The empire, a sort of super-state which might cover the entire area of a world-economy, presents us with a broader problem. On the whole, the world-empires, as Wallerstein calls them, were no doubt archaic formations, representing ancient triumphs of the political over the economic. But [by the late eighteenth century], they were still in existence outside the Western world.… Wallerstein has argued that wherever there was an empire, the underlying world-economy was unable to develop […] No merchant or capitalist could ever feel completely free under an empire. Footnote 1
Historians have long struggled to explain the purportedly late introduction of endogenous modern finance and banking in the Middle East. The ongoing search for absence of European institutions in the Muslim world to explain its economic stagnation has produced arguments concerning the static nature of institutions such as the waqf (pious endowment) and the absence of the corporation, the lack of notaries and of “faith in paper” in the legal system, and a general abstention from the open charge of interest, among others.Footnote 2 All of these are said to have impeded the rise of large-scale impersonal exchange and, as a result, of “real” banks and financial markets such as those that developed in Western Europe.Footnote 3 Another set of explanations for this divergence concerns the nature of the state and its role in the economy, focusing in the case of the Ottoman state on its continued preying on private capital and its reliance on premodern financial intermediaries such as tax-farmers and sarrafs (state financiers).Footnote 4 It has thus been assumed that only with the advent of European banks in the late Ottoman Empire and more systematically after its fall, could capitalist development occur in the region.
The view of the Ottoman state as an archaic, predatory polity has been widely shared by historians and social scientists, including in world historical analysis. Fernand Braudel’s rich and nuanced historical approach inspired generations of scholars who rewrote Ottoman society into the history of the early modern commercial world. Still, he believed in a nineteenth-century divergence: he saw the Ottoman world-economy as one that remained powerful and independent of the European world-economy until the early nineteenth century, when it started to decline and failed to catch up with industrial Europe due to “its archaic ways and the legacy of its past.”Footnote 5 To be sure, this view has also been applied to other non-Western empires that survived into the twentieth century but “failed” to transform into modern capitalist economies. This article argues that world historical analysis’ binary understanding of capital and empire, as a specific political formation, has led to the view of the nineteenth-century Ottoman Empire, and by extension its sarrafs, as an anomaly.Footnote 6 It asserts that this analysis is rooted in a rigid conceptualization of “the political” and “the economic” as pre-existing, separate realms which are inherently in opposition. At its core, this perspective assumes a shifting balance between state and capital, between political and economic power, such that the latter took over the former with the rise of capitalism.
In world-system theory, the advent of the European world-economy put an end to the old order of empires—the Russian, Ottoman, and Chinese—which were “archaic formations, representing ancient triumphs of the political over the economic,”Footnote 7 making way for the rule of capital. In Immanuel Wallerstein’s model, this process entailed the incorporation—and subordination—of world-empires into the European world-economy. Since he believed a world-economy could not exist wherever there was an empire, Wallerstein assumed that in the process of the Ottoman Empire’s incorporation as a “periphery” it ceased to be a “world-empire” and turned into “simply one more state,” and its redistributive-tributary mode of production was displaced.Footnote 8 This narrative came under serious criticism in the 1990s for its teleological nature, its assumptions of Ottoman passivity and subordination to an all-powerful “Europe,” and for ignoring local social dynamics and actors.Footnote 9
Braudel recognized that the Ottoman Empire, which maintained its sovereignty and relative economic power, could not be treated as a mere periphery within that system.Footnote 10 And while he discussed what he saw as the Ottomans’ archaic financial practices, he remained puzzled as to the reasons for the empire’s “decadence,” which he regarded an “irritating problem … to which there is unfortunately no solution.”Footnote 11 Ultimately, his analysis of imperial polities in the global economy made more room for complexity, but he still saw a paradox in the Ottoman Empire’s survival and “decadence.” The empire thus came to be seen as an anomaly.
In this analysis, for the triumph of capital (or “the economic”) over the state (“the political”) to take place on a global scale, this process had to occur also within polities. Braudel stressed as preconditions for the growth and success of capitalism “a certain neutrality, or weakness, or permissiveness by the state”; in the West, the presence of these conditions (albeit in varying degrees) allowed merchant capitalists to take over the state, whereas in China and in the “world of Islam” merchants remained powerless in the face of a state hostile to capitalism.Footnote 12
The relationship between merchants and the state thus stands at the center of this divergence narrative. In a 1988 special issue of the Fernand Braudel Center’s Review on “nineteenth century transformations” in the Ottoman Empire, Şevket Pamuk and Çağlar Keyder described this relationship as a “naturally” conflictual one, “a struggle between the central bureaucracy and … the merchants and export-oriented landlords” in which the former “had the upper hand,”Footnote 13 and acted to prohibit the growth of “the autonomous market sphere” to safeguard its control over the economy.Footnote 14
If in this theorization the nineteenth-century Ottoman Empire, as a state hostile to capitalism, was an anomaly, then the sarraf was too, due to his deep ties to the state as opposed to “private” merchants. As an archaic creature who remained a central economic actor in the nineteenth century (and later), the sarraf represented, and even profited from, the absence of a “modern” public debt system and “modern” financial markets in the empire.
In this vein, a common approach in the historiography on finance in the Ottoman Empire argues that because of its “premodern nature”—in the nineteenth century—the empire failed to develop a “real” banking system. This was because of the marginalization of “the financial market proper” by the “attractive form of ‘political money’ which circulated within the circles of power, between the treasury, the community of sarrafs, [and office holders].” The agents of “political money” are understood here to be financial intermediaries who engaged with the circulation of monetary value, as opposed to accumulating capital from production. Eventually, just like in “pre- and early modern Europe … the fiscal and financial hunger of the [Ottoman] state was responsible for a growing atrophy of private credit.”Footnote 15
A similar narrative arc is common in historical studies of the “great divergence,” that criticize culturalist narratives of decline in non-Western economies, but still use a teleological universalist logic to explain the latter’s failure to modernize, pointing to a combination of economic and political obstacles created by “predatory” states. From this perspective, what stood in the way of non-Western economies “organically” developing formal capital markets were the suppression of private entrepreneurs by despotic rulers and the persistence of kin-based financial networks that tilted capital flows away from the market. These obstacles, in their turn, influenced factors of supply and demand (e.g., insufficient demand for credit).Footnote 16
This article moves beyond the conceptualization of a zero-sum game between state and capital, and specifically of (non-Western) empire as external to or incompatible with capitalism,Footnote 17 to challenge the picture of a predatory Ottoman state. It does so by analyzing the key role that local private credit played in the Ottoman state’s new system of public debt, designed to support its project of economic development in the nineteenth century. More specifically, I trace the changes in the tax-farming system and the new commercial legislation that together facilitated the creation of markets for government and peasant debt and the rise of merchant-bankers who dominated parts of the countryside through intertwined credit transactions and fiscal services.Footnote 18 The merchants and sarrafs who led these processes belonged to extensive regional business networks that often had a global reach and were closely tied to the state and markets through webs of credit and debt that defy any simple classification into “public” and “private.” In fact, the boundaries between public and private were being redefined and negotiated in this period, specifically in relation to interest and usury.
