Relational finance: Ottoman debt, financialization, and the problem of the semi-civilized

ABSTRACT How might archival fragments of an economic anthropologist of post-Ottoman Egypt speak to current debates about finance and financialization? Literature in critical financial studies often reads as if financialization began in 1970 and moves outward from the global North like a mobile frontier remaking the world in its image. But if there is anything like a ‘frontier of finance,' it moved from East to West long before the Industrial Revolution. Through readings of ‘ethnographers of finance’ in archives of the Ottoman Public Debt Administration, I disrupt common views of finance as an intrinsic agent of extraction, colonialism, and imperialism to show how finance entails multiple and overlapping processes that make debt valuable. From such a perspective, attention to finance and revaluation in the late Ottoman Empire can invigorate debates about financialization more broadly, including in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis in the United States.

beginning of the twentieth century: the sarraf was a key part of Ottoman economic life long after the appearance of 'real banks' (Derri 2021a).
This finding has important implications for anyone concerned with Ottoman history and finance writ large. But the sarraf can speak far beyond Ottoman history. What can the sarraf teach us about finance more generally? Viewed more abstractly, the sarraf is a node in an extended web of social relations, expressed as promises to pay, that extend across space and time. Derri might agree. In this article, I will show how close this take on the Ottoman sarraf comes to economist Perry Mehrling's description of finance as the substance of social relations (Mehrling 2017) or the notion of 'relational finance' important to a sub-genre of business literature (Lehrer 2018). 1 The perspective of the sarraf might even work well in a 'Certified Relational Finance Planner Training Programme' (https://knowthyself.academy/certificate-in-relational-financial-planning/).
To make my claims, I will take a number of steps. First, I will review recent contributions to the debate about financialization that invite a move beyond northern-centric and presentist approach to finance and financialization. Then, I move to basic relevant information about the Ottoman Empire, Ottoman finance, and Ottoman infrastructures of mobility of people, things, and finance. I then turn to archival research I conducted as a graduate student on Ottoman debt, informed by recent work of brilliant young scholars working on Ottoman finance and sovereignty (Alff 2018;Barakat 2015;Can and Genell 2020;Derri 2021;Nye 2023). I have no pretense about counting myself among their ranks. Rather, I write as a historical anthropologist, an ethnographer of finance and banking in Egypt (Elyachar 2005(Elyachar , 2012, and the great-granddaughter of an Ottoman Palestinian sarraf to contribute to critical financial studies today.

Anthropology of finance, colonialism, and the semi-civilized
Recent contributions in critical political economy have called for a 'longue durée' approach to financialization (Koddenbrock, Kvangraven, and Sylla 2022) and conceptualization based on concrete financial practices (Beck and Knafo 2020). All too often, literature in critical financial studies reads as if history began in 1970s and centers around the global North (Copely 2022, 1-7;Koddenbrock, Kvangraven, and Sylla 2022;Mader et al. 2020). Financialization then moves out from the Global North like a mobile 'frontier' remaking the world in its image. Classic work on imperialism and financial capital also began with an origin story of finance as a product of the capitalist West (Luxemburg 2003). The anthropology of finance (to generalize, of course) studied how finance acts as a deux ex machina undoing the rich fabric of sociality in the non-Western world (for a review, see Weiss and van der Zwan 2020). This story is a fiction, if one with power in the world. Sophisticated global debt markets and regularized channels of finance existed in the Global East long before nineteenth-century capitalism in the West. If there is such a thing as a 'frontier of finance,' it moved from East to West long before the Industrial Revolution. This much I learned through my career as an economic anthropologist of post-Ottoman Egypt.
As far back as the sixteenth century, the Ottoman empire had an extensive and sophisticated financial system. Ottoman financiers lent not only to private businesses but also to the state with short term loans (Pamuk 2000, 80). Members of the Greek Orthodox and Jewish communities were prominent in this realm. Kings of Poland and France turned to these Ottoman bankers for loans issued as bonds in which many prominent Ottoman invested (Pamuk 2000, 80). In the Ottoman Empire, imperial politics were commonly articulated in the language of finance (Kafadar 1995). Finance was intertwined with politics, kin relations, and the religious sphere. The sarraf, too, was deemed too intertwined with relationships to be considered a 'modern banker.' How could finance intertwined with relationships, politics, and kinship be considered true, modern finance?
Such relational finance is no anomaly. It is not a matter of Oriental corruption. It merely violates an ideal type of finance that grew from the study of one parochial empirical model. But this Ottoman-centered financial order is at least as 'global' or 'universal' as finance that evolved in capitalist western Europe. Sovereigns in western Europe petitioned for the privilege to enter and conduct commerce in the empire's 'well-protected domains.' Arrangements to do so, called the Ottoman capitulations, shaped global financial infrastructures of commercial society from which capitalism as we think of it evolved.
