AHA Session 102
Friday, January 5, 2024: 10:30 AM-12:00 PM
Plaza B (Hilton Union Square, Lobby)
Chair:
Jacob S. Soll, University of Southern California
Session Abstract
Early modern state formation is often portrayed as an internal, competitive process in which states eliminate or neutralize their internal rivals. Our panel challenges these prevailing views by revealing how cooperation with foreign financiers and merchant networks shaped the formation of states and the growth of European empires between the late -seventeenth and early nineteenth centuries. We show that the ability to draw on foreign networks of credit, finance, and financial expertise was a critical aspect of imperial state building and market expansion and shaped the lives of colonial and indigenous communities on a global scale. At the same time, our papers also reveal how too strong a reliance of foreign assistance could become destabilizing and a source of state impairment. Privileging a study of trans-imperial credit relations and extra-territorial finance, our focus joins with recent calls to go beyond notions of bounded states (for instance scholarship on the centrality of mercenaries) in order to rethink the financial geography of early modern empires. In so doing, we also seek to integrate explicitly the history of early modern capitalism into the explanatory framework.
The three papers in the panel examine the activities of foreign financiers and merchant creditors within three distinct empires: the Danish-Norwegian colonial empire, the Ottoman empire, and the British colonial empire. Ellen Nye demonstrates how the Ottoman state’s expansion of long-term public debt at the end of the seventeenth century was facilitated by English merchants who transferred revenue, traded tax farming shares, and offered short-term financing. Pernille Røge’s paper exposes the large-scale Dutch financing of Danish-Norwegian imperial expansion into the sugar-producing islands of the Caribbean in the second half of the eighteenth century. Finally, Jessica Hanser’s paper exposes how the credit relationships among British merchants and indigenous merchants in Madras, Hong Kong, and North America paved the way for new forms of military and territorial interventions that expanded the reach of the British Empire around the globe between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries. Together, the papers suggest a more expansive definition of imperial governance across three early modern empires.
