Western trade in the Ottoman Empire: questions, issues and sources

The issue of Western trade and that of its legal framework, the capitulations, has always been viewed as crucial in the understanding of certain transformations undergone by the Ottoman Empire in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The implicit argument behind these statements is that, in the long run, Western trade and economic presence in the Levant has worked towards the gradual integration of the Ottoman Empire into an economic system that came to be dominated by Western powers. This integration, in turn, has generally been described in rather negative terms, ranging from (Ottoman) passivity to signs of an impending domination of the Ottoman economy by the commercial and industrial supremacy of Europe. In that sense, it is rather striking that most scenarios concerning the evolution of Western trading activity in the eastern Mediterranean basin tend to reinforce the often-criticised vision of decline applied to the Ottoman Empire as a whole and, more particularly, to its military and diplomatic performance against the growing power of Western nations. Political and diplomatic in essence as it may have been, the Eastern Question is inextricably linked to the outcome of over three centuries of commercial interaction between Europe and the Ottomans.

This, one may argue, is even truer of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. While the sixteenth century is generally associated with the emergence of the Ottoman capitulatory regime and the granting of the first commercial ‘privileges’ to the French and the English, the implicit understanding is that these treaties were granted out of a combination of a self-assured magnanimity and a desire to forge durable political alliances with certain Western powers.