Donald Quataert is Professor of History and Director of the Southwest Asian and North African Program at the State University of New York at Binghamton. He is the author of Social Disintegration and Popular Resistance in the Ottoman Empire and Ottoman Manufacturing in the Age of the Industrial Revolution, and coeditor, with Richard T. Antoun, of Syria: Society, Culture, and Polity, published by SUNY Press.

This book provides the first comprehensive history of manufacturing in the Ottoman Empire and its Turkish successor state. As the Ottoman Empire evolved, manufacturing underwent an unusual trajectory. Expansion in the sixteenth century gave way to transformation and adaptation after the Industrial Revolution. Then, in the earlier part of the twentieth century, modern Turkey's attempt at state-led industrialization became a model for many developing countries.
Suraiya Faroqhi, Mehmet Genç, Donald Quataert, and Çag∑lar Keyder, experts on different phases of the manufacturing trajectory, provide here exceptional case studies of manufacturing activities in their social and political contexts, integrating first-hand research with surveys of the literature. This work offers rich material for historians, economists, and other social scientists, including those interested in the origins of underdevelopment and development in the contemporary world.