I join recent writers on financial networks and institutions in the Ottoman Empire and in other “fiscalist” empiresFootnote 19 who have turned the ahistorical question of divergence on its head: instead of searching for absence (of institutions deemed “modern”), their work examines the financial infrastructures of these empires on their own terms, and the role of merchant capital therein. This has included a reconsideration of cash waqfs (Islamic trust funds) as a source of credit to Ottoman merchants in international trade in the early modern Mediterranean.Footnote 20 One of the main findings of this new scholarship concerns the role of regional elites who had access to fiscal monies not merely in their transferal or circulation but also in their usage as short-term capital in the imperial financial system and in long-distance trade.Footnote 21 With the proliferation of provincial administrators-cum-fiscal entrepreneurs starting in the late eighteenth century, private and public wealth in the Ottoman Empire became all the more interwoven.Footnote 22
Historians of Europe and the United States have also contributed to destabilizing civilizational narratives of finance, uncovering the embeddedness of institutions such as central banks and the limited partnership in specific political projects and debates, and highlighting the continued multiplicity of business forms.Footnote 23 Notably, the assumption of an a priori historically antagonistic relationship between merchants and the state is itself being scrutinized. In Europe, the image of early modern corporations controlling the state originated in later narratives on the prehistory of the “modern” centralizing nation-state. Philip Stern’s study of the English East India Company historicizes this image, and shows that such arguments were being made starting in the late eighteenth century, when the British parliament acted to diminish the company’s independence; that is, in the context of fierce debates over political economy and sovereignty.Footnote 24 These later discourses used evolving notions of public and private, framed within a “growing consensus that the economy were ‘fields of intervention’ for the polity rather than sites of government in their own right.”Footnote 25 These notions were thus grounded in concrete political concerns and specific terms such as production and commercial exchange; by the 1930s and 1940s, according to Timothy Mitchell, “the economy”—as a modern term, with the definite article—was constructed as a separate sphere of human action.Footnote 26
Similarly concrete arguments against state intervention in “private” contracts were made in Ottoman Syria by merchants who protested new prohibitions on excessive interest in the mid-nineteenth century. For European merchants, the Ottoman practice of deduction of excessive interest from existing debts joined other transactional conventions and fiscal institutions to which they had to adapt as they engaged in regional commerce, alongside legal restrictions on their access to land and tax-farms. Far from static traditions, these forms of debt and credit were undergoing change in this period of booming global grain markets. Indeed, as recently conceptualized in a study on the Indian Ocean world, capitalism as a global co-creation was based on the fusion of “transactional grammars” through “processes of translation and commensuration.”Footnote 27 In this sense, globalizing Ottoman finance does not mean reducing the region’s life-worlds to a case study in support of a particular theory and its conceptual binarisms (e.g., state versus capital), but instead, as Jane Guyer suggests, incorporating into the theory the dynamics of multiplicity that “arise out of specific and identifiable historical tensions and ambitions” and that should “reframe our analytical attention to questions of equivalence, difference, and commensuration.”Footnote 28 This move is integral to the broader effort to challenge origin stories of financialization and its frontiers,Footnote 29 particularly relating to so-called “archaic” imperial political formations.Footnote 30
Taking a global perspective to the closely intertwined processes of Ottoman state-building and fiscal experimentation, scholarship on the early modern period has shown how finance mediated restructured political relationships, both vertical and horizontal, between center and province and within the provinces.Footnote 31 Here I build on this work, together with an open-ended and non-linear approach to forms of business organization,Footnote 32 to examine change in Ottoman statecraft and finances, which, like in other states at the time,Footnote 33 relied to a great extent on local elites who debated and redefined the boundaries of private economic activity and the state’s role therein.
In the mid-nineteenth-century Ottoman “age of credit,” spurred as it was by the grain market boom, imperial institutions and actors adopted new roles and practices that benefited both private creditors and the fiscal state in its credit-based development project. My analysis will focus on the domestic public debt of one Ottoman province and its new financial markets, the sort of history that has been obscured by that of the empire’s foreign debt, and by literature on global capitalism that has seen credit markets as detached from (imperial-)state finances and the latter as concerned with the mere circulation of money in an unchanging landscape managed by “premodern” intermediaries. Public debt in the Ottoman Empire was much more than an instrument of foreign domination; it profoundly shaped political institutions, social relationships, and inter-imperial competition, as well as conceptions of political belonging and sovereignty.
The Ottoman Age of Credit
The late eighteenth century was a time of inter-imperial warfare and competition, intertwined with political upheavals within states.Footnote 34 But it was also when debt regimes were restructured, and public debt gradually became a central policy tool for governments that sought to raise additional revenues through credit rather than increased taxation. Instead of following a British ideal-type of modern public credit, commonly associated with economically “efficient” and “democratic” institutions, recent historical study of public debt’s political nature explores the variety of ways in which different states raised and managed it, varying with specific historical contexts, social dynamics, and political debates.Footnote 35 More than any one successful economic model, what mattered most in each case were issues of political legitimacy and power relations on the local and international levels. In addition to diverse experiences with public debt, researchers have stressed the importance of tracing shifts in debt regimes and practices in a non-teleological manner.Footnote 36
The processes of fiscal experimentation and state-building that followed the “age of revolutions” included a growing state reliance on the private capital of wider segments in the population, which turned the provision of credit to the government into a personal investment. Since public debt is more than a financial transaction, and is also “inseparably, an instrument of power, a social relationship, and a political arena in which interests and values collide,”Footnote 37 this process entailed the redefinition of concepts like interest versus usury and public versus private debt, in tandem with the reconceptualization of political participation. In the case of non-Muslim Ottomans it included loyalty, which remained a serious concern for the Ottoman government throughout this period of European financial expansion. A similar analysis stressing how local and international political circumstances shaped distinct debt regimes across Europe and the United States has challenged simplistic binary models of centralized/decentralized or parliamentary/absolute political systems.Footnote 38
The Eastern Mediterranean began its slow recovery in the mid-eighteenth century from the dramatic ecological effects of the Little Ice Age and agricultural production gradually expanded.Footnote 39 European merchants who immigrated to the region integrated themselves into a commercial elite of Ottoman Muslims and non-Muslims who enjoyed the benefits of berats—certificates that granted tax privileges to foreign protégés—or similar ones the Ottoman government offered its own merchants, the Hayriyye Tüccarları.Footnote 40 During this period, the Syrian countryside saw the rise of new groups of merchant-moneylenders, who appear in the sources as murabahacıs. Footnote 41 This term referred not to a formal position, but to an increasingly widespread set of credit practices—including the advance purchase of crops (Turkish selem; Arabic salam)—that carried negative connotations of immoral conduct toward peasants who depended on credit. I will show how, throughout the nineteenth century, the government sought ways to bring these private credit operations under its control, while recognizing their contribution to regional commerce, and also to state revenue since these merchants became regular providers of credit to the government.
