of people have defined their social sta-tus and separated them from others. As in the past, jobs are important in that they are the way of living for people and define their positions and status in the society in our present day. Books of Dividends, provide us with “data for those who con-duct social and economic history studies because they have information about the chiefs of the household”. It is possible to reveal the social and economic lives of the people in a center of county, village or a tribe by using and assessing the data in-cluded in these books. The main source of the present study consists of the Çorum Books of Dividends that cover the years 1844-1845. The records of a total of 1998 chiefs of the household living in 42 neighborhoods in the center of Çorum County were examined in the scope of the study. As a result of this examination, 93 differ-ent jobs were determined in the neighborhoods included in the study. Additionally, it was also determined that the jobs of 1447 of the chiefs of the 1998 household liv-ing in the county were defined. The fact that 387 of the chiefs of the household be-ing recorded as “lost”, “one-armed”, “elderly” explained why these people were not mentioned in these books by their jobs. The present study aims to determine and explain the jobs in Çorum, which was a center of county in middle size with its 10 thousand population in Anatolia in mid-19th century by making use of the Books of Dividends. In this way, answers were sought for the questions like “What was the economy of Çorum based on in those times?”, “How did people make a living?”, and “Which jobs were favorite?”. Additionally, the income brought by these jobs in Çorum were also investigated in the present study. On the other hand, the jobs that existed in those times but do not exist in our present time were also determined to monitor the changes in the economic structure of the city. With its current character-istics, the study aims to contribute in a humble manner to the local history studies that try to reflect the cultural and socioeconomic structure of Çorum in mid-19th century.

Keywords

Çorum, Books of Div

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