This dissertation explores debt as an instrument of control deployed by German private and state actors in the Ottoman Empire between the 1870s and 1919. The everyday functioning of empire relies on seemingly abstract and smooth financial transactions across vast territories. Studying these processes architecturally foregrounds the material reality of the “immaterial” system of modern finance, revealing the frictions it creates, and thereby centers how power is produced and subverted within and across imperial borders.
Focusing largely on Deutsche Bank’s archives and related sources, “The Architecture of German Capitalist Imperialism” traces the movement of German capital into Ottoman territory. The corresponding material system—from financial office buildings in Constantinople to farms, factories and trading posts in the Ottoman region of Cilicia—served to enable Deutsche Bank, a private German bank with significant state support, to carry out its business in a foreign, non-colonized territory. In the Ottoman capital, the Deutsche Bank branch office and the headquarters of the Ottoman Public Debt Administration (OPDA, founded by international creditors following the Ottoman government’s 1875 declaration of bankruptcy) constituted the central structures of the debt system.
Yet to increase agricultural tax revenue—thus helping to repay foreign debt and serving as collateral for new loans—the OPDA operationalized a system of resource extraction across a wide economic geography, reaching far into the Anatolian provinces. As a major creditor of the Ottoman government, Deutsche Bank was central to this OPDA project while also developing its own agricultural cotton program in the Anatolian countryside. What emerged, as this dissertation demonstrates, was a vast inter-imperial architectural network engendered by, and servicing, Ottoman debt.
To understand how that debt operated on the ground, the study follows the flows of capital through the more informal spaces that mostly go unacknowledged in both architectural and economic history—such as a local banker’s private villa in Cilicia and warehouse facilities at Deutsche Bank’s cotton factory—and explores the land regime the Germans encountered in the Ottoman countryside.
It shows that financial transactions required physical translation and transformation, which generated dependencies for Deutsche Bank from local actors, thus undermining the bank’s dominance particularly in the “hinterland” and slowing down the German Empire’s imperial push. By focusing on the multifaceted built environment of capitalist imperialism, this dissertation challenges well-established boundaries of rural and urban, private and imperial, metropole and colony and establishes architecture as both a medium and a product of the logics of modern finance developed in the late nineteenth century. Directing attention to the material foundations of imperial finance illuminates the functioning of global capitalism at its founding moment, throwing long shadows into the twentieth century.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:columbia.edu/oai:academiccommons.columbia.edu:10.7916/ttm3-8j43 |
| Date | January 2024 |
| Creators | Schreiner, Eva |
| Source Sets | Columbia University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Theses |
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