These basic facts render common approaches to anthropology of finance problematic. They also trouble the conceptual horizons of economic anthropology, since those horizons were shaped by frameworks of nineteenth-century political economy, in which commerce (and the finance that makes commerce flow) is rendered an archaic concept. Formative debates about Arabs and the Ottoman Empire in the making of political economy disappear as well (Elyachar 2015). Early in my career, I thus began to think with native concepts and the cosmology of eighteenth-century 'commercial society' instead. Commercial society was shaped by the 'financial revolution,' the rise of public debt, and speculative practices that occasioned much contemporary amazement and concern (Hont 2015). A huge contemporary literature in eighteenth-century England dealt with the traumas of 'financial revolution' and financial speculation in which the English Levant Company and their 'stock-jobbers' played no small part (Elyachar 2015, Elyachar and Mastnak nd). What might it mean to reconsider critical financial studies (including the anthropology of finance) from these coordinates?
Here it helps to recall a few things about the social science of anthropology, which came of age in the early twentieth century. Anthropology specialized in providing knowledge about regions of the world considered 'primitive' that were colonized by Great Britain and France. Civilizational binaries of the civilized versus the primitive underlay anthropological research agendas through the first half of the twentieth century. Colonizers gathered 'facts' and all kinds of knowledge as part of a multifaceted process of consolidating power (for some classic analyses of these dilemmas, see Cohn 1996, Trouillot 2015, Wolf 1999. Anthropologists of the Middle East ignored this story of how finance articulated relations between East and West. Instead, they focused on a limited set of questions pertaining to segmentation theory, the veil, and Islam (Abu-Lughod 1989). Economic anthropology of the Middle East was, until recently, a subfield 'waiting to exist' (Abu-Lughod 1989;Elyachar 2005).
The Ottoman Empire was not considered 'primitive' in anthropology or in nineteenth-century cosmologies of civilizational order. It was 'semi-civilized.' The semi-civilized had signed treaties with countries of the Christian west and thus were part of the 'international order.' But they had too many 'civilizational differences' to be part of 'international society' (Özsu 2016). All of this referred to the Ottoman Empire, which had signed treaties with western sovereigns for the safe conduct of financialized commerce since the sixteenth century (Eldem 2006, Inalcik 1994. Those arrangements in international private law, the capitulations, facilitated flows of commerce and finance through the region. Relations between the 'capitalist West' and the Ottoman Empire were mediated through commercial and financial infrastructures and in private international law. If this is a 'frontier of finance,' then that frontier continually shifted along the fluid and incorporative boundaries of the empire (Burbank and Cooper 2010).
The very notion of the frontier is a native concept both in the Ottoman political lexicon of the 'ghazi' state of conquest and in Ottoman historiography, where the word 'frontier' appears in the titles of many tomes. And yet, there is no fixed frontier in empire. 'Extraterritoriality' is at least as important as territory.
In its modern incarnation, extraterritoriality refers to exemption from local rule of law for staff and families of diplomatic missions and consuls, or for military personnel on military bases in foreign lands. In the Ottoman and other empires where the promotion of commerce pre-dated the establishment of territorial states, extraterritoriality was a reincarnation of 'the personality of law.' In such a system, sojourners moving through the lands of other sovereigns carried with them, as attested to by a laissez-passer of the kind my grandfather carried, the attachment to the sovereign of their place of birth or abode. Extraterritorial arrangements consolidated in the Ottoman capitulations begun as a courtesy to weaker western polities, but with the rise of territorial nation-states, the Ottoman Empire came to be at a disadvantage on a global stage. 2 By the mid-nineteenth century, these extraterritorial arrangements with western sovereigns, and the porous nature of 'boundaries' in the empire-state, left the semi-civilized without sovereignty over territory (Elden 2013).
