ABSTRACT
The economy of the Ottoman Empire was based on free agricultural production and the complete control of the economic life by the state, a pattern which has been characterized as the Asian mode of production in Marxist theory. In the heyday of the Ottoman Empire during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, political power was concentrated in the hands of the Sultan and his extensive civilian and military palace bureaucracy. The formation of an international committee supervising Ottoman finance had already been recommended by the European great powers at the Congress of Berlin in 1878. The political economy of Turkey during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is characterized by the transition from a decaying world-empire to a nation-state fully incorporated as a periphery into the capitalist world-economy. An agreement on the settlement of defaulted foreign debt between the Ottoman Empire and its creditors was concluded in 1881 and resulted in the establishment of foreign financial control.
