ABSTRACT
European financial imperialism became a threat to Turkish independence after the establishment of so-called dual-control and the occupation of Egypt, which is marvellously described in David Landes’s book about bankers and pashas.2 When in 1881-2 a Caisse de la dette publique ottomane was established, parallels to the Egypt case were obvious.3 The dette publique had an ambivalent character: on the one hand both the Turkish external and a great part of the internal debt came under the supervision of private European investors and governmental rights were transferred abroad; on the other, this made the dette publique an instrument of European financial imperialism, because private bankers in Paris, London, and Berlin were deciding about the Ottoman national treasury and exercising powerful formal and informal influence on taxes, financial and economic politics and sometimes, in association with their embassies, even on Turkish foreign policy. The governments of the European great powers also discovered the possibility of using their formal and informal channels to exert diplomatic pressure through financial means. On the other hand the existence of the dette publique was a necessary precondition for the Ottoman Empire to get access to the European financial markets, which was badly needed for the recovery of the state and the army. Modernization of economy, army, and especially traffic would have been impossible without Western credits and loans. Paradoxically from a Turkish political perspective, close cooperation with European bankers was necessary to avoid European financial imperialism.
