Fiscal Control and Political Cooperation: The Ottoman Empire, 1854–1914

Abstract

This chapter provides a brief history of international financial control as experienced in the Ottoman Empire from 1881 to 1914. In the first section, I provide the longer-term context and give a historical outline of the process of accumulation of sovereign debt, which started in 1854 and ended with a catastrophic default in 1876 stirring international financial markets. The second part of the chapter will deal with the activities of the IFC by mostly relying on reports of the Council of the Ottoman Public Debt Administration. Unlike the Egyptian case, the Ottoman government never lost its political sovereignty against foreign powers. However, the broader impact of the IFC over fiscal and monetary affairs was still far from being negligible, as the Ottoman government chose the amenable path of cooperating with its foreign creditors.