Capital and State-Formation in the Ottoman Mediterranean, 1680-1830

FAIN: FT-278997-21

Zoe Ann Griffith
CUNY Research Foundation, Bernard Baruch College (New York, NY 10010-5585)

Writing a history of maritime trade in the eastern Mediterranean during the late Ottoman era, focused on ports along the Egyptian coast.

This project analyzes a virtually unstudied network of regional port cities and coastal communities in the eastern Mediterranean that played a crucial role in the Ottoman Empire’s transition to state centralization and economic marginalization around the turn of the nineteenth century. The study is centered on Egypt’s Mediterranean coast, home to a middling stratum of Muslim brokers, merchants, landowners, ship captains, and petty officials who resisted and mediated imperial challenges of revenue collection, European encroachment, and crises of political legitimacy leading to centralizing reforms in Egypt and the Ottoman Empire by the mid-nineteenth century. This is the first book-length study of Ottoman port cities that were not primarily defined by their relationship to European capital. Instead, it emphasizes aspects of Ottoman-Islamic financial, legal, and commercial culture that are often subsumed to European forms as the hallmarks of modernity in the eastern Mediterranean.