An Empire of Obligation: English Merchants as Ottoman State Fiscal Agents, 1670–1720

From his office in Istanbul in the late seventeenth century, the English merchant Peter Whitcomb orchestrated a vast financial network, sending bills of exchange to Ottoman officials in Aleppo, Baghdad, Beirut, Crete, Cyprus, Edirne, Thessaloniki, and Tunis and painstakingly recording his transactions in an Ottoman letter book. His bills of exchange, like those of other English merchants, transferred tax revenue to the central Ottoman treasury in Istanbul and provided short-term financing at a high rate of interest to local officials. Other English merchants in the Ottoman Empire also supplemented their trade through service to the Ottoman state. They swapped tax-farming shares contributing to a secondary market in Ottoman state debt, imported currency that served as legal tender, and provisioned Ottoman troops with food, weapons, and gunpowder.

The financial activities of these merchants point to extra-territorial dimensions of early modern Ottoman state formation and indicate that prevailing notions of competitive state formation between bounded early modern polities should be revisited. Through this paper’s examination of these foreign merchants, we confront the question of where the boundaries of the Ottoman state can be located and who we consider to have been an Ottoman state actor in an empire that relied on contractors for much of its administrative needs. By moving away from a restrictive definition of formal state actors, we see more diverse players including foreign merchants bound into the Ottoman fiscal system through bonds of mutual obligation.