An Overlooked Problem in Turkish–Russian Relations: The 1878 War Indemnity

1978 ◽  
Vol 9 (4) ◽  
pp. 519-537 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael R. Milgrim
Keyword(s):  
Ottoman Empire ◽  
Public Debt ◽  
Crucial Role ◽  
Actual Agreement

The 1877–1878 Russo-Turkish War left the Ottoman Empire burdened with a new debt that was to play a crucial role in the relations between Russia and Turkey in subsequent years. Diplomatic and financial histories, however, have largely overlooked this indemnity for a number of reasons. Foremost among them is the timing of the ratification of the indemnity treaty. The actual agreement governing the procedure for the payment of the indemnity was drawn up four years after the San Stefano negotiations and the Congress of Berlin. While monographs concerned with these events mention the indemnity, they fail to follow it up. Second, in the post-Berlin period the European bondholders of the Ottoman Public Debt were primarily interested in securing control over the administration of the revenues servicing their debt. The indemnity, however, remained apart from those revenues ceded to the Ottoman Public Debt Administration. The standard financial histories naturally concentrate on the projects of the bondholders and refer to the indemnity only in passing.

THE RECASTING OF THE OTTOMAN PUBLIC DEBT AND THE ABOLITION OF THE CAPITULATIONS REGIME IN THE INTERNATIONAL LEGAL ACTION OF TURKEY LED BY MUSTAFA KEMAL ATATÜRK

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pierluigi SIMONE
Keyword(s):  
Ottoman Empire ◽  
Public Debt ◽  
The Political ◽  
Byzantine Empire ◽  
Nationalist Movement ◽  
International Debt ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Republic ◽  
Republic Of Turkey ◽  
Kemal Ataturk

The recast of the international debt contracted by the former Ottoman Empire and the overcoming of the capitulations regime that had afflicted Turkey for centuries, are two of the most relevant sectors in which the political and diplomatic action promoted by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk has been expressed. Extremely relevant in this regard are the different disciplines established, respectively, by the Treaty of Sèvres in 1920 and then by the Treaty of Lausanne in 1923. After the Ottoman Government defaulted in 1875, an agreement (the Decree of Muharrem) was concluded in 1881 between the Ottoman Government and representatives of its foreign and domestic creditors for the resumption of payments on Ottoman bonds, and a European control of a part of the Imperial revenues was instituted through the Administration of the Ottoman Public Debt. At the same time, the Ottoman Empire was burdened by capitulations, conferring rights and privileges in favour of their subjects resident or trading in the Ottoman lands, following the policy towards European States of the Byzantine Empire. According to these capitulations, traders entering the Ottoman Empire were exempt from local prosecution, local taxation, local conscription, and the searching of their domicile. The capitulations were initially made during the Ottoman Empire’s military dominance, to entice and encourage commercial exchanges with Western merchants. However, after dominance shifted to Europe, significant economic and political advantages were granted to the European Powers by the Ottoman Empire. Both regimes, substantially maintained by the Treaty of Sèvres, were considered unacceptable by the Nationalist Movement led by Mustafa Kemal and therefore became the subject of negotiations during the Conference of Lausanne. The definitive overcoming of both of them, therefore represents one of the most evident examples of the reacquisition of the full sovereignty of the Republic of Turkey.

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

1964 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 47-63 ◽  
Author(s):  
Olive Anderson
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Great Britain ◽  
Ottoman Empire ◽  
Public Debt ◽  
Near East ◽  
Financial Control ◽  
Foreign Loan ◽  
Foreign Control

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.

The Dry Man of Europe—Ottoman Prohibition against British Domination

2021 ◽  
pp. 225-254
Author(s):  
Mark Lawrence Schrad
Keyword(s):  
Ottoman Empire ◽  
Public Debt ◽  
World History ◽  
Turkish Government ◽  
Financial Benefits ◽  
Foreign Occupation ◽  
Occupied Territories ◽  
Turkish State ◽  
Kemal Ataturk

Chapter 8 examines temperance and prohibition history within the Ottoman Empire and secular Turkey. Drinking and viticulture were widespread throughout the empire, though the trade was often in the hands of non-Muslims. The Ottoman liquor traffic even became integral to the European-run Ottoman Public Debt Administration. Mustafa Kemal Atatürk was among the drunkest leaders in world history, yet Atatürk and the secular Turkish government in Ankara embraced prohibitionism as a means of denying badly needed alcohol revenues to the Christians occupying their lands—most notably the British controlling Istanbul and the Greeks around Smyrna. Turkish prohibition expanded across Anatolia, as Atatürk liberated Turkey’s occupied territories. Only in 1924, with the end of foreign occupation, was the Kemalist prohibition rescinded, and replaced with a national alcohol monopoly, in which the financial benefits of the liquor trade would accrue to the Turkish state, not to foreigners.