Yet, the Ottoman Empire was never colonized; the empire remained formally, if imperfectly, sovereign over its lands until its demise after the end of World War I. As such, the Ottoman Empire falls outside the bounds of 'colonialism studies' premised on an implicit model of territorial colonialism. If there is such a unitary thing as colonialism, it clearly proceeded differently in relation to the Ottoman Empirea strong military and commercial power (if diminished) through the end of World War I. Sophisticated financial infrastructures ran through the Ottoman Empire long before any theory of capitalism or imperialism was penned. Finance in the Ottoman Empire also contradicts classic models of imperialism, in which excess capital from overproduction in core capitalist countries is the source of 'finance' elsewhere. That is not all. It also has a different relation to doctrines of terra nullius, settlement, and improvement than has come to proliferate in discourse about 'colonialism.' (Bhandar 2018) The Ottoman Empire lay in an anomalous relation to the rising capitalist powers of the west. This can be seen in key texts of international law by scholars such as Alberico Gentili (1552Gentili ( -1608, who is known as a father of international law, along with Hugo Grotius and Francisco de Vitoria. Gentili was fully aware of the power of the Ottoman Sultan and granted without reservation the legitimacy of his sovereignty. At the same time, Gentili conceded 'extensive rights to Europeans over non-Europeans to settle in the lands of the Ottoman Empire on the grounds of their greater technical capacities, [and he] was certain that such occupation would be licit' (Pagden 2015, 139). Such settlers were 'bound to accept the sovereignty of the Sultan' even as they had rights according to natural law to settle (Pagden 2015, 139). What, then, gave Europeans the right to occupy lands in the Ottoman Empire when jurists recognized their ruler as a legitimate sovereign? Improvement, settlement, and finance infrastructures of the semi-civilized Gentili helped formulate the deeply consequential theory of 'improvement,' 3 which became the key and supposedly objective grounds for declaring land terra nullius, even lands of the sovereign Ottoman Sultan (Gentili 1877, 131). 'Improvements' allowed Gentili to both recognize that the Sultan had sovereign authority and argue that is was legal for settlers to take up residence on 'unimproved' land. Large tracts of territory of the Ottoman Empire were effectively 'unused,' jurists stated (Kingsbury 1998, 713-23, 723n;cited in Pagden 2003, 196n34). That landwhich was in fact used and owned by in ways the jurists could not seecould be claimed by Europeans as terra nullius and thus 'settlement' to 'improve the land' was legitimate. 4 But it would be illegitimate for western civilized nations to ignore the Sultan's rule or set aside the multiple treaties that supplicant western nations had signed with him. In short, the Ottoman Empire was the place where terra nullius was decoupled from territorial colonialism. The Sultan's sovereignty was legitimate, but he had no sovereignty over his territory. This was the mark of extraterritoriality that rendered the Ottoman Empire semi-civilized instead. Finance would play a key role in the saga of the semi-civilized. To understand how, I need to first review some basic facts about the Ottoman Empire and the global financial infrastructures of which it was a part.
At the height of its territorial reach, the Ottoman Empire encompassed most of southeastern Europe up to Vienna, including present-day Hungary, the Balkans, Greece, and parts of Ukraine, and most of today's Middle East, including large parts of the Arabian Peninsula and North Africa. The Ottoman Empire existed for more than six hundred years and was never fully colonized, although parts of it were. It was dissolved after its defeat together with its Austro-Hungarian ally in World War I, at the Treaty of Lausanne in 1923. Through the end of World War I, it remained a formidable military power.
Ottoman history is usually relegated to subspecialties in Middle Eastern Studies. That is a mistake. For one thing, Ottoman history is 'European' history as well (cf. Deringil 2007, Goffman 2002, Minawi 2017. The Ottoman Empire connected Europe, Asia, and Africa. It included, at its height, one-third of the land mass of Europe. Empires such as the Ottoman, Saffavid, and Moghul had no passports or fixed borders. Instead, these empires had a different logic, a 'spotty' (Burbank and Cooper 2010) relation to its 'domains.' They had no 'territory' and were not a 'territorial state.' Being a part of empire was regulated in large part through relations of tax and tribute. Political belonging was thus linked to finance, which was a mode of rule, a language of political power, and a channel of ongoing interaction and mobility with western Christian nations (cf Derri 2021).
Finance was also directly linked to internal politics of the Ottoman Empire (Kafadar 1995;Pamuk 2012). The Ottoman Empire was an 'Empire of Debt' (Yaycıoğlu 2022). This does not mean that the empire was indebted to the west, although the structure of finance would flip that way in the second half of the nineteenth century. Rather, it means that political, kin, and commercial relationships were interwoven through a medium of debt (and credit). This is the logic from which the story of my great-grandfather the sarraf starts to make sense.