Imperial plans for economic development centered on agriculture. The commercialization of agriculture was promoted not only through the better-studied land legislation from 1858, but also through finance: this included the expansion and regulation of commercial credit, in tandem with the commodification of government debt, which was directly attached to agricultural taxes as collateral. By midcentury, credit for “productive” purposes was commonly seen, globally and in the Ottoman Empire, as the prime motor of economic and social reform, or in the words of Tanzimat leader Fuad Pasha, “the lever of all the wonders of our age.”Footnote 42 By midcentury, there was a growing confidence around the world in public debt’s contribution to prosperity, after a long period in which British and French economists had written emphatically against it as wasteful and ruinous.Footnote 43
I will examine the role of murabahacıs alongside that of the more established financiers of the empire, known as sarrafs, as credit became essential infrastructure for development. By the mid-nineteenth century, sarrafs represented the legitimate business of interest as opposed to usury, which was associated with murabahacıs. This distinction reflects the process whereby the Ottoman government facilitated the creation of new credit markets and supported private capital, while it sought increased control over private credit, specifically through new laws on interest—the Murabaha Nizamnamesi (1851). Instead of outlawing murabaha, the government worked to turn these creditors into productive economic actors.
In Damascus, this process included the introduction of treasury bonds (Şam sergileri), a new instrument of public credit that was collateralized by village taxes, and by the early 1860s stood at the heart of a vibrant trade in state and peasant debt. The provincial treasury bonds systematized, for the first time, direct government borrowing from merchant-moneylenders in the form of a negotiable, short-term, high interest-bearing debt. The financial innovations the Ottomans introduced in the nineteenth century to increase state revenue partly resembled debt instruments in other states, but at the same time they evolved out of the existing tax-farming system, as part of a long process of fiscal experimentation that had begun a century before.
Tax-Farming and Treasury Bonds
Starting in the late seventeenth century, changes were made in the Ottoman fiscal system in order to increase the cash flow to the central treasury. The result was an expansion of tax-farming (iltizam), a system of auctioning and contracting out concessions for tax-yielding assets which was the empire’s main institution for raising revenue. Historians have explored the process whereby a specific form of tax-farming—life-term revenue contracts (malikane) assigned to local powerholders—generated a network of localized and flexible imperial administration that bound the provinces closer to the center through bargaining-based contractual relations.Footnote 44
During the eighteenth century, provincial political elites became heavily invested in the “business of governance”Footnote 45 and in long-distance trade,Footnote 46 but they were not the only key players; also essential to the very functioning of imperial governance were families of sarrafs and merchants who acted as moneylenders and guarantors to tax-farmers,Footnote 47 and as key agents in empire-wide networks for transferring state revenues. These fiscal networks served at the same time as long-distance trade routes, from which large-scale credit providers profited, including Ottoman non-Muslims and foreigners.Footnote 48 Also, in contrast to long-standing assumptions about credit instruments being typically Western, researchers have been uncovering the central role that Muslim merchants played in these operations.Footnote 49 They have examined the use of poliçes (bills of exchange) as instruments of commercial finance and, at the same time, of transferring provincial tax payments and funds for military expeditions.Footnote 50 In the latter case, provincial elites were in charge of converting such bills from Istanbul into cash, using local revenues.Footnote 51 The trade in bills of exchange became a profitable business for Istanbul-based French merchants with surplus cash; a parallel demand for cash transfers from the provinces to the center by Ottoman and foreign traders, as well as by provincial governors and tax-farmers, helped create extensive financial networks.Footnote 52 Other credit mechanisms such as deferred payment in the Ottoman postal systemFootnote 53 and havales (payment orders) for officials’ salaries and tax-farming were used in the day-to-day operations of state systems.Footnote 54 These and other mechanisms, like advance purchases (salam), were widespread already in early medieval Islam.Footnote 55
In the late eighteenth century, a new fiscal instrument was introduced, which like malikane was a life-time revenue contract, but it relied on a dramatically different logic, one in which lending to the state was detached from both tax-farm management and the right to collect taxes. In this new system, known as esham, it was shares of the expected profit of a tax-farm that were sold off, rather than its entire revenue.Footnote 56 Esham were small shares of the annual revenue that were sold to the public, including small and medium-sized savers.Footnote 57 Historians have noted the striking similarities between esham and life-annuity bonds that emerged in Europe at this time, while stressing continuity with the previous Ottoman malikane system.Footnote 58 Investors in esham became shareholders as opposed to entrepreneurs-cum-administrators temporarily delegated the right to collect taxes; that function was now reallocated from tax-farm owners to salaried government officials.
