Empires of Obligation: Global Monetary Governance between Early Modern England and the Ottoman Empire
The 1690s was a period of profound financial change in both England and the Ottoman Empire. In England, the founding of the Bank of England in 1694 backed by new ideas about money adopted through the Great Recoinage of 1696 funded Britain’s global wars and empire. In the Ottoman Empire, the government introduced longer-term public borrowing in 1695 through a newtax farming system, the mālikāne, and introduced a new empire-wide coin, the kuruş, in a 1697 recoinage. Despite the striking parallels between English and Ottoman financial developments, their histories have been told as separate, largely domestic affairs.
Instead of assuming a national or even regional perspective, this talk follows Levant Company merchants whose trade became increasingly intertwined with state institutions in both empires.Levant Company merchants invested disproportionately in the Bank of England in England and were incorporated as fiscal agents into longer-term structures of public debt in the Ottoman Empire. At the same time, merchants’ interstate shipments of coins and their arbitrage activities challenged each state’s domestic control over money. What emerged in response weretwo different attempts to redefine money: one privileging international merchant creditors and the other imperial understandings of money. Through Levant Company merchants, we can connect famous English events with little-known Ottoman developments and expose a plurality of responses to early modern global trade instead of one single path to modern capitalism.
this event is free to attend but booking is required.
This page was last updated on 14 March 2025
