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.

Religious endowments and their credit activities in the early modern Ottoman Empire have been a well researched topic in Ottoman historiography. The majority of the scholarly research, however, focuses on endowments from the point of cash waqfs and their role in major urban centers in the Ottoman Empire. Rural societies and their relations with waqfs in times of crises have largely been neglected. This paper offers new insights regarding credit relations between village societies and waqfs in the early modern Ottoman Empire by using the Muslim court registers (ser’iyye sicilleri) of Edirne from the eighteenth century. Particularly, as part of the Muslim court registers of Edirne, the hitherto unused borrowing entries that concern the Haremeyn-i serifeyn waqfs endowed for the Holy cities are used as the main sources. It focuses on the financial activities of waqfs (i.e., sultanic waqfs or evkaf-i selatin) in the rural spheres of Edirne between the 1740s and 1810s. Going beyond the conventional interpretations of religious foundations, this paper frames waqfs as credit institutions before the proliferation of modern banks in the Ottoman Empire. Unlike modern banks, waqfs offered credit to villagers (as well as to various segments of society) that could be returned with an interest in a longer period of time. On the one hand, through the credits waqfs provided, village societies found a way to pay large sums of taxes to the state (i.e., cizye). On the other hand, the interest accumulated as a result would create larger problems later on (i.e., property transfer or abandonment of villages). In other words, this paper suggests, waqfs offered to rural societies a wide range of credit options that alleviated villagers' economic problems in the short run, yet caused more burdens in the long term. Considering the efforts of the Ottoman state to centralize waqf revenues in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that posed a serious threat to the waqf institution (especially to cash waqfs) itself, it argues that expanding waqfs’ influence among rural societies was a way to protect their position in the reforming period of pious endowments. As a result, the role of waqfs as a main credit institution among rural societies would continue well into the late nineteenth century when financial system had other formal borrowing venues.

Why did a number of big businesses face financial difficulties in the eve of the Constitutional Revolution in the Ottoman Empire in 1908 and how did they overcome them? By utilizing hitherto overlooked Armenian-language business magazines and periodicals, this paper revolves around the relations between financial and commercial institutions and the broader society, and it will focus on a number of cases of financial difficulties and bankruptcies from the provinces in Anatolia in the last years of the reign of Abdulhamid II to answer this question. The scholarship has approached the economic crisis in the period preceding the Constitutional Revolution as the material basis which prepared the ground for political change. Some scholars have particularly questioned the possible links between the worsening living conditions of different groups in the society such as workers and state officials and their susceptibility to political agitation. Others focused on the protest movements against rising taxes in various provinces of the empire as a prelude to the revolution. Yet, I argue, due to their focus on the ensuing political change, these works hinder us from seeing how the major economic crisis—a shrinking economy, failure of credit institutions, unemployment—was experienced in different part of the Ottoman economy. Therefore, the paper examines how the crisis was addressed and discussed by different groups, creating new forms of interactions between financial institutions, merchants and the broader society. By focusing on the impact of the crisis on one of the main actors of commercial and financial networks, namely the big merchants and entrepreneurs, the paper highlights three interrelated aspects the economic crisis of 1906-1908. First, it explains the domino effect of the crisis which disturbed various local and regional credit and commodity markets, slowed down businesses and left tens of small businesses and hundreds of workers in a precarious position throughout the country. Second, it deliberates upon the agency of the Hamidian state and Ottoman financial institutions during the crisis, particularly the ways in which they dealt with the worsening economic situation and tried to assure confidence in the business community. Thus, through analyses of the news and the language used in business magazines and newspapers it allows us to understand how financial difficulties of the merchants were addressed and discussed as problems of the broader society—while the Ottoman local and regional commercial and credit markets were firmly linked to the global economy, hence its crisis.