The mid-nineteenth century Damascus sergis took this logic one step further: they were a short-term bond (with a maturity date of up to twelve months) issued to a lender in return for a high lump-sum advance, which carried a high monthly interest. Moreover, while esham were mostly used for urban revenue sources, the Damascus bonds were attached to agricultural tax-farm units, hence investors’ annual profit came from villagers’ tax payments (or tithe; Turkish aşar). Lastly, esham offered new financial opportunities to non-Muslim communities, especially as the exclusive holders of the tax-farm of spirits;Footnote 59 Damascus bonds could be purchased also by Ottoman subjects under foreign protection and by foreigners, although that was a contentious issue among imperial officials and as such remained under close supervision. Therefore, by introducing the provincial treasury bonds, the government expanded the fiscal system to include new groups of creditors, while at the same time it denied them formal political power by prohibiting their holding tax-farms.Footnote 60
The circulation of bonds meant that agricultural revenue became a commodity traded as a private asset among merchants and investors. The main actors involved in the commodification of this debt were the established families of sarrafs who had close ties to the government, as well as the new groups of merchant-moneylenders, or murabahacıs. The treasury bonds were used for funding the military, administration, and hajj (pilgrimage caravans to Mecca), the latter being of crucial geopolitical, symbolic, and economic importance for the empire, and especially for the Damascene province. The introduction of the bonds in 1856 was the result of a search for credit sources more systematic than occasional loans from private merchants, and ultimately capitalized on the heightened demand for grain on world markets during the Crimean War.
By this time, the position of sarraf had changed considerably. In the 1820s their networks experienced a serious upheaval following the political executions of several prominent Jewish sarrafs and the abolition of the Janissaries, which terminated the position of ocak bazergan, itself a major source of power for the early modern Jewish financial dynasties of Istanbul.Footnote 61 The position of sarraf persisted, but now it was filled by second-tier financiers: in Damascus, members of the Farhi family continued to engage in credit and trade after the execution in 1820 of Haim Farhi, the province’s chief sarraf, but the latter position was taken up by Shemaya Angel (Anjil; 1801–1874).Footnote 62 Scholars have identified a similar shift among non-Muslim merchant-financiers in Anatolia and the Balkans after the 1820s.Footnote 63 At the same time, the provincial sarraf no longer depended on any specific governor or provincial dynasty; instead, Angel cultivated a direct relationship with the palace and grand viziers.Footnote 64 It was in this new landscape that Abraham Salomon de Camondo (1785–1873) rose to power as one of the chief imperial bankers and became the center of a restructured Ottoman Jewish financial network, with Angel in Damascus as an important node.Footnote 65 But it was not only the profile of sarraf families that changed; the main expertise of Jewish sarrafs in Istanbul became the provision of large amounts of cash on short notice for specific purposes.Footnote 66 Syria’s sarrafs offered similar services to the government, and together with rising murabahacıs, they played a key role in agricultural commercialization and financialization in the region. Shemaya Angel and his son, Azer, became primary investors in Damascus treasury bonds.
In the initial phase of sergi issue, the provincial government converted its existing debts to sarrafs into these transferable bonds. The first bonds were thus given in 1856 against previous advances by sarrafs for military officials’ salaries and taxes of villages whose revenues had been earmarked for the hajj. Footnote 67 After this phase, new sergis were given against direct cash advances to the treasury, carrying a monthly interest of 2–2.5 percent (later reduced to 1.5 percent). As collateral, purchasers received assignments on village taxes. Although upon maturity, these short-term bonds could theoretically be redeemed in full by the government, the large majority were renewed regularly, signaling both sides’ trust in and intention to prolong the debt relationship. In practice, therefore, the government debt was transferred onto the villages. Bondholders who received payments from cultivators in kind gained in this way steady access to agricultural surplus on favorable terms.
Ultimately, the treasury bonds, which relied on the triangular debt relationship of peasants, private investors, and the government, helped to complement the tax-farming system, while at the same time, standing at the heart of a growing private market for government and peasant debt (see figure 1). In contrast to occasional (and sometimes forced) loans from local merchants to cover ad hoc needs of the government, the bonds served as a regular source of government credit, which was also transferable (and divisible into smaller amounts): local and foreign merchants based in Damascus, Aleppo, and Beirut traded in the bonds and used them as collateral for credit.
Figure 1. Excerpts from a list of sergis Azer Angel purchased from local merchants (source: BOA, BEO 440/32964)
This change in practice was accompanied by a shift in official rhetoric about the provisioning of credit to the government by private individuals from an emphasis on obligation (which continued to inform imperial discourse, if less so) to framing such loans as a contribution or help (iâne, muâvenet). This language was employed in official documents to describe Angel’s long-time loyal services as the main investor in sergis.Footnote 68 Similar terms were used to frame the mandatory payment of extraordinary taxes during the Crimean War, which in the case of non-Muslims was tied to their loyalty to the empire.Footnote 69 Dong Yan identified a similar shift in Qing China, where investment in public debt came to be seen as self-interested and productive, much in line with mid-Victorian discourse.Footnote 70
Soon, the Damascus bonds became an extremely attractive investment across the region and beyond. In 1872, the British vice-consul described them as the real “temptation” for capitalists looking to invest in Syria, rather than purchasing agricultural lands (which was legalized for foreigners in 1868). He reported that even though interest payments were sometimes postponed, “[the bonds’] market value clearly proves the enjoyment of public confidence.” Therefore, he explained, “those who wish to realise their profits find no difficulty in doing so the moment a Government renewal of their bonds has been obtained, for the purchasers are in excess of the vendors.”Footnote 71 Between the mid-1850s and the bonds’ suspension in the mid-1870s, bondholders made handsome profits.Footnote 72 The bonds became popular thanks both to booming international commodity markets and to their unique terms, as a safe local investment—especially considering new commercial laws that set limits on other credit mechanisms, which were seen as potentially involving usury.
State Credit, Usury, and the Murabaha Regulation
The term murabaha referred to interest-based credit operations of local elites, not only those of moneylenders by profession. Ali Yaycioğlu analyzed the process whereby eighteenth-century ayan—provincial notables and petty office-holders—found new opportunities in monetized taxation and in the expansion of lump-sum tax collection, taking the initiative to pay in advance the taxes and expenses of communities on their behalf. These “entrepreneurs and patron-creditors,” who obtained credit from financiers to further enhance their business, profited from the interest and service fees on this operation.Footnote 73 In nineteenth-century Damascus, a more direct involvement of merchants and sarrafs in the countryside included the important, albeit little-known, function of subaşı who similarly profited from advancing villagers’ payments to the government. The position of subaşı is mostly known to historians as a chief of police, especially in pre- and early Ottoman Anatolia.Footnote 74 In the later Ottoman centuries, subaşıs became part of local fiscal administration, increasing their involvement in trade and finances. In the European provinces, the subaşı officially served as manager of a çiftlik (estate), where he was responsible primarily for securing tax payments by the villagers, although he often advanced them loans as well.Footnote 75 A similar role was performed by Refail (“Refail yahudi,” “the Jew,” most likely Farhi) in the years 1841–1842 in villages around Damascus.Footnote 76 An earlier record of a Jewish subaşı in Damascus, Binyamin bin Yaqub Farhi, is dated to 1827.Footnote 77
A central role assigned to subaşıs in Damascus was financing the hajj. Their large advances to the government for this purpose were repaid in village taxes. Upon signing a contract, the creditors received havalenames (payment orders) in the amount of the tithe of villages whose revenues had been earmarked for the hajj. In practice, a subaşı could concentrate the entire finances of a village or group of villages in his hands: providing credit for the hajj before the harvest when peasants could not yet pay their taxes, subaşıs gave the latter direct loans to cover production expenses and other needs. In addition to interest, they charged a fixed annual service fee, known as subaşılık aidatı. The interest could be paid in cash—or in kind through selem (advance purchase, below market price). These arrangements enhanced the ability of merchant-moneylenders to monopolize the grain market in certain regions, while they gained influence as financiers of the government.
