All four papers in this panel emphasize continuity over rupture, utilizing rich and diverse archival repositories and focusing on multiple scales, contexts, and conjunctures, as well as on commodities, actors, institutions, and power relations, Standing at the intersections of science, technology, capital, labor, environment, and corporate colonialism, this panel welcomes the new histories of capitalism, urging scholars to move beyond strictly urban and industrial foci, as best illustrated by renewed and critical scholarship on histories of slavery, colonialism, and racial capitalism. While the spatial focus of the new scholarship remains on the Atlantic world and the Americas, this panel invites scholars to consider capital and capitalism as a global process and phenomenon through studies from the Ottoman Mediterranean between the eighteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Önder Eren Akgül argues debt, dispossession, and violence were essential to the multiscale operations of capital in Western Anatolia through the commodification of licorice by the British and later American MacAndrews and Forbes company in the late Ottoman Empire. Kristen Alff focuses on Beirut-based families becoming major actors in the global capitalist market in cotton and silk in the nineteenth century by employing various strategies within late Ottoman contexts and during critical conjunctures of global capitalism. Anıl Aşkın discusses the fierce competition among rival saltpeter contractors and the conditions of capital accumulation in eighteenth-century Niğde, the major supplier of saltpeter for the early modern and modern Ottoman war economy. Lastly, Emre Can Dağlıoğlu rethinks the 19th-century Ottoman public debt crisis and the subsequent establishment of an international financial control institution by European creditors from the perspective of corporate colonialism, with a particular focus on silk production.