Papers presented by Ellen Nye since 2019
2024 Providence, Rhode Island
"Merchants and Financial Revolution: Interstate Trade, the Great Recoinage, and Shifting Scales of Money"
Ellen Nye, Harvard University
Abstract:
The end of the seventeenth century was a period of tension when increasingly assertive early modern states grasped at monetary sovereignty and longer-term public debt while also facing the power of global finance with merchants moving money more quickly and easily than ever before. This paper examines the connections between interstate private credit and domestic public finance through seventeenth-century Anglo-Ottoman trade. It examines how merchants who served as creditors and state financiers in the Ottoman Empire—England’s largest market for its prized woolen textiles—returned home to London where they assumed elite positions in the Bank of England and imperial bureaucracy governing money in the Atlantic, South Asia, and within England. In these positions they drew on their experiences with Ottoman finance and crafted polices that promoted the interests of metropolitan creditors through the “intrinsic value” theory of money, the idea that coins are equal to the value of their precious metals. Contrary to a longstanding Eurocentric emphasis on domestic developments, I show that their monetary thinking was formed abroad—particularly in the Ottoman Empire, debuted in the colonies, and then contributed to the English Great Recoinage of 1696, persistent hierarchies of imperial subjecthood, and the intellectual underpinnings of the later international gold standard. The importance of the connections between private credit and public finance is often lost in the division between studies of long-distance trade and political economy. Studies of long-distance trade following in the tradition of Avner Greif often portray merchants as managing their transactions independent of any state. Studies of state public finance frequently adhere to national categories and present public finance as largely divorced from private interstate credit networks. By working between private credit and public finance, we see the personal inter-imperial entanglements at the heart of an emerging capitalist system.
2024 Providence, Rhode Island
"Empires of Obligation: Law, Money, and Debt between England and the Ottoman Empire, 1670-1720"
Ellen Nye, Yale University
Abstract:
Krooss Dissertation Prize finalist
Keywords:
debt
2022 Mexico City
"A Commerce in Coins: The Early Modern Ottoman Empire as an Arena for Competing Theories of Money’s Value"
Ellen Nye, Yale University
Abstract:
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.