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Dossier: Transactional Spaces

Financing Cotton, Building Empire: Deutsche Bank in Late Ottoman Anatolia

Bâtisseur d'empire, financeur du coton : une banque allemande dans l'Anatolie ottomane tardive
Eva Schreiner

Résumé

This essay explores the financial structures of global cotton production and trade in the late 1800s and early 1900s by focusing on the German capitalist incursion into the Ottoman countryside. It chronicles one German company’s attempt at financializing Anatolian cotton for the benefit of the German Empire and critically engages Rosa Luxemburg’s concept of “capitalist imperialism,” which she developed in 1913 based on this very context. Acting in non-colonized Ottoman territory, German capitalists proved to be highly dependent on local capitalist agents, such as merchants, landholders, and bankers, particularly in the provinces. Financial transactions required physical translation and transformation. As a result, the dominance of the German firm was undermined, even though it was a subsidiary of Deutsche Bank, then the world’s largest private bank. The essay thus shifts our gaze away from metropolitan bank architectures to the “hinterland,” establishing factories, agricultural fields, and provincial mansions as spaces of financial transaction and contestation. It further identifies land ownership as a major impediment for the Germans. Studying the German government and company archives through an architectural lens foregrounds the material reality of the seemingly immaterial system of finance, revealing the frictions it creates, and thereby elucidates how power is produced and subverted across imperial borders.

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Entrées d’index

Index géographique :

Anatolie, Turquie
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Texte intégral

Introduction

1A group of men has stopped to pose for a photograph (fig. 1). Some stand at ease, looking straight into the camera. Two of the figures are merely a blur: perhaps the men were in a hurry to get on with their work. A camel caravan has just arrived, loaded with freshly harvested cotton spilling out of the bags, awaiting further processing. A large, simple building is visible in the background. It features multiple windows and a wooden awning to shield workers and animals from the sun.

Figure 1: Photograph, delivery of cotton to DLBG’s Adana premises, 1909.

Figure 1: Photograph, delivery of cotton to DLBG’s Adana premises, 1909.

Source: Berlin (Germany), Berlin-Brandenburgisches Wirtschaftsarchiv e.V. (BBWA), Philipp Holzmann Bildarchiv, U5/03/1837/2/00218.

2The photograph was taken in 1909 by a German railway engineer employed by the German construction firm Holzmann. He was presumably in the area preparing for the opening of the Ottoman railway leg over the Taurus mountains. It would have been necessary to scout the landscape to determine the projected railway’s connecting route through Cilicia (part of what is today known as Çukurova, located in Southern Anatolia near Turkey’s present-day border with Syria). Why the engineer photographed the factory and its workers remains unknown, but his archive constitutes rare visual evidence of the German capitalists’ architectural foothold in Ottoman Cilicia.

  • 1 For more on the “incommensurability” of financial regimes, see Łukasz Stanek, Architecture in Globa (...)

3The photograph depicts the premises of the German Levantine Cotton Company (Deutsch-Levantinische Baumwoll-Gesellschaft, DLBG) in Adana, the province’s capital. My essay chronicles this company’s attempt to establish itself as the region’s main cotton exporter. In doing so, the essay presents a space homogenized by imperial capitalism, oriented to capitalize on cotton from the fields to the factory and all the way to the port cranes loading bales onto ships headed to Europe. The German company attempted to materially alter the Ottoman countryside by establishing farms, installing processing machinery, building office and living spaces for its employees, and expanding railway and shipping infrastructures. I use attempted on purpose here: although the company may have envisioned simply plowing through and transforming Ottoman land, its efforts to establish itself in foreign, non-colonized territory frequently clashed with realities on the ground. Powerful local merchants, landholders, moneylenders, and bankers decisively shaped the process. The essay thus not only constitutes the company factory as a space of financial transaction but also establishes agricultural fields and provincial mansions as spaces of contestation surrounding these financial transactions. I suggest that by materializing a specific capitalist form of imperialism, architecture actively participated in mediating between seemingly incommensurable systems of global cotton, German finance capitalism, and the local Ottoman economic regime.1

  • 2 Frankfurt/Main (Germany), Deutsche Bank AG, Historisches Institut (DBHI), Orientbüro (OR) 707, Comm (...)
  • 3 Rosa Luxemburg, The Accumulation of Capital: A Contribution to an Economic Explanation of Imperiali (...)
  • 4 Kurt Grunwald, “Pénétration Pacifique: The Financial Vehicles of Germany’s Drang nach Osten,” in (...)
  • 5 For diplomatic and military histories, see Gregor Schöllgen, Imperialismus und Gleichgewicht: Deuts (...)
  • 6 Luxemburg’s emphasis of the role of debt is also what differentiates her theory of capitalist imper (...)
  • 7 Rosa Luxemburg, The Accumulation of Capital, op. cit. (note 3), p. 423-424.

