As part of the panel’s objective to challenge notions of premeditated and uncontested commercial policies, the paper examines competing understandings of belonging and exclusion in the Mediterranean trade. The expulsion of the prominent Ottoman Jewish merchant Haim Camondo and his family from the Ottoman Empire in 1782 and their subsequent claim of Habsburg subject-hood, offer intriguing insights into the messy regulations regarding transimperial actors. How did the Camondos negotiate different understandings of commercial affiliation and protection? What were the challenges for Ottoman and Habsburg authorities in dealing with the Camondos’ shifting claims of belonging? By working with Habsburg, British, and Ottoman archival sources, the paper shows that the family exploited the ambiguous notions of subject-hood and diplomatic protection to safeguard their possessions and foster their businesses. It further demonstrates that also governments, striving to gain access to the merchants’ wealth or networks, resorted to similar tactics and contested their narratives. Another goal of the panel is to further complicate the notion of clear-cut differences and speculative similarities in the Ottoman-European contacts. Thus, the paper focuses on intermediary activities of the Camondos, which connected as much as defined the commercial and financial spheres. What can their activities teach us about the forces shaping the trade between the Ottoman and the European worlds? What was the family’s significance for the Ottoman political economy? Before their expulsion, the Camondos had been trading in European countries with legal and commercial privileges of Ottoman subjects. In the Ottoman Empire, they relied on alternating French, British, and Habsburg protections, but also offered the protecting powers their intermediary services. Even after Haim Camondo assumed Habsburg subject-hood and escaped Istanbul to the port city of Trieste, he and his family members continued trading as Ottoman subjects rather than as Habsburg Jews. Ultimately, after over two decades of exile, his sons returned to Istanbul and established one of the first Ottoman banks, which would significantly contribute to the family's prominence in the nineteenth century. Through the Camondos’ peregrinations, it becomes apparent that authority over commercial and financial policies pertained as much to the merchants as to the governments. The negotiations of these authorities, as the paper finally argues, formed an intermediary field of connections and exclusions between the Ottoman and European spheres.

This paper will explore attempts by the authorities in Ottoman Algiers in the later 17th and 18th centuries to define and regulate a commercial space at the intersection between the Ottoman Mediterranean and the wider waters beyond. Through examining the Ottoman Turkish, English, and French treaty texts between Algiers and foreign states, correspondence of the deys with their Ottoman masters and European governments, and mercantile correspondence, several key themes emerge in understanding Algiers as a commercial power in the 18th century. As a frontier province of the Ottoman Empire, but also a de-facto independent state with its own foreign and commercial policy, Algiers developed practices with that attempted to balance two realities. On the one hand, the Algerian authorities wanted to enforce military authority over the Western Mediterranean, acting as a kind of security screen to protect its own interests and the Ottoman waters beyond against common enemies, monitoring commerce for potential contraband. On the other, it aimed to encourage commerce to, from, and via Algiers, as well as protecting the interests and security of Algerian merchants. Agreements and correspondence between Algiers and foreign powers show a wide range of rights on both sides, but also indicate a consent that security concerns necessarily had to play a role in the daily function of peaceful commerce. Whereas the historiographical focus has usually been, and often remains, focused on the depredations of the so-called “Barbary corsairs” against Western European shipping, an examination of the Algerian and Ottoman side of the sources indicates a more complex picture of trying to maintain peaceful commerce and friendly relations in a maritime space that was almost constantly dominated by conflict. The complications of this system became readily apparent from the beginning of the eighteenth century, as French and British privateering against each other’s shipping resulted in attacks against Algerian merchants and their cargos. The limited means of redress available to either the Algerian authorities or their merchants indicates shifting attitudes towards Algiers as a Mediterranean political and economic power in the 18th century.

This paper examines the contested connections between Ottoman monetary policies and commercial credit transactions to see how creditors and debtors attempted to sway state monetary policies and how these polices in turn mediated credit relations. Although money and credit are often seen as parallel systems of exchange, with credit substituting for cash in currency-scarce markets, the terms of credit transactions were set in the language of a currency. Therefore, through their monetary policies, the Ottoman state had to balance the interests of creditors with the predicament of debtors. Debasements and inflationary policies over the term of a contract could leave creditors with a loss. Similarly, “crying down” the value of a coin caused debtors to face nearly unsurmountable bills. In other words, early modern credit relations amplified patterns of advantage propagated by the politics surrounding money. To combat disadvantageous monetary policies, different factions within Ottoman society—debtors, creditors, salaried soldiers, regional governors, and shopkeeper—endeavored to sway state policies. Unpopular debasements sometimes contributed to the overthrowing of sultans while newly-crowned sultans often restored the value coins to garner support from creditors. In keeping with the panel’s goal of complicating narratives of clear-cut state power, this paper argues that Ottoman monetary policy was the consequence of competing interests from across Ottoman society. Next, this paper presents a case study of Anglo-Ottoman credit relations in order to examine how Ottoman monetary policies complicated trans-imperial credit relations as the web of credit was expanding globally. This case study therefore contributes to the panel’s investigation of the challenges and possibilities of connecting Ottoman and European political economy. In the early modern Ottoman market, British merchants confronted a heterodox monetary environment where Venetian ducats, Spanish pieces of eight, Dutch lion thalers, and Polish isolettes circulated alongside the Ottoman akçe and kuru?. In their credit transactions, merchants would often specify how payment should be made in a mix of currencies rather than relying on the stability of any one currency. Even with these provisions, uncertainty over the Ottoman currency’s stability could still suspend credit entirely. When conflicts arose over the quality and value of different coins, however, both Ottoman and British merchants relied on Ottoman courts to resolve their disputes. By investigating their treatment of these debt disputes, we can discover how the Ottoman legal system confronted the common and persistent problem of how to balance the possibilities of credit and the perils of debt.