In light of the proliferation of private credit dealers, throughout the nineteenth century the Ottoman state sought ways to draw on these actors for revenue raising while devising tools to gain greater supervision over them.Footnote 78 In contrast to portrayals of a zero-sum game between merchant-capitalists and the imperial state, Ottoman legislation and policy changes were a product of experimentation on the ground and negotiations with various groups of merchants, financiers, peasants, and local officials, as well as European diplomats, in what was a dynamic political-economic landscape.Footnote 79
In the early nineteenth century, peasant indebtedness was recognized as a growing problem in the provinces, one that demanded comprehensive treatment by the government. In addition to an older sharia-based discourse on usury as a form of oppression (ẓulm), by midcentury indebtedness was also seen as an obstacle to economic prosperity. The urgency of the matter was accentuated by the conviction that credit was fundamental to development, particularly for increasing agricultural productivity. In this context, the government sought to distinguish between private and public credit and between usurious and moderate interest (fāḥish versus muʿtedil faiẓ, respectively) and to set the terms of lawful interest. Yet, I argue that rather than simply outlawing murabaha, the government intended to turn private creditors into a productive factor in the reorganized, development-led economy.
Experimentation with agrarian credit was an important part of the comprehensive program of economic development pursued by the state starting in the early Tanzimat period. A continuation of earlier reform efforts, though reformulated according to the new demands of the mid-nineteenth century, the Tanzimat reforms (usually dated 1839–1876) were shaped by both internal needs and inter-imperial interactions: specifically as regards agrarian reform, statesmen and experts around the globe sought ways to reorganize administrative and economic infrastructures to increase productivity in light of a booming global grain market. During this period, Ottoman liberal-minded reformers saw the Syrian interior as a space of capitalist investment they sought to promote through the expansion of settled cultivation and individual property rights, by introducing the 1858 Land CodeFootnote 80 and enabling the commodification of state and peasant debt. Developmentalist aspirations were thus articulated by officials and lawmakers but also by intellectuals and journalists.Footnote 81 The Ottoman development program included new policies, regulations, and administrative bodies that relied on the cooperation of local elites in structured roles of oversight, information gathering, and advising the newly formed Agriculture Council (in 1843, under the aegis of the Finance Ministry).Footnote 82
This program included attempts by the state to offer credit with low interest to peasants in need. In the 1840s, state funds earmarked in the imperial budget for this purpose were occasionally provided to the provinces.Footnote 83 This required mapping the credit needs of different localities, which the government sought to do by appointing agricultural directors and regional councils staffed by local elites.Footnote 84 These attempts laid the foundations for the formation of rural credit funds (memleket sandıkları) in the 1860s—which unlike state funds, relied on local pools of capital—and two decades later the Ottoman Agricultural Bank, based on ideas of self-help, which gradually spread across Europe at the same time.Footnote 85 This new institutional infrastructure was aimed at providing cheap and accessible credit to cultivators.
Alongside this system, the government introduced the Murabaha regulation (1851) which concerned private credit. Initially, the regulation set interest rates to 8 percent annually, amended the following year to 12 percent following protests by merchants. But just as important, it stipulated that local authorities would review existing debt contracts, and in cases of poor debtors, reduce accumulated interests that exceeded 12 percent and extend repayment periods to a maximum of five years in equal installments. Recognizing the important role of creditors, the order set the terms of legitimate interest in an effort to prevent the exploitation of the peasant population (ehl-i kura).Footnote 86
Placing legal caps on interest rates, including the deduction of excessive interest from existing debts, was not a nineteenth-century innovation in the empire; the reformers drew upon an old Ottoman legal practice.Footnote 87 In 1851–1852, the state redefined lawful interest, termed fa’iḍ qānūni or nizāmi, as another principle of the Tanzimat to be implemented across the empire. In the 1860s the order was incorporated into the empire’s Commercial Code, which set the terms for its more systematic application in the provinces through the newly established commercial courts (instead of sharia courts) as well as local councils that would review existing debts.Footnote 88 Behind this move was an aspiration for standardization through local governance, which was seen as serving the moral principle of protecting peasants from abuse, but it also reflected new ideas about productive credit—the opposite of usury—as essential for agrarian development.Footnote 89
The Murabaha regulation distinguished between sarrafs as respected, established financiers who were exempted from the new restrictions, and murabahacis and “other wealthy persons” (sâir zengin kimesneler) who engaged in private contracts of moneylending at high interest rates that could lead to widespread indebtedness. The latter’s profit often came from accumulating interests on unpaid debts that included extra fees and/or advance purchase of crops at a low price: these types of contracts—subaşılık and selem, respectively—were specifically targeted by the new regulation.Footnote 90
A well-known credit mechanism, selem (Arabic salam)—the advance of cash to peasants against crops months before the harvest for a reduced price—was an old and common practice across the empire.Footnote 91 To ensure that excessive interest was avoided, the Murabaha regulation allowed the purchase of crops at their market price, with a maximum charge of 12 percent interest. Merchants with varying amounts of capital could engage with selem, and thus gain regular access to agricultural surplus on favorable terms.
Subaşılık, as explained above, combined private and public credit. The subaşı, who usually belonged to one of the big sarraf and merchant houses, functioned like a general banker of a village. In addition to advancing the village taxes to the government (up-front, as opposed to installments in tax-farming), he provided separate—collective and individual—loans to villagers, while also charging service fees.Footnote 92 By the early 1860s, the Damascus governor warned that local peasants’ debt to moneylenders had reached enormous amounts.Footnote 93 The extra fees were now prohibited, as were accumulated interest on unpaid debts.Footnote 94 In this way, subaşılık, as a mechanism that earlier in the century helped increase state revenue in the countryside, came to be treated as murabaha by the 1860s, with calls by the governor to abolish it altogether.
