Professor Şevket Pamuk is Chair of Contemporary Turkish Studies at the European Institute in LSE. He is a leading economic historian of the Ottoman Empire, the Middle East and modern Turkey. He is also the author of The Ottoman Empire and European Capitalism 1820-1913: Trade, Investment and Production (Cambridge University Press, 1987)and A Monetary History of the Ottoman Empire (Cambridge University Press, 2000). He co-authored A History of Middle East Economies in the Twentieth Century (1999) with Harvard-based historian Roger Owen. A collection of his articles on the Ottoman economy recently appeared as Ottoman Economy and Its Institutions (Ashgate-Variorum, 2008). His research interests include Turkish economic history since 1800, the Ottoman economy in the early modern era, and economic growth in the Balkans and the Middle East since 1800.

Also brother to Orhan Pamuk.

This volume examines the monetary history of a large empire located at the crossroads of intercontinental trade from the fourteenth century until the end of World War I. It covers all regions of the empire from the Balkans through Anatolia, Syria, Egypt and the Gulf to the Maghrib. The implications of monetary developments for social and political history are also discussed throughout the volume. This is an important and pathbreaking book by one of the most distinguished economic historians in the field.