Financing cotton, building Empire: deutsche bank in late Ottoman Anatolia

Abstract

This essay explores the financial structures of global cotton production and trade in the late 1800s and early 1900s by focusing on the German capitalist incursion into the Ottoman countryside. It chronicles one German company's attempt at financializing Anatolian cotton for the benefit of the German Empire and critically engages Rosa Luxemburg's concept of capitalist imperialism, which she developed in 1913 based on this very context. Acting in non-colonized Ottoman territory, German capitalists proved to be highly dependent on local capitalist agents, such as merchants, landholders, and bankers, particularly in the provinces. Financial transactions required physical translation and transformation. As a result, the dominance of the German firm was undermined, even though it was a subsidiary of Deutsche Bank, then the world's largest private bank. The essay thus shifts our gaze away from metropolitan bank architectures to the hinterland, establishing factories, agricultural fields, and provincial mansions as spaces of financial transaction and contestation. It further identifies land ownership as a major impediment for the Germans. Studying the German government and company archives through an architectural lens foregrounds the material reality of the seemingly immaterial system of finance, revealing the frictions it creates, and thereby elucidates how power is produced and subverted across imperial borders.