Date:
Location:
Lecturer:
Financial “intermediaries” are typically understood as enemies of the modern state, representing an “old order” based on traditional structures of overlapping political and economic power. Aviv’s talk concentrated on the epistemological-methodological question of how to narrate socio-economic change in the nineteenth century Ottoman Empire, as a political economic formation that relied on intermediaries until its last days, while moving away from common analytical frameworks that rely on ideal-types of the modern state and the modern economy, with “growth” as the telos of history.
She discussed the expansion of the Ottoman public credit system and agricultural credit markets in the province of Damascus (Syria) during the long nineteenth century, focusing on the key role played by economic actors that have traditionally been considered premodern intermediaries. These actors included tax-farmers, sarrafs and merchants who funded the hajj (pilgrimage caravan to Mecca), and investors in the Ottoman public debt, who helped shape, and were shaped by, transformations in financial institutions, practices and conceptions of debt, interest and usury in this period. New credit markets were generated by the introduction of interest-bearing treasury bonds, an important innovation that relied on earlier public debt mechanisms and complemented them, while at the same time changes in the legal system facilitated these processes of expansion through legislation that was favorable to creditors and moneylenders of various kinds.
Pיםאם: The scale of a money changer (Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality City Museum)