ABSTRACT
Much of the nature of Turkey’s nineteenth-century financial relationships with European financial centres can be inferred from reviewing the relevant entries in The Stock Exchange Year-Book for 1914.2 These provide details for ten long-term sovereign loans (many of which were conversion issues), with seven quoted in the London market’s Official List. Apart from one very particular exception,3 they dated from 1890 and had been floated across the markets of London, Paris and other continental financial centres by a number of issuing houses, including: Deutsche Bank, Imperial Ottoman Bank, Morgan, Grenfell & Co., Parr’s Bank, Rothschilds and Stern Brothers. The major intermediary was the Imperial Ottoman Bank,4 a multinational or transnational institution and, consequently, comparable in character to the composition of the continuing flow of finance that its managements arranged. Its garnering of Western European savings was further augmented from 1911 by the placement of Turkish Treasury bills through the London market and elsewhere. Collectively, these banks and bankers had enabled Turkey over the fin-de-siècle
period to tap the savings of wide sections of Europe’s bourgeoisie, so maintaining the movement of funds across the continent from the West to Southeast initiated in 1854.