scholarly journals ‘Impossible to provide an accurate estimate’: the interested calculation of the Ottoman public debt, 1875–1881

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-17
Author(s):  
Daniel A. Stolz
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Ottoman Empire ◽  
Knowledge Production ◽  
Public Debt ◽  
Government Intervention ◽  
Accurate Method ◽  
Accurate Estimate ◽  
Political Debate ◽  
Material Interest ◽  
Scientific Status

Abstract When the Ottoman Empire defaulted on its public debt in 1875, British bondholders launched a campaign to win government intervention on their behalf. This article interprets the unprecedented success of this campaign as a matter of knowledge production. Mobilizing the newly established Corporation of Foreign Bondholders as a kind of ‘centre of calculation’, bondholders argued that they deserved assistance because of the unique size of the Ottoman default and the proportion of it that was held by British subjects. Yet neither of these numbers was easily calculated. In fact, influential bondholders worked closely with accountants and members of the Statistical Society to devise an accurate method for quantifying the Ottoman debt – and concluded that such a method did not exist. Historians of quantification and accounting have argued that the scientific status of nineteenth-century accounting depended on its disinterestedness. In the case of the Ottoman default, however, calculation was understood to be inseparable from material interest and political debate.

Musa Kundukhov and the Tragedy of Mass Emigration

2018 ◽  
pp. 53-74
Author(s):  
Jeronim Perović
Keyword(s):  
Ottoman Empire ◽  
Crucial Role ◽  
Indigenous Population ◽  
The Caucasus ◽  
The North ◽  
North Eastern ◽  
History Of ◽  
Muslim Communities ◽  
North Eastern Part

This chapter deals with the tragedy of the mass expulsion of the North Caucasian indigenous population in the aftermath of Russian conquest in the mid-1860s. While the causes of the forced emigration of vast numbers of Cherkessians to the Ottoman Empire have been investigated, little research has been conducted regarding the simultaneous emigration of other Muslim communities, including thousands of Chechens. In the migrations of Muslim Ossetians, Karabulaks and Chechens in 1865, it was an ethnic Ossetian Muslim and general of the Russian Imperial Army, Musa Kundukhov, who played a crucial role. When he organized the mass emigration of Chechens and other Muslim peoples to the Ottoman Empire in the mid-1860s, he also departed together with his family, and later became a highly decorated general in the sultan’s forces. By studying the biography of this individual, this chapter sheds light on the situation in the north-eastern part of the Caucasus as well as the features of Russia’s rule in the early 1860s, and thus illuminates a still little-understood aspect of the history of Russia’s conquest of the Caucasus.

scholarly journals The socio-cultural and political significance of coffeehouses and coffee culture during the independence processes of Kosovo

2014 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 37-41
Author(s):  
Ajhan Bajmaku ◽  
Cinar Nartar
Keyword(s):  
Ottoman Empire ◽  
Significant Role ◽  
Crucial Role ◽  
Research Paper ◽  
The West ◽  
Political Values ◽  
The Balkans ◽  
Political Roles ◽  
Pull Through

The coffee culture in the Balkans spread and developed as the Ottoman Empire began using the region as a base that opened into Europe. This region with great strategic significance draws attention not only because it functioned as a bridge between the East and the West but also because of cultural and political values in perspective of the process of changes and developments that have taken place throughout time. As an establishment the coffeehouse is a vital concept for society. Beside their fundamental functions, coffeehouses have gained additional functions over the course of history. These additional functions are directed by socio-cultural and political behaviours. This research paper aims to focus on the socio-cultural and political roles of the coffee culture and coffeehouses with regard to the independence and liberation movements that took place with beginning with the disintegration of Yugoslavia, particularly in Kosovo. Within this context, the crucial role of coffeehouses is explained through the struggle every fraction of society went through to keep their own cultural and political identities alive in order to pull through the negative circumstances created in Kosovo by the wars experienced in the region in the 1990s. Furthermore, this paper also aims to reveal the significant role coffeehouses and their spatial functions play when a nation undertakes the immense challenge of emancipation.

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