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Paying for a New Order: Financiers and Ottoman Reforms in Egypt, 1786-1806
Abstract
This paper explores the role of Ottoman merchants and creditors in shaping the “New Order” reforms (Nizam-? Cedid) around the turn of the nineteenth century. Specifically, it focuses on Ottoman merchants engaged in high-value trade in Egypt (known as M?s?r Tüccar?) who acted as financiers for Ottoman state officials on an ad hoc basis throughout the eighteenth century. The Porte grew increasingly reliant on private merchants as intermediaries in provisioning and as community leaders in local governance during its campaign to overthrow Egypt’s Qazda?l? rulers from 1786-1787. While unsuccessful in the long run, the Porte’s efforts to re-consolidate imperial rule in Egypt in the 1780s experimented with fiscal strategies (such as seizing improper tax farms and instituting new pricing mechanisms on export commodities) that would be implemented empire-wide during the Nizam-? Cedid. I argue that networks of private capital on the Egyptian coast were central to Ottoman strategies of revenue collection intended to circumvent the empire’s reliance on local strongmen. The leader of the Egyptian campaign was the grand admiral of the Ottoman navy, Cezayirli Gazi Hasan Pasha, who was instrumental in initiating empire-wide reforms before his death in 1790. The Nizam-? Cedid reforms have been studied primarily as an Ottoman military project. More recently, scholars have begun to situate the Ottomans within the same processes of military modernization, fiscal centralization, and political accountability that entangled other global powers from the 1780s to the 1820s. This paper draws on correspondence between Egyptian officials, the M?s?r Tüccar?, and the Ottoman Porte held in the records of the governor’s divan of Alexandria, an invaluable but largely unstudied source for the Ottoman administration of Egypt during the Nizam-? Cedid period. Alongside the local record, this paper makes use of the registers from the New Order Treasury (Irad-? Cedid Hazinesi) and Grain Administration (Zahire Nezareti), both established in 1793 to centralize imperial control over new revenue streams from tax farms, tariffs on various commodities, and grain provisioning. Egypt, which is usually omitted from analyses of Ottoman statecraft after 1760, is in fact an ideal case study for the intersecting challenges that the Ottoman state faced in the eighteenth century: the expansion of the political arena to incorporate a growing commercial society, and the rise of local power holders in the provinces. The Muslim merchant financiers of Egypt thus provide an ongoing and provincially grounded context for the imperial reforms of the long nineteenth century.
Discipline
History
Geographic Area
Ottoman Empire
Sub Area
13th-18th Centuries