How can historians reconstruct informal economies of the early modern period, and what can informal economies tell us about early modern societies and empires more broadly? Taking heed from studies of early modern informal economies in Europe and the Atlantic, this article shows how an eighteenth-century Ottoman shadow economy of horse-traffickers sheds new light on commercialization trends and state transformation. It analyzes a series of fifty-one imperial decrees concerned with fixing the problem of missing horses at Ottoman post stations and examines the shifting, contradictory diagnoses of why, and how, horses went missing. To make sense of this discursive instability, this article first reads these decrees chronologically to delineate the fitful expansion of central bureaucratic knowledge about the pan-imperial post station system, an exclusively official communications network. Then, the article switches gears and reads the decrees against chronology. It places a range of discrete, illicit activities within the same analytical frame to reveal the existence of a shadow economy that had mushroomed around post stations across the empire and diverted horses towards profit-making ventures. By piecing together qualitative evidence of this shadow economy, this article reveals evidence of intensifying overland commercial activity, demonstrating that early modern connections were not solely maritime phenomena. It further argues that central bureaucrats were unable to recognize and stamp out horse-trafficking despite having information about them because they lacked a “unifying matrix” to parse the numerous, but discrete, reports that flowed into the capital. In this way, it highlights the structural blindspots of state formation.

This paper will reinterpret the late Ottoman fiscal crisis from the perspective of ordinary people who worked in the mining, distribution, and sale of salt in the Ottoman lands. The story of the Ottoman loans is conventionally told as a story of financiers and statesmen in Istanbul and the Great Power capitals. However, the Ottoman government’s ability to secure external financing came to depend heavily upon new commodity taxes that profoundly impacted certain kinds of agriculture in the countryside. Thus, as part of the security for a set of loans in the 1860s, the Ottoman government established a new state monopoly on salt. This monopoly would only become more important to state finances after the imperial default of 1875-76 and the establishment of the Ottoman Public Debt Administration (OPDA) in 1881. The salt monopoly was the largest of the revenue sources ceded to the OPDA; by World War I, it would account for over half of the administration’s total revenue. This paper will argue that the experience of salt workers offers a new perspective on how fiscal crisis reconfigured Ottoman society from the ground up. Making the salt monopoly profitable entailed vast and continuous anti-smuggling operations, which targeted both the sale of “unlicensed salt” within the Ottoman lands, and the transportation of such salt whether into or within the Empire. These efforts left a broad trail of documents across the late Ottoman archives, including reports on individual smugglers and salt depots. Building on the work of Batman (2016) on tobacco smuggling in the Black Sea region, this paper reads such state-centered documents against the grain, to recover the perspective of people who worked in the salt trade: how their livelihoods changed with the establishment of the monopoly, what circumstances drove them to resist the monopoly, and the means they employed to do so. The paper will show how the creation of “unlicensed salt” as a legal category led to the emergence of an illicit economy that (unlike the case of the tobacco monopoly) was centered on a basic necessity that all people and animals consumed.

One of the arguments for the underrepresentation of Muslim-owned banks in the Islamicate world before 1900 is the prevalence of inert capital tied up in pious endowments (waqf/awqaf). To highlight the waqf’s function as both expedient and encumberance, this paper examines the interactions between Muslim pious endowments and local formal banks in the Ottoman Empire between 1850 and 1890. Contrary to the picture of uniform waqf stagnation, Muslim entrepreneurs in all three contexts relied on endowments to reduce transactions costs and enter competitively into the market, and many of the most prosperous Muslim merchant communities owed their initial success to the support of these institutions. Still, with full recognition of the legal restraints applied to utilizing waqf assets for purposes other than those outlined in their charters, many Muslim entrepreneurs tried to link their endowments to the financial/insurance services and interest-bearing capital supplied by banks. They did so because they recognized that waqf alone could not meet all of their institutional needs in a rapidly changing regional economy. Although this was nominally a violation of the stipulations of many waqf deeds, entrepreneurs attempted, with inconsistent success thanks to legal obstacles, to fuse endowments to non-Muslim banks to offset the persistent problem of inadequate access to credit. Curiously, however, the interlinking of endowments and banks did not lead to the formation of Muslim banks before 1900. That only occurred after the creation of national level waqf committees which supported the growth of Muslim formal banking institutions as an official policy. Through its transregional emphasis, this paper makes an important intervention in Ottoman economic history by examining the extent to which Ottoman endowments interacted with newly founded banking institutions, the obstacles to further integration, and how these developments compare to Muslim economic histories in colonial settings. Unlike other Muslim environments outside the empire, in the Ottoman context the Ministry of Imperial Awqaf did not assume the function of a bank and facilitate the centralization of endowment capital, nor did Ottoman legal rulings and handbooks allow banks to assume control over endowments. Ultimately, this paper demonstrates that waqf-formal banking interactions in the period 1850-1890 had economic consequences for Muslim banking into the next century both in the Ottoman Empire and outside it.