Money-changers and bankers (sarrafs) were otherwise concentrated in Istanbul in its western neighborhood of Galata. The most well-known exchangers of the sixteenth century were Sephardic Jews, who (like my own forebears) were invited to the Ottoman Empire after expulsion from Andalusia/Spain in 1492. Members of the Armenian and Greek Orthodox communities were also prominent. Merchants and money changers articulated complex commercial deals moving channels of commerce across the domains of empire. They and others who slowly gained access to protected status from western countries were mostly known as 'Levantines.' This system was fully financialized. Along the Mediterranean coast, commerce was conducted with 'letters of credit' coming from French, Italian, and English commercial merchants. 'Merchants balanced their accounts between the main Ottoman ports of call in the Aegean, Syria, and Istanbul with a combination of bullion and letters of exchange. Commercial capital and state borrowing merged with the Mediterranean markets' (Clay 2001, 118). An inward-facing credit nexus was part of this financial infrastructure, mediating relations of power in the most direct of ways. Finance was the 'lifeblood of bureaucracy,' of the state bureaucracy managed by the Grand Vizier. Finance was also an engine of growth in state capacity (Clay 2001, 86). Finance mediated power struggles between the 'Porte,' the seat of the imperial bureaucracy, and the palace and its own distinct sources of wealth (Eldem 1999) Coin was part of this infrastructure of imperial finance. In the Ottoman Empire, as in Europe, the notion of sovereignty encompassed the functions of coinage and debasement (Spufford 1988, 10;Kafadar 1995, 86). Issuing coin was a mark of sovereignty; a new sovereign could call in currency and recoin it in his own image. As in Europe, the sovereign enjoyed the right of the mint and had the right to coin, imprint his face on, and call back in for reminting coins minted within his domains. A new coin was issued whenever a new sultan ascended to power, beginning with Osman I (d. 1324; Kafadar 1995, 45;Nye 2023). The first silver coins in the Ottoman Empire were issued in the name of Orhan, the Second Sultan, 1324-60. Locally minted coins would usually serve as means of exchange, and currency issued in the name of the former sultan would continue to circulate. Foreign currencies were used for conquests and commercial relations with other countries. 5 By the mid-sixteenth century, there were four effective currency zones in the Ottoman Empire (Kafadar 1995, 12). At no point was there one central currency system denominated by the state. Coins minted in Europe were often the favored store of value. Given the dual silver/gold basis of money in the world, which coin was in favor shifted along with the gold/silver value ratio. International monies were always acceptable to the merchants moving goods across the empire, back and forth to Europe, India, and China (Kafadar 1995, 12). By the nineteenth century, the Ottoman administration issued paper currency called kaime, which became the focus of monetarist financial reformers both Ottoman and European, who saw it as the source of many financial woes. Those conflicts entered into the discursive field of political economy and political conflict via ethnographic writing in the British archives on the nineteenth century.

Ethnographers of finance in the Ottoman and British empires
In this section, I revisit archival research I conducted as a graduate student of anthropology and Middle East Studies at Harvard University in the 1990s (in the archives of British Foreign Office and the Ottoman Public Debt Administration), with an eye towards issues of importance in debates about finance today. 6 I read these reports as mini ethnographies recording struggles to comprehend 'native practices' of finance. Why do I call these ethnographies of finance rather than the obvious (and equally true) statement that they are archives?
Authors of these reports record countless ethnographic encounters with actors in this confusing 'field' of finance. Like classical anthropologists, they traveled far afield to distant lands and attempted to make sense of practices in a very different culture on their own terms. These were military engineers, officers, consuls, and bureaucrats activating a 'money view' (Mehrling 2011) of finance on the ground. They were also ethnographers working on the 'enclosure and disclosure' of a complex social field that is at the heart of any anthropological or critical theory endeavor (Kockelman 2007).
Finance is everywhere in these archives. The British state stood behind loans granted to the Ottomans for the first time in 1855. This was a matter of controversy in the United Kingdom. Ottoman Debt was debated in Parliament by Ricardo as well as Disraeli and Gladstone. Ottoman debt entailed collaborative inter-imperial management of financial crisis among three empires: Ottoman, British, and French (Genell). All three governments collaborated to guarantee the interest rate on a loan of five million sterling, which brought in even the most conservative investors, who had resisted a differential interest rate of 4 percent on shares in England and 9-10 percent on Ottoman debt (Blaisdell 2020, 47-48).
This loan was devoted to Ottoman war expenditures against the British enemy Russia. Specific revenues were not earmarked for this loan, as sometimes happened with Ottoman era loans. Rather, and significantly, Ottomans granted westerners the right to designate two commissioners to exercise control over the funds realized by the loan (Blaisdell 1929, 28). If this was colonialism, it was a colonialism through financial advice. A European Commission composed of three Europeans and three Ottomans issued a report in 1860 with the goal of advising the Ottoman government 'in all questions of financial administration' and to 'organize a system of financial reform' (FO 424/19/59; Constantinople, 28 November 1860; Sir H. Bulwer to Lord J. Russell).
Archives of debt in the late 1850s record many conversations among British lords and financial experts visiting the empire, Ottoman bureaucrats, and leadership of the Ottoman Bank. In one such report, Sir Bulwer reported to London about his conversation with Fuad Pasha, in the presence of M. Falconnet of the Ottoman Bank and the European Commission. The report focuses on Sir Bulwer's 'plain talk' to the Ottomans. Sir Bulwer 'plainly told the Ottoman Minister that if the Turkish Government did not at once adopt some decided step towards the establishment of regularity and order in the Turkish finances, the ruin of Turkey was inevitable' (FO 424/19/6; Constantinople, 3 August 1859; Sir Bulwer to Lord Russell). This period culminated in the 'Confidential Report on the Financial condition of Turkey' by Mr. Foster and Lord Hobart, submitted to the Foreign Office from Constantinople in December 1861, in which a comprehensive program of economic and fiscal reforms was laid out in line with the principles of classical political economy (for an analysis of the Foster-Hobart Report, see Kiray 1988).
In the 1860s, British loans paid for salaries of Ottoman civil servants and soldiers, as well as of European advisors. And yet, the Foreign Office feared that the Ottomans were using the commission more as a means of access to the European bond market, where the imprint of reform was a precondition for loans, than through a sincere desire to reform their finances (Kiray 1988). To really effect a European financial system, Europeans themselves would have to be brought in to take the system over, something the Ottomans would be sure to resist (Kiray 1988). Imaginings of a financial colonialism were firmly in place.
