Papers presented by Dimitrios Stergiopoulos since 2019

2024 Providence, Rhode Island

"From Istanbul to Athens: The Transnational Movement of Homme d’Affaires in the Second Half of the 19th Century"

Abstract:

The second half of the 19th century was a period of rapid change on multiple fronts for the Eastern Mediterranean. Central into this process was a group of merchant bankers who were active and present in all the major financial centers of Eurasia (Istanbul, Athens, Odessa, Lebanon, Alexandria, Paris, Marseille, London, etc.). Although scholars have studied the business activities of these bankers to a certain extent, we still do not know why some of them decided to attach themselves to different countries and nation-building projects regardless of their ethnicity. Thus, some Jewish bankers moved to Paris or London, and others stayed in Thessaloniki and the Ottoman Empire. In this paper, I explore a specific aspect of this process; the influx of Greek-speaking financiers and bankers to Athens in Greece after the 1870s. This led not only to deep changes in the Greek economy, but also to them being attached to the modernizing agendas of one of the most prominent Greek politicians at that time, Charilaos Trikoupis. Interestingly, these bankers did not migrate to Greece from Western Europe, but from Istanbul, the capital of the Ottoman Empire. Istanbul had been at the forefront of advanced banking practices and had served as a major hub of the capital flows from Western Europe to Eastern Mediterranean. In this paper, I argue that the opportunities for enrichment in the Ottoman Empire did not suffice for this stratum of ambitious homme d’affaires who also wanted to translate their wealth into political power. Greece offered these Grecophone financiers more opportunities than did the Ottoman Empire, where authoritarianism prevailed.

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