Why do empires adopt foreign coinage? This paper examines the Ottoman Empire’s seventeenth-century monetary system in global comparative perspective. Between 1650 and 1687, many Ottoman mines closed down and Ottoman mints severely limited their production. With little Ottoman coinage, people began to use imported European coins. These coins denominated state budgets, and even small change arrived from abroad and passed from shopkeepers’ hands to the coffers of the state through tax payments. Global coinage that had previously been largely reserved for interstate trade, became the money of the empire.
This period that has been viewed as a peculiar period within the Ottoman historiography appears less strange within a broader comparative perspective. In the seventeenth-century many different empires similarly paused their own minting in favor of foreign coins. Safavid Iran under Tahmasb and Abbas II drastically reduced the number of operational mints (Matthee 2012). Japan circulated coins from Ming China rather than minting its own currency, and the English Empire in America, without mints of its own, relied on a scant supply of foreign coins (Kuroda 2008, Nettels 1934).
By placing the Ottoman Empire within this broader context, this paper considers how we should think about empires of foreign coins during a period traditionally defined by Spanish American mining and East Asian demand. How did empires govern foreign coins through how they were measured if not how they were minted? And what were the economic and political considerations behind halting and resuming minting? In keeping with recent literature on the history of money, such questions require thinking between local socio-political forces and global economic circumstances.
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