Silk-Made Capitalism: Public Debt and Local Networks in Ottoman Sericulture, 1881–1914

Donald Quataert, a leading scholar of Middle Eastern economic history, wrote in 1983 that the establishment of the Ottoman Public Debt Administration (OPDA) was “perhaps the landmark event of late Ottoman history.” All indicators bespeak his postulation: As a stark symbol of European financial control over the empire, creditors in France, Germany, Austria-Hungary, Italy, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and the Ottoman Empire were granted the right to collect tax revenues from salt, tobacco, spirits, stamp, fishing, and silk in the empire. However, far from a mere tax collecting entity, the OPDA as an incorporated financial institution oversaw the entire process of production, financing, and standardization of the commodities. Until the outbreak of WWI, the OPDA became the main organ of the Ottoman financial administration, managing over one-third of the imperial balance sheet, employing a vast workforce of more than ten thousand people, and administering a network of twenty offices stretching from modern-day Greece to Yemen.

However, the vast majority of the works are only interested in their imperialist dimension and their contribution to the economic “modernization” of the Ottoman Empire. Challenging the traditional narratives focusing solely on economic advancement and sovereignty, my study presents the OPDA as an extraordinarily privileged private enterprise driven by its own agenda—maximizing its shareholders’ wealth—rather than helping the financial recovery of the Ottoman Empire or protecting the Great Powers’ political interests. With dynamic and fluid constellation of networks particularly within the silk industry—a network encompassing humans, eggs, worms, and trees, the OPDA offers deep insights into the interplay of financialization, corporate colonialism, and capitalism. This perspective contests Westcentric narratives of modernization, presenting instead a view of capitalism as constructed socially, interlaced with the ecological relations, science, class, and gender in the Ottoman Empire as elsewhere.