Materials in the British Foreign Office Archive (BFO) shift in nature, intensity, and format after the mid-nineteenth century. Amateur travel documents and ethnographic accounts begin to disappear, and a bureaucratic system of writing and archiving documents sent to Great Britain from the Ottoman Empire takes their place. By the late nineteenth century, the British Foreign Office was documenting and sending to London extensive and regular reports about interlinked military and financial concerns in the Ottoman Empire. These archives cover the kinds of matters that would be included in the Colonial Archives of countries formally colonized by Great Britain.
Ethnographers of finance wrote veritable primers on Ottoman finance to send back to London, giving politicians a 'money view' (Mehrling 2017) so that they could better understand the issues at play. In one such memo written by Mr. Wyndham to the Earl of Granville, we get a history of the medjidjie currency, disputes with Ottoman officials at British customs houses and factories, the exigencies of a dual gold/silver currency system, and financial measures taken by the Ottoman administration to protect itself. Mr. Wyndham reports on one such dilemma from 1885, when the Ottoman Porte was discussing an option the issue rate of the silver coin to reduce by one piastre. It could declare that state treasuries would accept payment only at the rate of nineteen rather than twenty piastres. But the British diplomatic mission could override these rules under terms of the Ottoman capitulations. British customs houses and factories were exempt from many such measures, as Mr Comments about the chaotic nature of the Ottoman finances abound. A common orientalist trope about many aspects of Eastern life in the western eye, here 'chaos' refers to a multiplicity of currency regimes and a dual accounting system. How, commercial consul Law wrote in 1889, could there be two separate sets of accounting books for imperial financesone in Istanbul and others in the provincial centers? Perhaps the Ottomans and their lenders were exaggerating the seriousness of their underlying problems. If only the imperial and provincial accounts were consolidated, might the financial situation look much better (FO 424/166/17/inc. l; Jan. 1, 1889, Comm. Consul Law to Sir White)? Double-entry bookkeeping was not yet instituted in the Ottoman Empire. In fact, the Ottoman Public Debt Administration (PDA) would be central to that change (Birdal 2010). Multiple zones of currency and finance, multiple sets of books, were confusing in the native cosmologies of the British consul charged with optimizing returns to the bondholders of Ottoman Debt.
Another such report in the BFO archives is written by Mr. V. Caillard, who would go on to be an official of the Public Debt Administration. 7 Caillard does not include the conversations and interactions that gave the basis for his extensive knowledge. His interlocutors fade into the background, as is common in ethnographic writing: Upon these values the Government has obtained advances from those to whom money was due already, naturally upon the most usurious terms. The amount for which the havalé (a kind of government draft of bond sold to provincial Treasuries by the Porte on its anticipated tax revenues) was made out thus comes to be made up of three distinct parts: an advance to the Government in cash: the amount due to contractors furnishing supplies to a Government Department; 'Compensation' with 'surets' (a kind of Treasury bond), for the pay of Government officials, old debts of the Ministry of Finance, etc. (FO 424/157/34/inc., "Memorandum on the present Financial Position in Turkey, " Constantinople, 1888) These bonds were quickly hypothecated (or discounted in value) in the money markets. This, in turn, led to a shift in financial flows from taxation into the hands of money changers and the French-controlled Ottoman Imperial Bank. Pervasive debasement of currency intensified the reliance on havalé. In Angora in 1880, Caillard recounts, havalé were often sold on the open market at a discount of 20-33.5 percent (FO 424/106/151/1, April 1880, Vice-Consul Gatheral, Report on Angora).

Sorting out debts and fixing finance in the public debt administration
In 1875, Ottomans suspended payment on a portion of their external debt. The bankers' nightmare had come true. An official proclamation of the Porte issued on October 6 decreed that for five years to come, 'only one-half of the interest and drawing of all funded loanswith the exception of the Guaranteed Loan of 1855shall be paid in cash, and the other half in new 5 per cent scrip at par. All special hypothecations were ignored, and the revenues derived from the customs, tobacco, salt, the Egyptian Tribute, and a portion of the sheep tax were to be set aside into a special Caisse for meeting the reduced service of the debt, estimated to require henceforward about 7,000,000 Turkish pounds in cash annually' (FO 424/93/161; 1 July 1880: 'Memoranda on the Turkish Debt communicated to Earl Granville by Mr. Bouverie'; see also Blaisdell 2020, 81). Four years later, a deal was mediated by the British official Mr. Hamilton Lang on behalf of a syndicate of local Galata bankers (Blaisdell 2020, 97).