The order, which by 1861 had become integrated into the Ottoman Commercial Code, was circulated to the provinces, including Damascus, where it was soon met with opposition by merchants who described it as an unjust state intervention in private transactions. A petition signed by eighty-five merchants who belonged to the Hayriyye and Avrupa Tüccarları claimed that the universal application of the new interest rates to existing contracts constituted a violation of these beratlı merchants’ rights. They objected to the commercial court’s interfering in their private transactions unless specific errors or abuses were found in them, and argued that, unlike subaşıs and murabahacıs, their status was special.Footnote 95
Another letter of protest to the governor was submitted by a group of ten creditors who were British subjects and protégés. Thanks to their services, they asserted, the villages they operated in were all tax-paying and cultivating more. In their districts, they claimed, “not one of the [villages] is deserted” and “not one peasant … was under the necessity of selling property [to pay taxes],” while elsewhere villagers were “in considerable arrears of taxes.” But now, they argued, if the accounts are reopened and revised, all peasants would plead an inability to pay, as some had already done, while they as creditors had to continue to borrow at the usual rate of 24 percent “to meet our obligations and thus maintain our credit and honor.” They also reminded the governor that many of their claims on the villages originated in the loans they had provided the government at a 24 percent interest rate in the form of sergis, a debt which the government itself transferred onto the villages.Footnote 96
The subaşıs of Damascus, who were among the major investors in treasury bonds, asked to be excluded from the Murabaha regulation based on their special service as financiers of the hajj. Footnote 97 To risk losing this source of funding was indeed a challenge for the province—as was its attempt to distinguish between private and public credit: the governor and treasurer insisted on the unique status of the treasury bonds as a tool of public credit, backed by silver (or gold), whereas subaşılık was like any other private loan given to peasants. As such, they explained, subaşılık should be subjected to the new legal terms for legitimate interest.Footnote 98 Yet, the provincial government soon realized that often the same individuals engaged both in private credit (through subaşılık and selem) and in treasury bonds, and thus it was no simple task to distinguish legitimate from illegitimate credit, or sarrafs from other private creditors.
Given the bonds’ unique status, the governors preferred to see as many of them as possible held by sarrafs as trusted local financiers, and in particular, the province’s chief sarraf, Shemaya Angel, himself an Austro-Hungarian protégé. In addition to other banking services, Angel regularly provided credit to the treasury, the army, and the hajj. He also took over a considerable portion of the public debt through bonds while also buying debts that the government was unable or unwilling to pay—though, the Finance minister noted, unlike others he charged “moderate” (mu‘tedil) interest rates.Footnote 99 Still, despite potential risks, the government tried to monitor the bonds’ movement, not through official restrictions, but rather by requiring bondholders to register their endorsed bonds. These requirements were only partially followed.
Despite repeated requests by local governors to abolish credit mechanisms they struggled to control, the central government was adamant regarding the benefits of drawing on private merchants’ funds, confident that the latter’s actions could be effectively regulated using the new laws. This was also the case when Damascus governors Mehmed Emin Pasha (1862–1863) and Mehmed Rüşdi Pasha (1863–1865) relayed their concerns to Istanbul over the social and political consequences of the extensive circulation of treasury bonds, which, they argued, should be withdrawn from the market.Footnote 100 Their concerns anticipated what the state would have to deal with after the bonds were suspended in 1877; namely, the rapidly accumulating interests on numerous discounted bonds whose original owners could not be ascertained.Footnote 101 In addition to a highly inflated government debt to bondholders, the trade in what ultimately became peasants’ debt meant a greater risk for this vulnerable population. This challenge gained urgency when coupled with the ongoing concern over foreigners’ access to the local public debt.
Between Capitalist Visions and Imperial Sovereignty
By the late 1870s, following the Ottoman financial default and subsequent loss of territory in the 1877–1878 war with Russia, investments by European protégés and subjects in treasury bonds became a serious concern for Ottoman sovereignty. As Nora Barakat observed in regards to the land market in the Syrian interior, the imperative to retain sovereignty by closing it to foreigners, as some late Ottoman officials attempted to do, clashed with imperial aspirations for capitalist expansion in the region, which was promoted by pro-market land administrators.Footnote 102 This tension was similarly reflected in the decision to suspend the renewal and issue of the Damascus treasury bonds in 1877, at least as it was understood by foreign and protégé merchants.Footnote 103
As the question of loyalty took on new urgency, it became a structural element in the valuation of the bonds after their suspension. A thorough review of the province’s accounts in the 1880s found that much of its enormous debt to bondholders consisted of accumulated interests on highly discounted bonds. The government therefore set a universal rate of 10 percent as payment on the bonds. A much higher value of 51 percent was assigned to bonds that had been purchased directly from the treasury.Footnote 104 In the years that followed, local and foreign sergi holders flooded the government with demands for payment or renewal. Shemaya Angel’s son submitted multiple petitions claiming he deserved the higher rate since he did not “[find] these bonds on the street” like other merchants who bought theirs “for 3 kuruş each” (i.e., for a very low, discounted price), and avowed his and his father’s long-time loyal service to the empire in “wealth and body” (mālen ve bedenen).Footnote 105 Having original sergis was associated with loyalty to the empire, and as confirmed by the Finance Minister, those presented for payment by Shemaya’s son originated in direct advances to the treasury in its most difficult times of shortage (en müzayakalı zamanda).Footnote 106
Angel’s demands were met at least partially, whereas in most other cases of British and French protégés or nationals, bonds were valued at 10 percent. Before imposing those rates as part of long negotiations with bondholders and their families that sometimes lasted into the early 1900s, Ottoman lawmakers set to define the status of these families as “doubtful” nationals. A joint investigation with Finance Ministry officials found that these families of merchant-bankers had been holding tax-farms, paying certain taxes, and transacting in land (before the latter was opened to foreigners)—in other words, practicing the rights and duties of Ottoman subjects. Applying the new legal category of “doubtful” nationals to those merchants whose claims for foreign nationality had not (yet) been established according to the 1869 Nationality Law allowed the government to treat them as de-facto Ottoman nationals.Footnote 107
This move, together with the core legal principle that ensured Ottoman jurisdiction in cases pertaining to land regardless of its owner’s nationality, aimed at denying these financiers’ extraterritorial rights in debt disputes with locals. Such disputes often pitted indebted peasants against merchant-bankers backed by consular representatives. One case concerned Yaqub Levy-Stambouli (Islambuli), who belonged to a prominent Jewish merchant family in the region that was under British protection. In 1862, soon after the Damascus governor set to implement the Murabaha regulation and appointed the Village Commission (kura komisyonu) to oversee the process, indebted peasants rushed to court to challenge their creditors. Others submitted petitions using the language of the regulation in their complaints against usurious interest. Ten villages from the Ghūṭa (a particularly fertile area known as the oasis of Damascus) submitted a collective petition addressing their large debts to Stambouli as their subaşı, which, due to excessive interests, had reached a total of nearly 7.5 million kuruş. Footnote 108 This debt alone constituted one-tenth of the estimated total of peasant debt to moneylenders in the province by the early 1860s.Footnote 109
As the village headmen emphasized, their debts originated partly in loans they took to pay taxes (aşar and vergi—the tithe and the property tax) and production expenses, but also in treasury bonds, and they attached to their petition a copy of the sultanic edict of April 1852 on Murabaha as the legal basis for their claims to reopen and review those debts. Like other merchants in the region, the Stamboulis also engaged in the advance purchase of crops (selem) which they would store in the family’s nearby warehouse for sale. The family thus managed to secure dominance over large swaths of rural land through this year-round cycle of moneylending (see map 1). Financial innovations, like the Damascus treasury bonds, as well as joint-stock companies and guarantees-as-investment,Footnote 110 grew out of the tax-farming system, which, being far more than a traditional system of extraction, continued to evolve and became enmeshed in regional and global capitalist markets.
