This paper seeks to answer the following question: how did Western states aid private capital in penetrating the Ottoman Empire in the late 19th century? Researching this question requires investigating (in)formal Western economic diplomacy, the actual functioning of which have barely been studied for the modern period. The paper singles ...
(Show more)This paper seeks to answer the following question: how did Western states aid private capital in penetrating the Ottoman Empire in the late 19th century? Researching this question requires investigating (in)formal Western economic diplomacy, the actual functioning of which have barely been studied for the modern period. The paper singles out three relatively understudied polities, Belgium, Italy, and the United States, whose economic initiatives in the Ottoman lands will be investigated comparatively. In order to tell this global story in a non-reductionist manner, and hence on a human scale, the focus lies on the most evident institution through which governments sought to expand business and industry abroad: consulates. The people that headed them were members of a group of local intermediaries operating on and around the nodes of Western-Ottoman interaction and competition, often deeply embedded in Ottoman urban society and active as investors themselves, holding stakes in the foreign firms they advised. Their initiatives could be colored by conflicting allegiances across national boundaries and a concern to reinforce their local powerbases. Examining the roles of these powerful, but often neglected go-betweens in furthering foreign trade, finance and investments in one specific Ottoman urban locale – Salonika, the Empire’s third busiest seaport – this microhistorical study aims to reconstruct the logics behind Western economic diplomacy in the Ottoman Mediterranean. We sustain that it cannot be attributed solely to the interests of foreign states and capitalists, but also to transnational and local dynamics. In so doing, our paper hopes to complicate our understanding of how public-private synergies functioned in international relations in an era of ‘high imperialism,’ competing nationalisms, and unprecedented capitalist globalization.
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