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Implementation of the 1838 Anglo-Turkish Convention on Izmir'S Trade: European and Minority Merchants

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 July 2015

Elena Frangakis-Syrett
Elena Frangakis-Syrett*
Affiliation:
Queens College, City University of New York, Department of History
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Extract

In the last decades of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Izmir experienced tremendous economic growth, mainly as a result of growth in the world economy. In addition, the French Revolution and the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars resulted in the collapse of French economic domination in the area. As a result, Ottoman minority merchants experienced an equally tremendous economic growth (Frangakis-Syrett, 1987, pp. 73-86). Britain replaced France as the principal trading partner of Izmir, while the economic growth of the port-city as well as that of the minority merchants continued strong. It was in this period of increasing commercial activity that the Anglo-Turkish Convention was signed between Great Britain and the Ottoman Empire on 16 August 1838 to come into effect in western Anatolia on March 1839. The Treaty, which subsequently was signed by all the European States as well as the United States and the Ottoman Empire, aimed at removing obstacles to free trade in the Empire for the merchants of these states. It was to achieve that by removing an array of local or additional duties paid for the export of Ottoman goods or the import and circulation of all other goods, manufactured or otherwise, and by setting a fixed rate of five percent duty on imports and twelve percent on exports—nine percent on purchasing at the place of growth and three percent on exportation.

Type
Research Article
Information
New Perspectives on Turkey , Volume 7: Special Issue Title: The 1838 Convention and Its Impact , spring 1992 , pp. 91 - 112
Copyright
Copyright © New Perspectives on Turkey 1992

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