 Relational finance: Ottoman debt, financialization, and the problem of the semi-civilizedJulia Elyachar Journal of Cultural Economy, 2023, vol. 16, issue 3, 323-336 Abstract: How might archival fragments of an economic anthropologist of post-Ottoman Egypt speak to current debates about finance and financialization? Literature in critical financial studies often reads as if financialization began in 1970 and moves outward from the global North like a mobile frontier remaking the world in its image. But if there is anything like a ‘frontier of finance,' it moved from East to West long before the Industrial Revolution. Through readings of ‘ethnographers of finance’ in archives of the Ottoman Public Debt Administration, I disrupt common views of finance as an intrinsic agent of extraction, colonialism, and imperialism to show how finance entails multiple and overlapping processes that make debt valuable. From such a perspective, attention to finance and revaluation in the late Ottoman Empire can invigorate debates about financialization more broadly, including in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis in the United States. Date: 2023 Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:jculte:v:16:y:2023:i:3:p:323-336 Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from DOI: 10.1080/17530350.2023.2189146 Access Statistics for this article Journal of Cultural Economy is currently edited by Michael Pryke, Joe Deville, Tony Bennett, Liz McFall and Melinda Cooper More articles in Journal of Cultural Economy from Taylor & Francis Journals |
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