Public Debt after a Defeat: Negotiating the French image of the Ottoman Empire as debtor in the aftermath of the Russo-Turkish War of 1877-78

Abstract

The Ottoman Empire was integrated into European financial markets in the second half of the nineteenth century. During the Crimean War, the Ottoman government turned to foreign loans to fund its state-building policies and military reforms. Britain and France, its allies in that conflict, facilitated this effort, even going so far, exceptionally, as to act as guarantors of the Ottomans’ 1854 bond issue. Accessing the international financial markets via the public debt meant that Ottoman officials had to learn to play by the rules, which were not set in stone but instead were being negotiated in a conflict-laden process. The Ottoman government also had to maintain its international credibility as debtor in the context of a pervasive orientalist discourse in the West that construed the Empire as inherently corrupt and unreliable. This article shows how the credibility of the Ottoman government was established and discussed in France, a great power of the day whose capital was a world financial center and home to many major holders of the Ottoman debt. Relations between the two governments were only one aspect of the question, however. The creditors communicated with one another across national borders, and French public opinion on the Ottoman government’s creditworthiness was shaped by transnational circulation of discourses.