British Policy towards the Ottoman Empire, 1908-1914

Agricultural Productivity in the Early Ottoman Empire

This paper provides standardized estimates of labor productivity in arable farming in selected regions of the early Ottoman Empire, including Jerusalem and neighboring districts in eastern Mediterranean; Bursa and Malatya in Anatolia; and Thessaly, Herzegovina, and Budapest in eastern Europe. I use data from the tax registers of the Ottoman Empire to estimate grain output per worker, standardiz...

Public Policy and British Multinational Banks, 1914-1982

Until the 1960s, when the advent of the Eurodollar market transformed the banking industry, British-owned banks were the predominant form of multinational bank. From the 1830s, British banks had established overseas branches, first in British colonial settlements in Australia and Canada, later in Asia, Latin America, Africa, and even California. By 1914 a group of around 30 banks owned and oper...

The British Empire Exhibition

A scholarly intermediary between the Ottoman Empire and Renaissance Europe.

This essay studies Moses Galeano, a Jewish scholar with ties to Crete and the Ottoman Sultan's court, who traveled to the Veneto around 1500. After describing Galeano's intellectual milieu, it focuses, first, on circumstantial evidence that he transmitted information central to the rise of Renaissance astronomy. Galeano knew of theories that strongly resemble portions of astronomy texts written...

Military Transformation in the Ottoman Empire and Russia, 1500-1800

By the early 16th century, the Ottoman Empire had emerged as a major military power in Southeastern Europe and the Middle East. The Ottomans were feared and admired by contemporaneous Europeans from Niccol6 Machiavelli to Ivan Peresvetov. The latter regarded the empire of Sultan Mehmed II (r. 1444-46, 1451-81) as a model to be emulated by his own ruler, Ivan IV of Muscovy (r. 1547-84), and inde...