Plums & Power
~ In 1863, the Ottoman inspector-general Cevdet Pasha arrived to Bosnia and began to investigate the global flows of the plum trade

Cevdet Pasha came to Bosnia in 1863 as an Ottoman reformer and imperial advisor. Cevdet noted that Bosnians heavily relied on plum cultivation (think pekmez & rakija), with dried plum exports being big business. Yet plum exports suddenly dropped that year, impoverishing many.

Sensing problems, Cevdet investigated the plum trade. Bosnians traditionally sold dried plums across the Ottoman-Habsburg border to Hungarian traders; but Cevdet found that Hungarians just sold those on to Trieste, and it was there that the demand for plums dropped.

Trieste was just a port of passage, with most Bosnian plums/prunes resold to American markets. After the US Civil War broke out in 1861, the plum network began to fall apart. “Poor Bosnians thought no one liked their plums any more, but they didn’t know the real reason.”

“One must understand how far commerce has expanded to connect different parts of the world so that a war in America can now greatly endanger commerce in Bosnia,” Cevdet wrote in 1863. —little story from Kerima Filan’s great new BCS translation of his Tezkire (Sarajevo 2017)