“A Bank of Trust”: Legal Practices of Ottoman Finance Between Empires

Abstract

How agreements were maintained and enforced beyond state-backed systems is among the least understood aspects of Ottoman legal history. This article reveals how merchants’ engagement with Ottoman state finance intertwined private and state-backed legal practices through a letter-book written entirely in Ottoman Turkish belonging to a seventeenth-century English merchant, Peter Whitcomb, who provided financial services to Ottoman officials across the empire. As a rare example of surviving early modern mercantile correspondence in Ottoman Turkish, Whitcomb’s letters to distant officials expose Ottoman financial epistolary culture and a wide range of alternative methods of dispute resolution. By combining these letters with court records, this article shows how Ottoman finance’s layers of devolved authority themselves relied on a range of legal practices that encompassed a language of reciprocity and reputation, established Ottoman documentary forms, intercessions on an individual’s behalf, appeals to elites, petitions to the grand vizier, and appearances in Ottoman sharīʿa courts. The capacity of Ottoman state finance to incorporate a foreigner like Whitcomb into its fiscal apparatus through this breadth of legal practices further suggests that we should revisit domestic narratives of competitive early modern state formation to include inter-imperial actors.