The Bill of Exchange, <i>Poliçe</i> , and Financial Instruments Between Europe and the Ottoman Empire in the Seventeenth Century

This article examines the development of a financial instrument, the poliçe, through interactions with interstate finance in the seventeenth-century Ottoman Empire. In doing so, it highlights the dynamism of Ottoman finance and the importance of interactions between European and Middle Eastern finance—a perspective missed by a long tradition in economic history of drawing comparisons between the European bill of exchange and the Middle Eastern suftaja. The poliçe was described by European merchants as a bill of exchange and used in both Euro-Ottoman and intra-Ottoman transactions. Its usage facilitated the workings of the Ottoman fiscal system but also introduced questions about sovereignty, value, and money’s mobility that had to be addressed across a plural Ottoman legal system. The poliçe, consequently, shows not simply how institutions moved across the early modern world but also how they changed through interactions with other financial instruments, political authority, and local regimes of value.