Empires of Obligation: Law, Money, and Debt between England and the Ottoman Empire, 1670–1720

During the 1690s, both the English and Ottoman states developed new institutions for longer-term borrowing and reformed their imperial monetary systems. These synchronous but divergent developments present a puzzle that has not been answered by rigidly separate English and Ottoman historiographies. “Empires of Obligation” follows merchants trading between England and the Ottoman Empire to understand how both states responded differently to the challenges of global trade and fiscal crisis. At this time, English merchants were the most powerful European traders in the Ottoman Empire, and the Ottoman Empire represented England’s greatest single market for its woolen textiles, its largest industry. As Levant Company merchants swapped woolens for silk, they also blended international private credit with domestic public finance. They were the largest merchant investors relative to the size of their trade in the Bank of England and helped facilitate Ottoman longer-term public borrowing through the mālikāne system. From within England’s bureaucracy, they also worked to ease global trade through an “intrinsic value” theory of money, the idea that coins represented a government commitment to provide a fixed amount of precious metal. At the same time, the Ottoman state sought to redefine money as an instrument of the state, not a tool of trade. Following merchants who themselves bridged two empires that are rarely compared shows interconnected but divergent responses to the challenges of making money work both within and between states at the end of the seventeenth century.