Moving in to directly administer the country's finances was now on the agenda. A semiautonomous province of the Ottoman Empire (Gennell 2016;Shlala 2018), Egypt stood as the exemplar of what could be done, as such arrangements had already been made for the Egyptian debt. 'Honest government' was needed: 'The way in which Egyptian affairs had been managed showed what honest government could do for Turkey.' The Foreign Office counseled patience, especially at this 'moment when the Powers were acting in absolute concert upon very large questions, which to some extent include this one in them' (FO 424/93/164, extract from The Times, 8 July 1880.) In 1881, the Administration of the Ottoman Public Debt Administration was established. Unlike previous ad-hoc schemes, from the beginning, the PDA suspended particular interests of nation or financial groups in favor of the general interest of financial capital. It acted in the name of economic rationality and financial responsibility. The PDA activated an as-if relation to the natural world as commodities.
The PDA began its work by taking over 'practically intact' the administrative organization set up by Mr. Lang with the Galata bankers (Blaisdell 2020, 97). The institutional structures were in place for it to take up work as part of the Ottoman Empire itself. All the revenues ceded to the Galata bankers were handed over to the trust of the PDA. These included the salt and tobacco monopolies, the stamp tax, the spirits tax, the fish tax, and the silk tithe in some districts (Blaisdell 2020, 92). Revenue from the tributes assigned by the Treaty of Berlin to Servia, Montenegro, Bulgaria, and Greece, as well as from Cyprus and Eastern Roumelia, were also ceded to the bondholders of Ottoman debt with the PDA as their trustee, 'absolutely and irrevocably until the liquidation of the debt' (Blaisdell 2020, 92), citing the 1881 Decree of Muharrem.
The Ottoman imperial state ground-rents and taxes had become the private property of the mainly European holders of Ottoman bonds, the 'absolute and irrevocable' nature of their claim fixed into international law. So solid was this form of private property finance capital that it outlasted the end of the empire. As a special report to London in 1909 put it, despite the 'remarkable and successive changes in Constantinople,' it was a matter of great satisfaction that 'the revenues of the Debt Administration should have suffered so little' (Block, Special Report, 1908, 7-8;in Blaisdell 2020, 179).
The PDA was set up as an internal agency of the Ottoman government (Blaisdell 2020, 6). In practice, it functioned as an independent institution, guided by its own norms and rules of the game. Like the Ottoman Imperial Bank earlier, the PDA straddled the line between an official state-level institution of financial control and a purely private form of financial control (Blaisdell 2020, 103), as a bilateral agreement between the Ottoman Government and its private creditors drawn up under the auspices of the European powers (Blaisdell 2020, 99). Employees of the PDA were considered employees of the Ottoman government in the exercise of their duties, but administrators of the PDA had the power to hire and fire them (Blaisdell 2020, 96). The PDA Council could farm or lease out to any third party the collection and sale of its ceded revenues (Blaisdell 2020, 96). The PDA's straddling of the Ottoman state and the generalized interests of European finance capital led to a curious working out of problems of legitimacy and control.
The oversight of the PDA in the collection and administration of any loan guarantees became essential to Ottoman success in raising new funds in the European money markets, even when revenues were not earmarked for the PDA (Birdal 2010). The legitimacy of the Ottoman state facing outside in the money markets rested on the PDA's good name. At times, the Ottoman Porte came to rely on the PDA to collect the few revenue sources left. In 1888, the PDA collected silk and tobacco tithes for the Porte; in 1890, it collected the valonia and opium tithes; and in 1890 and 1896, it supervised the payment of service on loans of 1890 and 1896 (Du Velay 1903, 149-150).
Since the Ottomans did not benefit from the ceded revenues, the state was not always eager to antagonize its population by helping to enforce collection of PDA revenues. Yet, if the Ottoman police did not help, the PDA could not convert its monopoly privileges into actual money. Interests here were not well aligned. The more collection of PDA revenue improved, the more pressure would be put on and threaten the tax-base of the state (du Velay 541; Eldem 1999).
In Damascus in 1880, the governor-general reported orders both to suspend all payments on the Ottoman Debt and to immediately remit payment. Political disturbances had broken out, our ethnographer of debt reports. The two battalions dispatched to put them down had to be paid with hastily borrowed money (FO 424/169/inc, Vice-Consul Jago to Sir A.H. Layard, Damascus 30 April 1880). In Van in 1881, the governor demanded that peasants repay corn distributed to alleviate famine conditions the year before. The sheep tax was sold for immediate revenues. The governor-general disclosed confidentially to Captain Clayton, the local military consul, that he had received a telegram from the Council of Ministers threatening 'dismissal and punishment if he did not send money' (FO 424/122/38/inc., Van, 8 Feb. 1881, Captain Clayton to Mr. St John).
