II. Great Britain and the Beginnings of the Ottoman Public Debt, 1854–55

Abstract

In 1929 the historian of European financial control in the Ottoman Empire—that most significant factor in the affairs of the Near East at the turn of the nineteenth century—found ‘the seed of the idea’ of European control in the second Turkish foreign loan, raised in 1855. Nevertheless, he added virtually nothing to the brief and rather inaccurate account of this transaction given in 1903 by that able retired official of the Ottoman Bank, A. du Velay. It may therefore be worth while to discuss, from the profusion of evidence now available, the circumstances in which this loan and its predecessor of the year before were raised, and the extent and significance of the foreign control which these transactions introduced into Turkey.