This paper draws on methods of historical anthropology to revisit the case of the Ottoman sarraf and push back against literature in critical financial studies that reads as if history began in the 1970s, centers around the global North, and moves outward like a mobile “frontier” remaking the world in its image. Such an approach follows in the footsteps of classic work on imperialism and financial capital that incorporated an origin story of finance as a product of the capitalist West, even though scholars of the Middle East and Indian Ocean know that if there is any such thing as a “frontier of finance,” it moved from East to West long before the Industrial Revolution. In this vein, the Ottoman Capitulations, for example, are usually left out of universalizing theories in the West, even though they are an infrastructure of commerce and finance in Europe as well. In contrast, I take the case of the Ottoman sarraf as a “theory-machine” (Helmreich 2011) of finance. The sarraf is usually read in specialist literature as a “pre-modern” character that disappeared with the rise of “real” banks in the mid-nineteenth century. Such approaches reinforce a lingering tendency to treat Ottoman financial infrastructures as local, particular, and ethnographic. Recent research unsettles that account, but the implications can be further extended. This case of the sarraf and the Ottoman public debt can contribute to theories of finance and financialization more generally. From such an approach, the sarraf reappears as a node in what economist Perry Mehrling calls, with reference to finance in general when examined from the “money-view,” an extended “web of time-dated promises to pay that stretches from now into the future, and from here around the globe” (Mehrling 2017).

The paper deals with a period of intense debates in the Ottoman Empire over economic policies, particularly concerning the management of imperial finances and private capital following the imperial default in 1875-6. These debates, mirroring worldwide discussions during this time of global financial crisis, often centered on the morality and efficiency of financial intermediaries, sometimes labeled as ‘usurers’, and their role in precipitating the crisis. One such criticism of ‘big capital’ and the governments that allowed it to dominate the finances of the Ottoman and other states including Russia, Spain, Argentina, and Mexico, was developed by Ruhi al-Khalidi shortly before his death in 1913. Khalidi came from one of Jerusalem’s prominent landowning families with a vast record of service in the imperial bureaucracy and is mostly known as one of the first opponents to Zionist settler colonialism. Much of the literature characterizes as ambivalent or contradictory early twentieth-century Palestinian elites’ view of the Zionist movement, whose economic achievements they both admired and resented, as part of their general fascination with Europe and resistance to its aggressive encroachment upon Ottoman sovereignty. However, Khalidi presented a much more nuanced perspective which relied on a global analysis of economic power relations and a concrete vision of state development and individual productivity, based on financial investment. His vision was profoundly shaped by the imperial default and its ongoing repercussions for Ottomans subjects of all walks of life, particularly peasants dispossessed from their land, but also merchants and artisans. As this paper will argue, drawing on one of his unstudied manuscripts from 1912, Khalidi’s ideas on sovereignty and development engaged with broader debates worldwide on the role of private capital in state finances and in society. Moreover, they reflected regional discourses and discussions that informed the agendas of nationalist movements in the late and post-Ottoman Arab world, sometimes to very different ends.

This paper connects late Ottoman debates over economic policy to developmentalist initiatives in the Arab provinces in the 1890s and 1900s. Older literature describes a “paradox” between Ottoman Arab elites’ aspirations towards a progress they associated with Europe and a desire to maintain Ottoman sovereignty in the face of European expansion. This paper explores a more complex set of debates that reflected global discussions about economic sovereignty that were also relevant in spaces like Germany and the United States during the financial crises of the late nineteenth century. In particular, the paper focuses on discussions among Arab elites in Istanbul and Damascus lawmaking circles over imperial development, Zionist investment in Palestine and the Hijaz railway. These elites had deep ties and investments in agrarian and commercial contexts across Syria and beyond. The paper draws on the 1890s diaries of Sultan Abdulhamid II’s Damascene palace associate Izzet Pasha al-Abid who came from a landowning family with deep ties to the provincial administration in Syria especially through the career of Izzet Pasha’s father, Holo Pasha al-Abid, in the 1850s and 1860s. In his diaries, Izzet Pasha expressed a vision of Syria and Hijaz as bulwarks of Ottoman sovereignty in comparison to the tumult he perceived in Anatolia. He also sharply criticized foreign borrowing and saw his efforts to reform tax collection practices and promote Ottoman infrastructure and agrarian production as clear alternatives to imperial indebtedness and the financial “fate of Egypt”, which he saw as distinct from the Ottoman experience. The paper connects Izzet Pasha’s views to those of administrative officials in Damascus as they debated the desirability of the Hijaz railway and Zionist colonization, showing that many favored a national economy vision that promoted preserving the regional status quo especially in terms of labor, production, land ownership and sovereignty. The paper argues that these debates over property policy and commerce, which followed broader regional and global tensions between free trade-ist liberal thought and aspirations of national economy, shaped the long-term legacies of Ottoman administration in the colonial and postcolonial Arab world.

This paper examines the strategies deployed and policies elaborated in the process of shoring up imperial sovereignty and finances through the development of the Sultan’s Lands in the countryside of Aleppo province. Since the earliest days of the Tanzimat, if not before, extending cultivation into the empire’s “empty lands” had been a priority of Ottoman administrators. The anticipated production from these lands was seen as one of the most promising ways to augment imperial revenues by increasing tithe income. This project took on increasing urgency in the wake of the 1875-76 imperial default and the formation of the Public Debt Administration when many of the most lucrative tithes were diverted to cover the empire’s debt and interest payments. Others were increasingly designated as kilometric guarantees to finance railroad construction. The literature has focused on the economically weak position of the empire’s financial institutions in this moment, but this paper contends that these circumstances were also generative. In the midst of these encroachments on one of the empire’s most secure sources of revenue, Ottoman officials sought to carve out spaces of fiscal sovereignty that would be less vulnerable to foreign creditors and concessionaires. The institution of the Privy Purse created one such space by acquiring vast properties across the empire that the Sultan held as his private property. Many of these properties were in the regions of “empty lands.” Although the institution had initially been established in the 1850s, the years following the default saw the Privy Purse administration ramp up considerably its efforts to acquire lands and maintain them in cultivation. In Aleppo, which would ultimately become one of the most lucrative provinces for the Privy Purse, these lands were located in relatively marginal areas for cultivation, posing challenges for farmers and administrators alike. Through an examination of the Privy Purse Administration’s files about Aleppo in the Ottoman Archives, including the original regulations governing their management, correspondence between the officials administering them, and cases involving counterclaims to their ownership, this paper will explore how administrators understood the role of these lands as a space both for establishing fiscal sovereignty and for testing potential policies and “best practices” for the developmentalist state. It argues that administrators walked a fine line between maximizing extraction and offering leniency and generous conditions to cultivators working in marginal ecologies, all while fending off efforts by local elites to acquire these lands for themselves.