The Compromised Empire: Ethnicity and Faith under State Power
Journal: Palgrave Macmillan US eBooks
Year: 2011

Long reliant on Galatta bankers to help shore up periodic shortages of specie, when Ottoman officials decided to take their first major loan from private European banks during the Crimea war, the imperial state's relationship with the larger world changed forever.1 By the 1870s, payments on the more than £200 million the empire eventually borrowed put such a strain on the Tanzimat government that it defaulted in October of 1875 (Blaisdell 1929: 79–82). The resulting confrontation with a few priv