European Financial Control in the Ottoman Empire: a Study of the Establishment, Activities and Significance of the Administration of the Ottoman Public Debt. Donald C. Blaisdell

1930 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 322-323
Author(s):  
C. C. Eckhardt
1964 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 47-63 ◽  
Author(s):  
Olive Anderson

In 1929 the historian of European financial control in the Ottoman Empire—that most significant factor in the affairs of the Near East at the turn of the nineteenth century—found ‘the seed of the idea’ of European control in the second Turkish foreign loan, raised in 1855. Nevertheless, he added virtually nothing to the brief and rather inaccurate account of this transaction given in 1903 by that able retired official of the Ottoman Bank, A. du Velay. It may therefore be worth while to discuss, from the profusion of evidence now available, the circumstances in which this loan and its predecessor of the year before were raised, and the extent and significance of the foreign control which these transactions introduced into Turkey.


1978 ◽  
Vol 9 (4) ◽  
pp. 519-537 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael R. Milgrim

The 1877–1878 Russo-Turkish War left the Ottoman Empire burdened with a new debt that was to play a crucial role in the relations between Russia and Turkey in subsequent years. Diplomatic and financial histories, however, have largely overlooked this indemnity for a number of reasons. Foremost among them is the timing of the ratification of the indemnity treaty. The actual agreement governing the procedure for the payment of the indemnity was drawn up four years after the San Stefano negotiations and the Congress of Berlin. While monographs concerned with these events mention the indemnity, they fail to follow it up. Second, in the post-Berlin period the European bondholders of the Ottoman Public Debt were primarily interested in securing control over the administration of the revenues servicing their debt. The indemnity, however, remained apart from those revenues ceded to the Ottoman Public Debt Administration. The standard financial histories naturally concentrate on the projects of the bondholders and refer to the indemnity only in passing.


Author(s):  
Pierluigi SIMONE

The recast of the international debt contracted by the former Ottoman Empire and the overcoming of the capitulations regime that had afflicted Turkey for centuries, are two of the most relevant sectors in which the political and diplomatic action promoted by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk has been expressed. Extremely relevant in this regard are the different disciplines established, respectively, by the Treaty of Sèvres in 1920 and then by the Treaty of Lausanne in 1923. After the Ottoman Government defaulted in 1875, an agreement (the Decree of Muharrem) was concluded in 1881 between the Ottoman Government and representatives of its foreign and domestic creditors for the resumption of payments on Ottoman bonds, and a European control of a part of the Imperial revenues was instituted through the Administration of the Ottoman Public Debt. At the same time, the Ottoman Empire was burdened by capitulations, conferring rights and privileges in favour of their subjects resident or trading in the Ottoman lands, following the policy towards European States of the Byzantine Empire. According to these capitulations, traders entering the Ottoman Empire were exempt from local prosecution, local taxation, local conscription, and the searching of their domicile. The capitulations were initially made during the Ottoman Empire’s military dominance, to entice and encourage commercial exchanges with Western merchants. However, after dominance shifted to Europe, significant economic and political advantages were granted to the European Powers by the Ottoman Empire. Both regimes, substantially maintained by the Treaty of Sèvres, were considered unacceptable by the Nationalist Movement led by Mustafa Kemal and therefore became the subject of negotiations during the Conference of Lausanne. The definitive overcoming of both of them, therefore represents one of the most evident examples of the reacquisition of the full sovereignty of the Republic of Turkey.


2011 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 18-38
Author(s):  
Kate Fleet

AbstractThis article examines the relations between the Ankara government and British financial circles in the period between the collapse of the Ottoman empire at the end of the First World War and the establishment of the new Turkish Republic in 1923. Highlighting the difficulties experienced by British business interests due to the political stance of the British government, it also calls into question the ability of such business circles to operate effectively within the new Turkey and demonstrates the new line adopted by the nationalists to British capital and to foreign financial control in the new Republic.


2021 ◽  
pp. 225-254
Author(s):  
Mark Lawrence Schrad

Chapter 8 examines temperance and prohibition history within the Ottoman Empire and secular Turkey. Drinking and viticulture were widespread throughout the empire, though the trade was often in the hands of non-Muslims. The Ottoman liquor traffic even became integral to the European-run Ottoman Public Debt Administration. Mustafa Kemal Atatürk was among the drunkest leaders in world history, yet Atatürk and the secular Turkish government in Ankara embraced prohibitionism as a means of denying badly needed alcohol revenues to the Christians occupying their lands—most notably the British controlling Istanbul and the Greeks around Smyrna. Turkish prohibition expanded across Anatolia, as Atatürk liberated Turkey’s occupied territories. Only in 1924, with the end of foreign occupation, was the Kemalist prohibition rescinded, and replaced with a national alcohol monopoly, in which the financial benefits of the liquor trade would accrue to the Turkish state, not to foreigners.


1930 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 272
Author(s):  
S. C. Wyatt ◽  
Donald C. Blaisdell

2018 ◽  
Vol 55 (2) ◽  
pp. 183-220 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael O’Sullivan

This article analyses the Ottoman government’s attempt to encourage Indian Muslims to purchase its treasury bonds during the Balkan Wars in 1912–13. It contrasts this largely unsuccessful scheme with the enormous contributions of Indian Muslims to the parallel campaign to raise relief funds for Ottoman soldiers and refugees. While this latter movement involved the intermittent dispatch of remittances to the Ottoman Ministry of Finance and Red Crescent, the bond drive demanded a multi-year commitment and conjured up a variety of financial and religious dilemmas for Indian Muslim constituencies. To better contextualise these divergent outcomes, this article first examines the infrastructures of Indian Muslim religious and financial exchange with the Ottoman Empire from the mid-nineteenth century. It then charts the charitable campaigns organised by Indian Muslims between 1877 and 1912, before turning to the Balkan Wars. The foundering of the bond drive stemmed from problems on both the supply and demand side, namely, International Financial Control (IFC) in the Ottoman context, informational asymmetries, fears of Ottoman insolvency and an aversion by some to accepting interest. Nevertheless, Indian Muslim capital enjoyed a freer degree of circulation than in the post-Ottoman environment, where new powers sought to curtail or control it in an age of financial de-globalisation.


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