A Commerce in Coins: The Early Modern Ottoman Empire as an Arena for Competing Theories of Money’s Value
A modern tendency to see money as the natural medium of a “market” composed of a multitude of spontaneous and individualized exchanges can obscure our understanding of early modern money. In Ottoman history, early modern money’s value is often assumed either to adhere to state decree or to reflect merely the precious metals that the coins contained. I instead follow foreign merchants into the Ottoman Empire to reveal the dazzling diversity of the Ottoman monetary system and the complexities of establishing money’s value.
For much of the seventeenth century, the Ottoman mints lay largely dormant with foreign coins instead facilitating exchange. For merchants peddling a diverse array of currencies, Ottoman monetary complexity offered the possibility of profits. Yet even as merchants vended global currencies, these coins’ value was assessed locally—determined through specific measurement conventions and rituals. Facing a fiscal crisis brought on by war, the Ottoman state broke with precedent and expelled all foreign coins. Instead of coins, merchants began to swap deeds for Ottoman tax farms. The profits that arose from the Ottoman monetary system’s complexity receded, but new opportunities for speculation emerged from the fiscal crisis.
My approach to the business of Ottoman money is shaped by my sources: Ottoman state documents, merchant papers, and numismatic evidence. Research on money often privileges state documents and philosophical treatises, rendering a top-down vision of how money worked. Following merchants through the more granular perspective of commercial correspondence and the coins themselves reveals a different reality than the tidy lists of bureaucrats. The history of early modern money rendered through this approach presents the opportunity to return to old debates over capitalism equipped with lessons from global history the cultural turn as merchants both shaped foreign monetary systems and navigated new understandings of money’s value.
