Literature Review in Turkish on Crimean War and the Ottomans’ War Finance

Abstract

The Crimean War not only affected the Ottoman Empire politically, but also caused it to suffer economically. Although the war originated as an Ottoman-Russian war, there were essentially two sides of the war, Russian and British. France also supported the Ottoman Empire in order to protect both its domestic policy and foreign interests in the face of Russian expansionism. Britain, who adopted a policy of neutrality at the beginning of the war, perceived the Russian advance as a great threat to British interests in the following months and built a foreign policy to preserve the territorial integrity of the Ottomans. For the Ottoman Empire, even if the war was won, it started a great financial collapse. Because the Ottoman Empire had attempted to borrow foreign debt for the first time in its history. The foreign debts borrowed from Britain and France were almost the turning point for the future collapse of the Ottoman finance. On the other hand, when the researches on the Crimean War are examined, it is seen that important works have been revealed in the Turkish literature written on the war in almost the last twenty years. In our study, we will give priority to these works and introduce them briefly, and then we will try to examine the economic collapse caused by the war for the Ottomans in the context of foreign borrowing.