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MUSTAK, Aykut
A Portrait of the Artist as an Entrepreneur: Yusuf Nabi (D. 1712) and His Economic Portfolio
The prolific and reputable poet of the late seventeenth to early eighteenth century, Yusuf Nabi’s work elicited a
steady string of modern scholarship by literary historians. In particular, the social commentary of his Hayriyye was deemed
historiographically pertinent to attempts at traversing disciplinary boundaries or bridging themes of multiple scholarly
orientations. In this paper, this proposition was brought to bear upon economic history and literature, by a reflection on
his literary output, his correspondence, and the archival documentation concerning his economic profile. Certainly, neither
the use of literary evidence for historical reconstruction nor the study of the social profile of entrepreneurship were
entirely neglected, yet hardly in vogue. If the documentation related to his investment in life-term tax-farms sheds light
on his entrepreneurial profile, securing the assets, or an office, in the first place, and protecting them against competitors,
was facets evinced by his letters. The artist’s life course is also an important analytical grid related to the themes and sense
of his artistic production, coupled with an assessment of his association / dissociation with patrons, competitors, and clients.
When read against the social imaginary he presented at his work, they are telling not only for his commentary but
the artist’s habitus at a provincial setting. Thus, a micro-analysis of the economic drive of an artist, in relation to his social
network and grandee households, accommodates the question of agency in socio-historical analysis, while inferring hints
for an Ottoman “middling sort.”
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