Mounting expenses of the Ottoman War Department in the late nineteenth century increased the pressure to gather up neglected potential sources of financing. The Ottoman Porte, Mr. St. John reported to the Earl of Granville in 1881, had tried to raise 100,000 lira by pledging half of the bridge tolls in the Golden Horn to the banking house of Messrs. Lorando (FO 424/122/38, Constantinople, 9 Feb. 1881, Mr. St. John to Earl of Granville). Pressures to get the money to pay the army, navy, and civil service enough salary arrears to stop a dangerous 'great murmuring' led to another loan from the Imperial Ottoman Bank paid in havales, which were accepted by the treasury as cash at nominal value (FO 424/154/17, Therapia 7 July 1885, Sir White to the Marquis of Salisbury).
By 1888, ethnographers of Ottoman finance in the archives convey a dire situation. Army contractors had threatened to stop supplies; no previous debts had been paid; orders were issued that havales were not to be honored; and pay of government officials at feast time was cut in half (FO 424/157/33/inc.;op. cit.). But in the same year, a commercial attaché wrote that the condition of the country was 'not nearly so bad as it is generally painted,' attributing the pessimism to the desire of provincial governors to make the Porte believe they had no money to send (FO 424/166//inc. 2, 31 December 1888, EFG Law, Commercial Attache).
Maybe the Ottomans were just being devious and tricky, the thought seemed to go. While the finance minister 'went begging,' desperate for money to pay officials in the center, regional officials were paid and bonds in the European markets were booming (FO 424/166/17/inc.1;Jan. 1,l889,Constantinople,Commercial Consul Law). As Consul Law saw it, 'the decentralization of revenue due to the vilayet system and the assignment of special revenues has left comparatively small sums under the immediate control of the Finance Minister to meet Imperial, as distinguished from local, expenditure' (FO 424/166/17/inc. 1, 1 Jan. 1889, Constantinople).
Revenue streams left in the hands of the Porte kept shrinking. The push to suck money out of the provinces continued, with varying success. With a decline in agricultural prices in the 1890s and poor tithe collection, Ottoman revenue declined precipitously, while revenues going to the Public Debt Administration were increasing. Despite the fiscal crisis, the Foreign Office was assured, the bondholders' money was not at risk: 'it is perhaps advisable that I should here point out that the difficulties which I have exposed in my Report do not of themselves necessarily affect the position of those creditors of Turkey whose money is invested on the security of the revenues administered by the Council of the Public Debt' (FO 424/185/2/1, Constantinople 11 July 1895, Major Law to Sir P. Currie).
As employees of the PDA were considered functionaries of the state in the exercise of their duties, the PDA could invoke the name of the state to enforce its monopoly when face-to-face with the producers of its revenue. But the state gained nothing from this use of its name to enforce the claims of foreign bondholders. Sometimes PDA collection was a relatively straight-forward matter, as when it sent its agent, a M. Nobet, to Sophia to come to terms on arrears due by Eastern Roumelia for its tribute (FO 424/156/27;7 Sept. 1887;Sir W. White to the Marquis of Salisbury.) But when it came to collecting other kinds of revenue, things could turn nasty. A 'fatal affray' occurred in 1891 near Van between 'tobacco contrabandists and Circassian surveillants of the Public Debt Administration' at the northeast end of the lake near Bergrin: A guard had been sent to seize an expected consignment of contraband salt, and Kolat Bey, with companions not far off, was watching the road by night, when a train of eight Kurds from Molazgerd, mounted, and mostly (if not all) armed with Burdan rifles, descended from the hills with six laden horses. On being challenged by the Circassian (PDA staff member), a Kurd at once attacked him with a sword, and was shot dead; two more Kurds were killed before Kolat Bey fell, mortally wounded. The Kurds then fled, leaving a large quantity of tobacco in the hands of the Government agents. (FO 424/169/65, Van, 30 May 1891) Near Erzeroum 8 in the same year, a similar encounter occurred between 'four workmen belonging to the service of the Public Debt' who had been sent on business to a spot two hours outside of town. They were robbed by a party of seven Kurds, 'who stripped the Christians of everything they had, giving them their own rags in exchange for their clothes.' Only the 'representation of their Mussulman companion' and colleague in the PDA, it was reported to London, saved the PDA men from murder (FO 424/169/66; Erzeroum, 10 June 1891).

Conclusion
After the Ottoman bankruptcy and establishment of the Ottoman Public Debt Administration (OPDA), British and French 'participant observers' took on new roles in this global field of debt. Some who had been advisors or consuls of western empires became fiduciaries of the bondholders of the Ottoman debt, working from inside a bureaucracy that was officially part of the Ottoman state. Which debts were attached to which revenue streams? Which were earmarked for the Ottoman state? Which had become the property of the bondholders of the Ottoman debt? Nothing was clear. There was no boundary to be founddefinitely not between a mythic 'West' and 'East.' Our participant observers worked to sort things out through ethnographic-like research in Damascus, Van, or Istanbul and in writings they sent back to London.
