Relational finance: Ottoman debt, financialization, and the problem of the semi-civilized

How might archival fragments of an economic anthropologist post-Ottoman Egypt speak to current debates about finance and financialization? Literature in critical financial studies often reads as if financialization began 1970 moves outward from the global North like a mobile frontier remaking world its image. But there is anything ‘frontier finance,' it moved East West long before Industrial Revolution. Through readings ‘ethnographers finance’ archives Ottoman Public Debt Administration, I disrupt common views intrinsic agent extraction, colonialism, imperialism show how entails multiple overlapping processes that make debt valuable. From such perspective, attention revaluation late Empire can invigorate more broadly, including aftermath 2008 crisis United States.