Preliminary Programme

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. (Show less)

This paper focuses on the experts of different nationalities and ethno-religious origins who worked for the French companies that were involved in investment and construction of infrastructures in the Mediterranean during the global expansion of capitalism in the second half of the nineteenth and the first three decades of the twentieth century. The analysis of professional trajectories of the technicians and managers employed by these companies shows how education in prestigious French engineering schools was a way for men of different ethnic and religious origins from several continents to get acknowledged as high-level experts. At the same time, it argues that the French companies benefitted greatly from the knowledge, skills, networks, flexibility and -sometimes forced- willingness to move of these men, particularly in their operations outside of metropolitan France. (Show less)

During the 1820s, several committees were formed by the bondholders of problematic sovereign debt in London, the main centre of the international financial market. When states such as Spain, Portugal, Greece or several Latin American countries started to default on their loans – contracted at the beginning of that decade – the committees emerged as platforms that would give support and provide an organizational base to the bondholders. This strategy allowed the bondholders – otherwise individual and unconnected investors – to act as a structured pressure group that could lobby close to the government and members of Parliament, or help shape public opinion through the press and the publication of leaflets. In occasions, the names of the same investors appeared in different committees; that is, many individuals invested in the bonds of states with similar characteristics: new-born countries or consolidated countries going through a revolutionary phase of state building, associated with liberal or republican institutions, which presented a high-risk investment that promised a high interest rate. The 1820s-1830s in Britain was a period of intense development of associations, committees and other forms of (in)formal sociability: besides the bondholders committees, there were philhellenic committees and committees in support of political refugees coming from Spain, Italy or Portugal. Some of the above-mentioned bondholders also participated in these more openly political committees. All together, they formed a network linking ideological, financial and cultural circles and interests. This paper wants to analyse these committees seeking to rebuild the networks they formed and the political and economic meanings given to them at the time. (Show less)