Map 1. Villages of the Ghūṭa (those indebted to Stambouli marked in red). Adapted from: marefa.com, “Kharīṭat manāṭiq muḥāfaẓat Rif al-ghuṭa Dimashq [خريطة مناطق محافظة ريف الغوطة دمشق],” accessed May 1, 2025 (https://rb.gy/dd48k3)
In addition to deducting excessive interest from the debt, the authorities devised an installment plan for these villages, but they also clarified that any amounts left unpaid would be charged through the sale of villagers’ confiscated produce.Footnote 111 In practice, another decade would pass before an agreement was made with those village headmen who continued to oppose these terms. During this time, the British ambassador wrote to the Ottoman Foreign Minister on Stambouli’s behalf and urged him to intervene.Footnote 112 The agreement finally made in 1881 included annual installments, the last of which was again disputed by the villagers because of sums they had previously paid. This time, diplomatic channels that Stambouli’s son was hoping to use to avoid local courts proved limited and unhelpful because of his new label as a “doubtful” national. Stambouli’s case demonstrates how, instead of placing official restrictions on the purchase or circulation of bonds, Ottoman authorities sought to balance out their consequences for sovereignty by enforcing the jurisdiction of the imperial court system. Still, the tension remained.
“Converting The Wilderness of Waste into Productive Fields”
Ottoman concerns over sovereignty in relation to treasury bonds were thus quite concrete, and not only because of individual cases of dispute with indebted peasants or the circulation and discounting of bonds without proper registration. Starting in the 1860s, offers came in from British and French firms to buy up the public debt of Damascus in return for agricultural tax-farms of certain districts. Amidst the growing influence of an emergent Euro-American financial oligarchy,Footnote 113 local governors saw these offers as clear threats to Ottoman sovereignty over its finances and agricultural lands. It was in this context that British consuls often referred to Damascus governors as “fanatics” and accused them of adopting policies that purposefully “menaced” European enterprise because of their “jealousy of Europeans” and their “wish to crush [Europeans’] influence in the Ottoman dominions.”Footnote 114
Ottoman authorities repeatedly rejected similar schemes to open British and French banking institutions in the province because of their reliance on foreign capital and on foreigners as owners of the debt.Footnote 115 Outraged by another blunt refusal by the governor, British consul Rogers wrote angrily to his superior at the embassy: “Those half-civilized Turks—whose only object is the gain of money … and whose only law is their own will or caprice—conceive that they are acting in a patriotic spirit when systematically abusing Europeans and opposing European interests, but on the contrary, it is the most degrading species of fanaticism which is then flattered by the name of patriotism.”Footnote 116 This racialized language can be placed more broadly within a mid-century British discourse of Muslim/Asian “fanaticism” which reflected colonial anxieties about threats to British domination in India and elsewhere (especially after the 1857 rebellion) and to the “European export of ‘progress’ to the world.”Footnote 117 When British officials lamented “the peculiar twisted way of looking at things peculiar to the Chinese official mind,” they referred to late Qing internal taxation of items of foreign trade which they saw as inhibiting their interests of capital reproduction.Footnote 118
The limited ability of foreign firms to take over public debt in Syria points to the unevenness of European expansion, not just globally but even within the empire, which in turn underscores the importance of multi-scalar histories of finance capitalism and public debts. The establishment of the Agricultural Bank in 1888 aimed at increasing Ottoman sovereignty at a time of clear vulnerability under the foreign-controlled Public Debt Administration and as Ottoman officials watched the impoverishment of Egyptians under British colonial rule through financial capital.Footnote 119 Provincial treasury bonds were issued again in the 1890s, only this time they were redeemed by the (British-French) Ottoman Bank and the French Crédit Lyonnais instead of the treasury.Footnote 120 Meanwhile, foreign debt demands coupled with substantial reform in the public finance system turned local tax-farmers into key supporters of the imperial treasury and underwriters of foreign borrowing and investment in infrastructure.Footnote 121 Eventually, it was not only Ottoman state measures that prevented a complete submission to international capital, but also local merchants’ ability to use foreign capital for local development and for their self-interest.Footnote 122
Such concerns about sovereignty were common to other “Asian” empires, for example Qing China. Under both Ottoman and Qing rule, fiscal experimentation involved the use of fiscal innovations alongside earlier credit practices that characterized decentralized fiscal systems such as inter-provincial transfers, merchant-farmed tax collection, and local variation in commercial taxes, which often led to European frustration and demands that internal fiscal policies be changed. While such demands relied on the argument that taxation acted upon goods and effected exchange value, Qing officials knew taxation was also inherent to social order and to the empire’s political relationship with its merchants.Footnote 123 In both empires, this relationship came to play a significant role in imperial sovereignty.
