Wonders of China and Iran, Knowledge of Contracts and Debts: From Bewildering Paper Money to Central Banking in the Ottoman Empire

Abstract

This thesis explores how paper money came to be first known, and understood in the Ottoman empire. By following two parallel stories of money, the thesis first explores the presence of paper money in Ottoman narrative sources on China. This first account explores how the idea was initially considered a wonder, and how Ottoman scholars interacted with the reported technology, making it intelligible as they explained how it bore value, and how it related to other known such social events in Islamic history. These included the anonymous translator of the Book of China from Persian to Turkish, but other well-known scholars like Kātib Çelebī (d. 1067/1657) and Ḫezārfen Hüseyin Efendi (d. 1102/1691). The second part of the thesis departs from this intellectual story to analyze the praxis of temessük, a particular bill that initially meant “proof.” Tracing its history, it becomes clear that the bill played a role in shaping Ottoman understandings of paper as possibly bearing value in ways that enabled scholars and bureaucrats to think of paper money as temessük. A key element of this story was the creation of a monetary authority, as the Imperial Mint became a central bank in the eighteenth century. The thesis holds the curiously synchronic evolution of a shifting conceptual discussion on paper money and a financial praxis, that of temessük, is an artifact of a changing financial culture, a culture that enabled the Ottomans to conceive of paper as money.