The Ottoman External Debt and its Features Under European Financial Control (1881-1914)

The essay analyses the foreign loans’ evolution of the Ottoman Empire between 1881 and 1914, by examining the three most important loan operations of the period: in 1881, in 1890-92, and in 1903. The foreign loans, besides feeding the growing public expenditure of the Empire, were essential for the European powers control on the Ottoman’ finances, steady all through the second half of the nineteenth century. At the same time, the essay explains how the in deficit public expenditure and the use of foreign loans were the only available means with which the Ottoman government could try a renovation of the Empire’s infrastructures and a modernization of the State apparatus, in order to regain a regional geopolitical supremacy, a more global one already being excluded.