Abstract

"Fraud on the Nile: Resisting an Imperial Currency Union in Eighteenth-Century Ottoman Egypt"

Ellen Nye, Purdue University (emnye@purdue.edu)

In 1707, Yusuf Ağa, the assay master of the Ottoman mint in Cairo, was executed for a mint fraud. The execution was but one part of a long contest over the control of currency in Cairo that escalated with the central government’s ambitions for uniform, empire-wide monetary standards. The Egyptian governor and the elite military group, the janissaries, however, preferred the Cairo mint to produce coins of lower quality to minimize their tax burden and boost exports. The contest over currency involved fights over the mint’s physical location, new fraud-busting technology, and finally the recognition that there could be no single standard for Ottoman coins.

This little-known episode allows us to provide a monetary prospective on the vexed issue of characterizing eighteenth-century Ottoman imperial governance that has variably been described as in decline, decentralized, or based on contracting. Scholars working on currency transitions elsewhere have highlighted that new monetary regimes are rarely as complete or as smooth as they initially appear and have both economic and political aims as coins both facilitate exchange and communicate political authority (Pallaver 2015, Heilleiner and Gilbert 2009). The politics of money in Ottoman Egypt show both the imperial government’s ambitions for a uni-centric and uniform currency system uniting the empire and the endurance of multi-centric approaches to money serving more local interests.