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Murat Birdal's book on the Ottoman Public Debt Administration (OPDA) is a timely reminder of some of the ways in which public debt, international monetary flows, direct foreign investments, and fiscal regimes of the world economy changed and were modified in the wake of the Great Depression of the late 19th century--themes that are again under discussion today in the midst of another major crisis of capitalism. In a study the author describes as combining the world-systems perspective with an institutional analysis, Birdal looks at the Ottoman Empire's relation to European (British and French, to be specific) financial institutions. He tells the story of how options for domestic borrowing from the local financiers, the infamous Galata bankers, were exhausted around the mid-19th century and how the Ottoman financial bureaucracy reluctantly turned to external borrowing in the aftermath of the Crimean War. The debt default following the Russian war in 1877 in the midst of the Great Depression and the establishment of the OPDA by British and French creditors to recuperate Ottoman debt form the main focus of the book.
Birdal then explains in some detail the organizational structure of the OPDA and how it administered revenues from certain commodities (salt, silk, spirits, fisheries, and, most important, tobacco) over which it was granted monopoly rights until the Ottoman debt was recuperated. He emphasizes how capital flows into the empire radically increased after this and underlines the transformative impact the OPDA's administrative practices had on the Ottoman bureaucracy (a new institutional framework in the fiscal system and new technologies of production, which were then taken up by the Ottoman administration). He also shows how the OPDA facilitated foreign direct investment in the empire, especially for the construction and operation of a number of railway lines. Based on the author's doctoral dissertation, the book lays down in a concise and comprehensive manner (although the contribution of the game-theoretic model in Chapter 3 to the...