Reviews for Catalogue of Seals in the National Museum of Wales: Vol II

The average rating for Catalogue of Seals in the National Museum of Wales: Vol II based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2010-04-25 00:00:00 Krystene Hawkes Painful to read. Did you know you have to place the metal in between two casts and then hit them with a hammer to make the coins? What kind of conditions do you think the workers worked in? Was it hot, did they suffer? Were they paid well? Did their bodies ache at the end of each shift? Did their tendons and ligaments in their shoulders and elbows wear down from the hammering? Did their muscles ache? Did they have access to enough protein for their muscles to recover from the strenuous days of minting? Where did they go home at night? What was the average coin-hammerers life expectancy? Did slaves mint the coins? Free laborers? Did they ever go on strike? Demand higher wages? Did they ever steal the coins? Or did they have overseers keeping a strict watch on them every step of the way? We will never know. Because instead of using coins to reveal a web of social relations, numismatics remains an academic discipline designed for no one but the most useless of all academics. I wanted to give it one star because of how utterly boring the book was. But I gave it two because of the EP Thompson reference in chapter 12 and also the fact that I pretended Pamuk and Balkan were in a historiographical boxing match during Chapter 7: Nobody wants to mess with Omar Lutfi Barkan: examined the price increases of the sixteenth century in the Ottoman context.21 After estab- lishing that large increases in food and raw materials prices did take place, Barkan argued that these trends were imported into the Ottoman economy through trade with Europe across the Mediterranean… Even though Barkan's arguments were widely read, they have generated only a modest amount of debate and his conclusions have remained mostly unchallenged UNTIL PAMUK (the author) COMES AROUND - young kid on the block, going for the throat: Who will win the fight?? == The challenger? PAMUK OR the elder == O. L. BARKAN? LET'S SEE ROUND 1 IS a BANGER: "My own calculations based on the available prices indicate that the value of Barkan's index in 1555 and 1573 should stand close to 125 and 145 respectively; not 142.26 and 179.97." PAMUK! ROUND 2, THE ELDER TAKES HIS CLASSIC STANCE: "Barkan's calculations indicated a 79.97 percent increase in nominal food prices until 1573, his food price index expressed in grams of silver rose by 62 percent during the interval 1489 to 1573. On the basis of this result, Barkan argued that the impact of the Price Revolution was being felt strongly in the Ottoman economy before the last quarter of the sixteenth century." CAN PAMUK WITHSTAND THE FURY?? ROUND 3 PAMUK'S CORRECTIVE FIST: "After my correction of Barkan's price index for the year 1573, however, the price increases between 1489 and 1573 expressed in grams of silver is reduced to 31 percent, indicating a much more modest rate of silver infation. With this correction, it becomes more diffcult to explain Ottoman fiscal diffculties primarily in terms of the Price Revolution or imported infation, following Barkan." BARKAN TAKES A BEATING! BUT CAN HE MAKE A COME BACK IN ROUND FOUR!? ROUND 4: "When he constructed his price index a quarter of a century ago, Barkan was unaware that the akcËe often deteriorated below its of®cial standard after 1586. As a result, for most of the years that the silver content of the akcËe remained below of®cial standards, his calculations overstate the extent of silver in¯ation even more than the indices I have constructed… After making crude adjustments for the de®ciency cited above…" OWWWWW HE HIT HIM WITH THAT "DEFICIENCY" --- BARKAN WAS UNAWARE!!!! His camp DEFINITELY did not prepare him for Pamuk's HEAT! IS Barkan out for the count!?!?! ROUND 5 The OG Barkan Recovers a bit: "Overall, then, my findings agree with those of Barkan regarding the extent of nominal price increases in Istanbul from the end of the fifteenth to the middle of the seventeenth century." ROUND 6: "As for the breakdown of this overall increase, however, my series based on a greater variety of sources and more realistic estimates for the silver content of the akcËe diverge from those of Barkan. They show that silver inflation accounted for a smaller part and Ottoman debasements accounted for a larger