This study analyses the dynamics between the non-Muslim merchant elites of Ankara and Izmir (mostly Greeks and Armenians) and their European competitors in the 18th century, particularly the mohair trade in Ankara, and Ottoman infiltration of the Dutch trade between Amsterdam and Izmir.

This study analyses the dynamics between the non-Muslim merchant elites of Ankara and Izmir (mostly Greeks and Armenians) and their European competitors in the eighteenth century. In particular, it investigates two major developments: the Dutch attempts to penetrate the mohair trade in Ankara and the local resistance they faced, and the Ottoman non-Muslim merchant’s infiltration of the Dutch Levant trade and the Dutch reaction to this form of Ottoman 'expansion'.

This book offers an account of how merchants litigated on the basis of mercantile custom as well as specific legal procedures, using an ensemble of cases brought before the Dutch consul in Izmir in the second half of the eighteenth century.

Aleppo and its Hinterland in the Ottoman Period comprises eleven essays in English and French by leading scholars of Ottoman Syria which draw on new research in Turkish, Levantine and other archival sources. Focusing on both the city and its place in the wider region, the collection examines trade guilds and Christian settlement in Aleppo, Turkmen and Bedouin tribes in Aleppo’s interior, international trade and the establishment of an Ottoman commercial tribunal in the Tanzimat period, Aleppo and the rise of the millet system, the Belgian consular presence, Sufi networks in the province of Aleppo, the countryside of Antioch under the Egyptian occupation, and the urban revolt of 1850. With contributions from Enver Çakar, Elyse Semerdjian, Charles Wilkins, Stefan Winter, Mary Momdjian, Bruce Masters, Sylvain Cornac, Mafalda Ade, Feras Krimsti, Nicolas Jodoin, Stefan Knost.

The Dutch Republic was an important hub in the early modern world-economy, a place where hundreds of monies were used alongside each other. Sebastian Felten explores regional, European and global circuits of exchange by analysing everyday practices in Dutch cities and villages in the period 1600-1850. He reveals how for peasants and craftsmen, stewards and churchmen, merchants and metallurgists, money was an everyday social technology that helped them to carve out a livelihood. With vivid examples of accounting and assaying practices, Felten offers a key to understanding the internal logic of early modern money. This book uses new archival evidence and an approach informed by the history of technology to show how plural currencies gave early modern users considerable agency. It explores how the move to uniform national currency limited this agency in the nineteenth century and thus helps us make sense of the new plurality of payments systems today.

How easy and uncomplicated was it for an 18th-century, medium-sized, Ottoman trade company to expand its business in the West? Which kind of resources, in terms of knowledge, information, experience, contacts and capital, could guarantee its successful passage from the business environment of a precapitalist oriental market to that of a major commercial and financial center of western Europe? Following the venture of the Ottoman Greek merchants Bartholo and Raphael Cardamici, who in the 1760s traded goods between Smyrna, Constantinople and Amsterdam, Despina Vlami investigates various aspects of the organization and strategy necessary for such an important transition. To expand their wholesale trade business to Amsterdam, the Cardamicis chose as their local correspondent an experienced and strong-minded Dutch merchant, Thomas De Vogel. De Vogel's letters addressed to his Ottoman clients reveal the course of their business transactions and the making of their personal relationship. At the same time, they are comprehensive and efficient tutorials on trade business and strategy guiding the Ottoman Greek merchants through the unpredictable and unfamiliar 18th-century international business universe.

This volume, based on both European and Ottoman sources, investigates the commercial, military and diplomatic relations between the Dutch and the English in the Levant from the early seventeenth to the early nineteenth century. On the one hand there was a more or less constant commercial rivalry and there were moments of outright military hostility between the two powers. On the other a common life in the Near East led to a form of solidarity which transcended the political situation in the home countries. The role of the local population of the Levant, of Ottoman officials, and of the Greeks, Armenians and other eastern Christians who intervened both as merchants and as embassy dragomans or interpreters, was often decisive in influencing the dealings between the Dutch and English residents. The nine papers examine these different aspects of a relationship which has never before been studied in a Levantine context.

Studies of early-modern Islamic cities have stressed the atypical or the idiosyncratic. This bias derives largely from orientalist presumptions that they were in some way substandard or deviant. The first purpose of this volume is to normalize Ottoman cities, to demonstrate how, on the one hand, they resembled cities generally and how, on the other, their specific histories individualized them. The second purpose is to challenge the previous literature and to negotiate an agenda for future study. By considering the narrative histories of Aleppo, Izmir and Istanbul, the book offers a departure from the piecemeal methods of previous studies, emphasizing their importance during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and highlighting their essentially Ottoman character. While the essays provide an overall view, each can be approached separately. Their exploration of the sources and the agendas of those who have conditioned scholarly understanding of these cities will make them essential student reading.

Arguably, trade is the engine of history, and the acceleration in what you mightcall 'globalism' from the beginning of the last millennium has been driven by communities interacting with each other through commerce and exchange. The Ottoman empire was a trading partner for the rest of the world, and therefore the key link between the west and the middle east in the fifteenth to nineteenth centuries. much academic attention has been given to the east india Company, but less well known is the Levant Company, which had the exclusive right to trade with the Ottoman empire from 1581 to 1825. The Levant Company exported British manufacturing, colonial goods and raw materials, and imported silk, cotton, spices, currants and other Levantine goods. it set up 'factories' (trading establishments) across Ottoman lands and hired consuls, company employees and agents from among its members, as well as foreign tradesmen and locals. here, despina vlami outlines the relationship between the Ottoman empire and the Levant Company, and traces the company's last glimpses of prosperity combined with slump periods and tension, as both the Ottoman and the British empire faced significant change and war. she points out that the growth of 'free' trade and the end of protectionism coincided with modernisation and reforms, and while doing so, provides a new lens through which to view the decline of the Ottoman world.

Mediterranean Encounters traces the layered history of Galata—a Mediterranean and Black Sea port—to the Ottoman conquest, and its transformation into a hub of European trade and diplomacy as well as a pluralist society of the early modern period. Framing the history of Ottoman-European encounters within the institution of ahdnames (commercial and diplomatic treaties), this thoughtful book offers a critical perspective on the existing scholarship. For too long, the Ottoman empire has been defined as an absolutist military power driven by religious conviction, culturally and politically apart from the rest of Europe, and devoid of a commercial policy. By taking a close look at Galata, Fariba Zarinebaf provides a different approach based on a history of commerce, coexistence, competition, and collaboration through the lens of Ottoman legal records, diplomatic correspondence, and petitions. She shows that this port was just as cosmopolitan and pluralist as any large European port and argues that the Ottoman world was not peripheral to European modernity but very much part of it.