What made merchant-bankers indispensable for the Ottoman Empire was their ability to provide large and swift advances of cash (in Damascus, mostly for the hajj). Given the new exigencies of the mid-nineteenth century, they were expected to do so in a productive and loyal manner, by refraining from excessive trade in discounted bonds, especially with foreigners. The Murabaha regulation set the terms of lawful interest that applied to all who engaged with credit in its territories, including foreigners. Debates were waged between supporters of legal limits on interest and others that opposed them in the name of the “free” flow of capital. Nonetheless, later versions of the Murabaha regulation remained focused on limiting interest rates, in contrast with racialized usury laws in Europe and the United States, which found such limits unnecessary since usury was understood as external to rational economic exchange. In German-speaking lands, usury as “a discourse of order and a diagnosis of crisis” was linked to backwardness and to the imperial periphery (e.g., Galicia); it stood at the center of anti-Jewish mobilization, while also informing the creation of new credit institutions that represented modernization and self-help.Footnote 124 Anti-usury campaigns in the United States were also framed around the image of the Jewish (or “Jewefied” American) loan shark who conspired to defraud the common people.Footnote 125
In the colonial economies of India and Egypt, indigenous credit practices deemed usurious were racialized and often also criminalized. The British marginalized indigenous economic actors and labeled their practices as corrupt and irrational, treating usury as a symptom of racial defects.Footnote 126 Parallels can be found in Zionist settler-colonial discourse.Footnote 127 Usurers were understood as hoarders of wealth whose archaic ways prevented their turning that wealth into productive capital. As Johan Mathew observed in relation to communities around the Arabian Sea: “Money was used as a store of wealth, but with changing conceptions of political economy in Europe what had once been an admirable trait became an irrational obsession. As early as the Mughal era, India was maligned as a nation of hoarders, an inexhaustible sink for the world’s precious metals.”Footnote 128
The Ottoman economy was understood in similar terms; opening an English national bank in the empire was thus presented as necessary for redeeming the country from sarrafs and for “converting the wilderness of waste into productive fields.”Footnote 129 Amid Ottoman attempts to block foreign financial expansion, the sarraf became the ultimate symbol of backwardness in colonial discourse, at the very same time that changing perceptions and infrastructures of credit in the Ottoman Empire refashioned him as an ideal, productive, and loyal economic actor.
Conclusions
In the origin story of finance in the West, Julia Elyachar notes, the Ottoman sarraf “was deemed too intertwined with relationships, [politics, and kinship] to be considered a ‘modern banker.’”Footnote 130 Elyachar proposes instead a critical relational approach to finance. She argues that the Ottoman-centered financial order, which “merely violates an ideal-type of finance” associated with the West, and its commercial interactions with European societies “shaped global financial infrastructures of commercial society from which capitalism as we think of it evolved.”Footnote 131
The present article has challenged the view of nineteenth-century non-Western empires as external to or incompatible with capitalism, due to their alleged failure to develop modern financial markets given their predatory, fiscalist bureaucracies. In the first section, I argued that the origins of this view can be traced in world historical analyses’ binary understanding of state and capital, or “the political” and “the economic” as two separate spheres of power in a zero-sum game. If the ascendancy of the European world-economy entailed the triumph of the latter over the former, then the nineteenth-century Ottoman and other sovereign “Asian” empires represent an anomaly, as remnants of an archaic order in which the “political” prevailed.
The article’s second part moved beyond the state-capital binary to examine the concrete practices of merchant-financiers and government officials, and the changes in Ottoman economic policy as characterized by experimentation and negotiation. Rather than an anomaly or premodern relic, sarrafs—as agents of the state who played a key role in financialization and commercialized agriculture well into the twentieth century—are understood from this perspective as embodying the substantial overlap between private and public finance in the Ottoman Empire. Not only did a variety of groups with diverse interests and relationships with the state take part in fiscal restructuring—the “state” itself proves to be a heterogenous and wide “array of [public and private] forms and manners to organize and do the work of the state.”Footnote 132 As scholars have argued more broadly, “Enmeshing the public and the private was, in fact, typical of the state in that period—not the product of national models but of a shared political economy.”Footnote 133
In that, the Ottoman Empire was no exception, although it had distinct financial mechanisms and actors to draw on in its reorganization efforts. European merchants who integrated into the region’s booming markets to profit from new investment opportunities adapted themselves to indigenous, changing forms of credit and debt. This was part of a dynamic exchange that entailed multidirectional processes of translation and conversion from and to vernacular forms and produced and constituted global commercial landscapes.Footnote 134 As the Ottoman experience shows, it was in the particular historical convergence of these processes of exchange, translation, and competition that finance capitalism as we know it took shape.
This article has sought to reconsider the Ottoman public debt within a global history of nineteenth-century statecraft and capitalism, from a non-teleological and socially grounded perspective that recognizes the diversity of financial institutions and forms of business organization. Instead of a story of inevitable crisis and foreign domination that is read backwards, the history of the Ottoman public debt as told here is one of endogenous fiscal experimentation within the tax-farming system which led to financial innovations that paralleled those of other states at the time. The commercialization of agriculture was promoted through the commodification of public debt, while the law was used to prevent the abuse of state resources by foreigners or Ottoman subjects with extraterritorial rights. The Murabaha regulation aimed not simply to limit interest rates and outlaw “usurers,” but to turn creditors into a productive factor through regulated markets that would complement state credit for peasants.
The limits of European financial expansion within the empire highlight an important point about sovereignty as layered and relational, thus complicating common narrations of Ottoman peripheralization. They also point to a different paradox than Braudel’s Ottoman survival-and-“decadence”: the interconnectedness between nineteenth-century attempts to bring Asian/Muslim “fanatics” under European domination and later “civilizationist” thinking embedded in critical scholars’ analyses of those sovereign “Asian” empires as such.
Acknowledgments
I am grateful to Nora Barakat, Julia Elyachar, Michael O’Sullivan, Shira Pinhas, and the anonymous CSSH reviewers of this manuscript, whose invaluable comments helped improve it immensely. I also thank my cohort of fellows in 2022–23 at Harvard University’s Safra Center for Ethics and the participants in Histories of Economic Life in and around the Ottoman World (Sciences Po, Paris, 2023) for their insights. This article is dedicated to Zachary Lockman and Frederick Cooper for their support and brilliant guidance on critical conceptualizations of empire, colonialism, and capitalism.
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