Sometimes debt is wealth (Roitman 2003(Roitman , 2005. Valuation schema underlying the attribution of wealth sometimes change. Those changes can be dramaticin times of revolution or bankruptcy, for example. Radical upheaval in valuation schema can take on the neutral attributes of finance. But the political is never fully cleansed away. Debasing an ontology of debtlike that of the Ottoman 'Empire of Debt'is no simple matter. Reworking valuation schema can be a bloody affair. Here we can see how ontologies of debt in the Ottoman Empire offer important lessons for considering the politics of valuation today. 'Finance is composed of processes that make debt valuable' (Poon and Wosnitzer 2012, 253). Those processes of making debt valuableand disvaluedare an underbelly of finance. Employees of banks or of the OPDA are sometimes stuck with the labor of sorting things out and deciding what has value and what does not. When valuation schema rapidly change, the consequences can be severe. Investors can end up penniless and die by suicide; mistakes can ruin the lives of countless invisible others. When private market making and credit relations break down, as in the United States after 2008 or in the Ottoman Empire post 1881, political economy rears its head (Neilson 2022).
Despite the best efforts of the Englishmen trained at Oxford and Cambridge working in the Ottoman Empire in the 1860s, nineteenth-century classical political economy made no more sense in the late Ottoman Empire than it does in financial markets of late US Empire. Leverage shrinking assets to create the attributes of 'wealth' involves different kinds of labor than the 'productive labor' enshrined in political economy. After the 1982 debt crisis, economists, research assistants, programmers, and managers at the US Federal Reserve Bank invented new schema for turning debt obligations of Mexico into securitized bonds (Elyachar 2013). Surveillants of the Ottoman Public Debt Administration did a more physical version. They scoured through accounting books with multiple currency schema, debated stubborn pashas over dinner who would not see the sense of nineteenth-century political economy, and deliberated over the value of income streams created through principles of an Ottoman political economy they could not even understand. Sometimes they got caught up in a nearly 'fatal affray,' like the one in Van.
We don't need moments of drama and crisis to understand the workings of finance as generalized debt markets. Details recorded in the exit documents of an Ottoman sarraf in Palestine or Syria (Derri 2021) are just as telling. We can understand the sarraf betterand his relevance to the work of an economic anthropologist of finance whose career started at the NY Federal Reserve Bankwhen we adjust the geographic coordinates of our theorizing. This demands we drop lingering assumptions that finance was exported from the west to the east (or Global South) as an epiphenomenon of capitalism, imperialism, modernization, or an expanding frontier of terra nullius.
Certainly, to be a sarraf was not to be a banker in a way familiar in western economic cosmologies. In the language of economists Mehrling (nd) and Treynor (1987), the sarraf enacted the 'dealer function' (Mehrling n.d). He provided liquidity in a generalized system of credit and debt relations in a society where 'the use of credit was widespread among all elements of the urban and even rural society' (Pamuk 2000, 78).
Finance did not render asunder otherwise-stable webs of social relations. Financial instruments were part of the glue weaving these worlds together. British and French visitors to the Ottoman Empire were not importing an unknown quantity -financeto instill dynamics of extraction, settlement, colonialism, or imperialism. Bureaucrats of the Ottoman Public Debt Administration were doing finance in a way familiar to students of the post-2008 financial landscape in the United States. They conducted valuation studies of debt obligations. They checked the underlying collateral of debt obligations. And, crucially, they tried to enter into 'native cosmologies' of valuation schema, whereby the Ottoman state had legitimate monopoly claims to revenue streams (from resources such as salt, tobacco, and bureaucratic 'stamps') in way that completely violated the tenets of political economy in which they believed. And then they had to regularize cash-flow streams that had been forcibly shifted into new valuation schemasometimes at the point of a gun.
Revaluation and deleveraging is always a dramatic affair. Revaluation can be violent. Leveraging is 'parasitic upon older regimes of value embodied in the ownership of assets and equity … before it subverts them as the basis of value' (Poon and Wosnitzer 2012, 253). This is no less true in relation to an Empire of Debt like the Ottoman Empire (Yaycıoğlu 2022) than it is to a corporation like Lehman Brothers or Credit Suisse. I don't think economist Perry Mehrling ever studied Ottoman debt, but well he might have when he said, 'Finance is not something separate from society. It is neither a Marxian superstructure or a monetarist veil, but rather the very substance of … social relations, a web of time-dated promises to pay that stretches from now into the future, and from here around the globe' (Mehrling 2017). Perry Mehrling (teacher of finance and the money view) might have a great deal to discuss with Aviv Derri (historian of the Ottoman sarraf). This makes sense to me as the great-granddaughter of an Ottoman sarraf and an economic anthropologist of finance.
Notes 6. For a comprehensive study of the OPDA, which did not exist when I conducted this archival research, see Birdal (2010). 7. On such reports see, for example, Caillard's introduction to The Ottoman Public Debt. Translation Of The Annual Report Of The Council Of Administration Of The Ottoman Public Debt, 1886 To 1887. With Intr. Notes By V. Caillard Paperback -August 25, 2017. 8. I preserve name and place spellings as they appear in the archives. So Erzurum appears here as Erzeroum.