Early modern Ottoman money was a major political project with clear stakes for creditors and debtors. Despite stabilizing mechanisms introduced by either the state or commercial interests, the value of the many different coins used in the empire fluctuated through debasement, wear, and counterfeiting. Through court cases, fetwas, and chronicles, this paper first examines the largely undiscussed dialogue that emerged between legal and financial interests on the relationship between money and credit contracts in Istanbul during a period of monetary instability in the seventeenth century. Particularly, how did merchants and judges value a plurality of variable coins when pursuing a delayed payment? And what were the consequences for different groups including creditors and debtors? Early modern credit relations permeated all aspects of Ottoman economic life. They constituted the life blood of human relations, forging viable social groups and distributing power within them. Through monetary policies, state actors, often swayed by powerful factions, intervened in these debates even as other segments of society resisted those policies. Through the relationship between credit and money, this paper then intercedes in debates on the influence of European capital in the Ottoman Empire by examining the English Levant Company’s credit relations with Ottoman subjects in the second half of the seventeenth century. This examination reveals the diversity of early modern ideas about money and the challenge of navigating monetary environments that weighted the interests of creditors and debtors differently. By tracing Levant Company merchants’ agreements with Ottoman traders and state bureaucrats over credit transactions, moneylending, and counterfeiting in Ottoman courts, Levant Company courts, and private correspondence in English and Ottoman, this paper demonstrates how Levant Company agents selectively adopted practices of Ottoman legal customs like istiglâl credit transactions, the use of pawns (rehn), promissory notes (temessük), bills of exchange (poliçe), court documentation (hüccet), and the agio rate of exchange to mitigate risks in their trade with Ottoman merchants and navigate between state and market assessments of money’s value. Further, it demonstrates the persistence of inter-English disputes over credit. Together, this history counters longstanding triumphalist narratives about the role of English chartered companies in the rise of global credit networks and contradicts arguments about the role foreign legal systems played in supporting European merchants. Instead, it demonstrates the persistent problem of both inter-English and English-Ottoman credit relations in the early modern period and the role Ottoman legal customs played in mitigating those risks.

Was the invasion of Sudan by Ottoman-Egypt a colonial endeavour? Can transformations in credit-debt relations help to demarcate the ‘colonial’? While accounts of Ottoman colonialism have addressed changing configurations of identity and race, legal institutions, subjecthood and space, few have touched on debt—although it lies precisely at the intersection of law, ethics and economy, while reordering space and reconfiguring life-worlds. The first part of my paper explores how transformations in debt engendered modern colonial dynamics. The Ottoman-Egyptian invasion of Sudan initiated a series of changes: taxes levied in money, land alienation and widespread indebtedness. This led to an exodus of northern peasants who joined merchants in the southern ‘frontiers,’ repaying their debts by trading in export commodities, including slaves. Penetrating previously autonomous communities, this initiated an ‘internal’ colonialism, with traders accessing credit for their ventures through the formation of Islamic partnerships. My paper outlines the importance of the Islamic juridical apparatus imposed under Ottoman colonialism, authorising new forms of credit-debt relations, effecting new forms of subjectivity and personhood. Second, I turn to the Mahdist uprising, a messianic movement led by the Mahdi—the eschatological redeemer of mankind—that stormed the nineteenth century Ottoman and European worlds, expelling foreign forces and establishing an independent government at the height of the ‘Scramble for Africa’ (1881-1898). Accounts generally oscillate between viewing it as a religious (‘fanatical’) backlash to foreign rule (as in the colonial historiography) or a cultural expression of economic grievances against excessive taxation and a curtailed slave-trade. My approach differs in that it interrogates the ways these bifurcations (religion vs. economy) were the products of forms of power that unfolded during the Ottoman period, particularly juridical power. It explores the role of new forms of indebtedness as a legal-moral rupture, and thus an impetus for the Mahdist uprising. Reading the archive of his proclamations, it engages with the Mahdi’s own critique of the kinds of money-oriented subjects Ottoman administration had fostered. It shows his critique of debt and land alienation to be part of a larger project to refashion an ethical—indeed, ascetic—subject by re-inscribing economic transactions back into the fabric of social, ethical and spiritual life. Moreover, it examines the temporal re-orientation implied by Mahdism, as it called followers to abandon a worldly future for a messianic present lived for an imminent afterlife. It thus asks: what political opportunities were afforded by the disruptiveness of messianic time?

This paper examines the role of men known as the “Egypt Merchants” (M?s?r Tüccar?) as creditors to the Ottoman state in the eighteenth century. Recent scholarship has emphasized how the Ottoman central government, like other modernizing states in the eighteenth century, turned to non-traditional “partners” in governance, including financiers and subcontractors for revenue collection. The valuable province of Egypt, where the Mamluks and Mehmed Ali Pasha emerged as some of the strongest challengers to Ottoman rule, has appeared to fit poorly within this model of imperial partnership. By exploring layers of social and political power beyond the arena of high politics in Cairo, I argue that the Egypt Merchants began to draw on their trans-regional networks to act as imperial financiers around 1720, in response to Mamluk dominance in Egypt’s political sphere and emerging French dominance in the Mediterranean commercial and financial spheres. With increasing frequency as the eighteenth century wore on, men identified as Egypt Merchants underwrote Egypt’s annual tax remittance (the irsaliye hazinesi) to the Ottoman state. Ottoman treasury records reveal how Egypt Merchants with business interests in the market districts and caravansaries of Istanbul moved money from the Red Sea, across the Mediterranean, and to the imperial capital through the use of promissory notes and other financial instruments. Closer to the ground, Islamic court records demonstrate how many of these men also leveraged their influence with the imperial government into control over landed wealth and commercial agriculture in Egypt through administration of tax farms and pious endowments. The Egypt Merchants were not a guild, and would not have recognized themselves collectively. They did not necessarily live in Egypt. Rather, the M?s?r Tüccar? were loosely designated as such by the Ottoman bureaucracy in recognition of their common function: they could leverage wealth and influence amassed in Egypt into financial assistance to the Ottoman state. Triangulating between Ottoman financial records, the Registers of Important Affairs in Egypt (Mühimme-i M?s?r Defterleri), and registers of Islamic courts and the municipal councils (diwans) of Alexandria and Cairo, this paper maps the relations of credit, debt, and guarantorship that produced the category of the “Egypt Merchant” as an unstudied Ottoman intermediary. In so doing, it probes a mutually constitutive relationship between a state on the cusp of dramatic transformation and a socially embedded group of Ottoman Muslim subjects who helped shape the empire’s response to political and fiscal challengers in the Mediterranean.