Daniel Stolz

The Long Debt: The Ottoman Loans and Economic Governance in the Twentieth Century

This book project offers a new history of the expansion of public debt and international finance, with the 1876 Ottoman default at its center. Tracing the consequences of public default from diverse perspectives—ranging from bondholders in London, to salt smugglers in eastern Anatolia—I argue that the aftermath of the Ottoman default contributed to the rising, global political power of bondholders, and to the emergence of national economic governance in the post-Ottoman Middle East. My work connects large-scale political economy to the lived experience of public debt for diverse individuals. This approach connects social history with a growing literature in anthropology that has treated public indebtedness as a central feature of modern life.

Daniel Stolz is a historian of the late Ottoman Empire and the modern Middle East. His work examines how late Ottomans used technical knowledge to transform their society. His first book was The Lighthouse and the Observatory: Islam, Science, and Empire in Late Ottoman Egypt (Cambridge University Press Science in History series, 2018).  His most recent publication, with A. Tunç Şen, is “Science: Institutions, Genres, Materials,” in the Cambridge Companion to Ottoman History, forthcoming in 2024. Previous publications have appeared In the International Journal of Middle East Studies, the British Journal for the History of Science, and the International Journal of Turkish Studies. In addition to the book project that he Is working on at the IRH, he is also writing an article on legacies of the Ottoman public debt in international law.