part of these increases than Barkan suggested quarter of a century ago." Boring round, but both fighters needed the rest…. ROUND 7 PAMUK COMES AGAIN WITH THE HEAT: "One section of that article, however, was titled ``Other Causes of the Price Increases'' and there Barkan showed that he was aware of the debates regarding the causes of the Price Revolution. Stating that ``it would not be correct to link price increases solely to the accumulation of large stocks of gold and silver from Africa and America and to rely only on the quantity theory of money in the explanation of price formation and in¯ation,'' he went on to produce a long list of other possible causes which included debasements, population growth, changes in the velocity of circulation of money, and the emergence of other forms of money such as letters of credit and bills of exchange. Aside from a detailed discussion of debasements, however, Barkan did not offer a critical examination of these explanations coming from very different theoretical origins." OH MY GOD!!!! DAAAAYYYYUMMM WE'VE NOT SEEN ANYTHING LIKE THIS IS TWO AND A HALF DECADES!!! ROUND 8 - WHO'S ON THE DECLINE? BARKAN IS! "One important reason for the latter was Barkan's thesis that the price increases constituted a negative turning point and a leading cause of the ``Ottoman decline'' at the end of the sixteenth century. These arguments also deserve closer scrutiny." PAMUK HITS HIM WITH THAT DECLINE THEORY SCRUTINY!! ROUND 9 WE SEE PAMUK'S NUANCED FOOTWORK ON DISPLAY: "Regarding the consequences on Ottoman industry, Barkan argued that the exportation to Europe of the basic raw materials arising from west±east price differentials created severe shortages for Ottoman guilds…. Nonetheless this line of reasoning, however, can not explain why Euro-pean manufacturers, which faced similar price movements, did much better than their Ottoman counterparts." WILL THIS FIGHT MAKE IT THE FULL 12!?!?! ROUND 10 PAMUK is looking to END THE FIGHT and comes out swinging -- "In retrospect, however, Barkan's as well as Hamilton's claims and the attempt to single out the Price Revolution as a key event appear exaggerated. The Ottoman system undoubtedly faced severe fiscal and economic diffculties at the end of the sixteenth century. These dif®culties related more to other causes than to the impact of silver in¯ation per se, however." THE ELDER BARKAN IS DOWN FOR THE COUNT… 1.. 2.. 3.. 4.. OH HE's UP ON ONE KNEE.. 5.. 6.. HE STUMBLES 7… 8… HE'S BACK DOWN!!!! AND THAT'S IT BOYS, THE GOLD/SILVER/COPPER GLOVES (COINS) AWARDED TO THE NEWCOMER PAMUK!!!! BARKAN'S QUARTER CENTURY OF DOMINANCE IN THE BOXING… errr, Ottoman economic world… IS OVER!!! PAMUK IS THE NEW WORLD CHAMPION!!!! What a fight… Both men deserve a round of applause. Oh holy shit there are still six more chapters to go....? Why isn't this book over yet?

Review # 2 was written on 2012-12-31 00:00:00 Robert Marino In 1584, at its peak of power, the Ottoman Empire suffered a catastrophic economic collapse that took it two generations to steady itself from. Its repercussions however reverberated long thereafter. What was the cause of the 1584 collapse, and can we learn something about it from the prices of food staples bought for the Imperial kitchen at the Topkapi palace? Why did Esther, the character in Orhan Pamuk's My Name is Red test the strength of the metal currency with her teeth (hint, Orhan must have picked this tidbit from Sevket, his brother). What does this clever trick of Esther tell us about currency debasement and how it was used by the Ottoman treasury as means of managing budget deficits by induced inflation? Does an empire need a currency of its own or can it manage with a currency minted by Florentine banksters, who made a killing in the process? The Ottomans did manage for a while, but that was a costly mistake on their part. And what happens when your creditors force you to peg your currency to a fixed standard so you could not do the shtick of currency debasement mentioned above (and escape paying what you owe them in full)? Why, this is what happened in the 19th century, giving the Ottomans a taste of what the IMF did to third world countries in the 20th century. It is amazing what one can learn from a book on monetary policies and practices of a defunct empire, and much of it is still relevant today. Highly recommended for economists and political and social historians and aficionados alike.