4It was on November 14, 1904, that Deutsche Bank founded DLBG. The bank wanted to monopolize cotton in Ottoman lands and export it to the booming German textile industry, which would effectively place Ottoman Anatolia within the reach of German industrialists, alongside German colonial territories. The company headquarters was established in Dresden, but the main area of operations was the Cilician Plains—a region DLBG considered “poor in capital” and hence exploitable (fig. 2).2 Less than a decade later, in 1913, philosopher Rosa Luxemburg would develop the concept of “capitalist imperialism” by studying, precisely, Deutsche Bank’s activities in the Ottoman Empire.3 Deutsche Bank, at the time the world’s biggest bank, was the key institution in the Ottoman railways, the largest building project in the late 19th-century Ottoman Empire. The German bank financed and organized the railways’ construction; they were built with German material and engineered by German firms such as Holzmann. From the outset in 1888, the railway project was tied to numerous million-mark loans granted by Deutsche Bank to the highly indebted Ottoman state. The German bank became a key creditor of the Ottoman government, and transfers of capital from Germany to the Ottoman Empire became one of the largest flows of international loans at the time.4 This is the process that Luxemburg designated as “capitalist imperialism”: the simultaneous emancipation and despoiling of “rising capitalist states” by integrating them into international circuits of finance on the basis of foreign loans. The process relied upon extorting higher taxes from the peasantry in the “hinterland” (to repay the debt) and extorting more work for less pay from workers in the creditor states (to generate capital to be loaned). The railway features prominently in diplomatic, military, and architectural histories of Ottoman-German relations.5 What distinguishes Luxemburg is her focus on the issue of finance surrounding the railways.6 In her account, capitalist imperialism appears to be a smooth financial machine, extracting value from Ottoman land and transferring it to “the coffers of Deutsche Bank,” its directors and shareholders, to accumulate as capitalist surplus value.7

Figure 2: DLBG, map of Cilician cotton cultivation, 1904.

Figure 2: DLBG, map of Cilician cotton cultivation, 1904.

Source: Frankfurt/Main (Germany), DBHI, OR 707, Sketch of areas of cotton cultivation in Asia Minor and North Syria.

  • 8 See Meltem Toksöz, Nomads, Migrants, and Cotton in the Eastern Mediterranean: The Making of the Ada (...)
  • 9 See for instance Şevket Pamuk, The Ottoman Empire and European Capitalism, 1820-1913, op. cit. (no (...)
  • 10 The language used in internal bank and government correspondence is German, with some sources in Fr (...)
  • 11 Jasper Ludewig and Maren Koehler, “Financialized Space,” Architectural Theory Review, vol. 26, no.  (...)
  • 12 See Brett Christophers, “The Limits to Financialization,” Dialogues in Human Geography, vol. 5, no. (...)

5While Luxemburg’s work is often discussed in economic and colonial histories, this essay introduces it to the architectural discourse, establishing architecture as the material embodiment of the capitalist imperial machine. This involves a shift of emphasis away from metropolitan areas, to which architecture usually attends, to the provinces. Recent histories of capitalism in the Eastern Mediterranean have developed a rich and complex picture of turn-of-the-20th- century Ottoman Cilicia.8 What requires further attention is the role of German actors, which gained particular importance in the early 20th century and went beyond the scope of railway construction. The importance of Germans in the region, I suggest, began with Deutsche Bank’s cotton project in 1904, not with the Ottoman railways reaching the province (which only transpired in the late 1910s) as many historians have claimed.9 By focusing on predominantly German government and company archives, my work thus aims to expand on the existing literature.10 Bringing this archival material into focus under the architectural lens, I further push back against the narrative of imperial dominance laid out in the Deutsche Bank and German government documents—a narrative Luxemburg replicates, despite being highly critical of the German activities in Ottoman territory. To grasp the workings of the overall system of capitalist imperialism and the financial logics it was based upon, we need to study how they in fact “take place on (and in so doing transform) the ground.”11 Architecture is hence applied here as both an analytical lens into the “black box” of finance, as well as the material expression of DLBG’s struggle on the ground.12 In the process of mediating capital, architecture actualizes notions such as debt and property, turning them into material reality.

6This essay focuses on specific architectural components that reveal the frictions in the capitalist imperial machine. I trace the early 20th-century movement of German capital in the form of agricultural machines, seeds, and money into the Ottoman countryside, where they engaged immobile objects and structures in the form of a factory, land, and a mansion. The interactions and frictions between these mobile and immobile objects and structures complicate Luxemburg’s concept and emphasize the role of local bourgeois actors in shaping the process. What emerges through foregrounding the materiality of financial transactions and contestations is a more nuanced understanding of the workings of power in capitalist imperialism.

Machines / Factory

  • 13 See Richard V. Pierard, “A Case Study in German Economic Imperialism: The Colonial Economic Committ (...)
  • 14 Allen Isaacman and Richard Roberts, “Cotton, Colonialism, and Social History in Sub-Saharan Africa: (...)
  • 15 See Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton, op. cit. (note 13), p. 294.

7For Deutsche Bank, the establishment of DLBG made sense in light of the bank’s Ottoman railway and credit investments. However, the existence of the cotton company was also firmly rooted in the German colonial project. Its founding in 1904 followed years of propaganda on behalf of the German Colonial Economic Committee (Kolonialwirtschaftliches Komitee, KWK), a private organization that worked closely with the German government and German colonial institutions. More than 400 German textile manufacturers dominated the KWK’s investors, contributing significant funds and setting the agenda of the organization.13 In the cotton business, the American Civil War (1861-1865)—known as the “industrial world’s first raw-materials crisis”—had put immense pressure on German industrialists and statesmen to decrease their dependency on the United States as their single supplier for cotton.14 In the aftermath of the global cotton crisis, struggles to reorganize the countryside surrounding the issues of land, labor, capital, and state power shaped the world.15 Around the turn-of-the-century, due to further shortages in the cotton supply and associated price speculation, the discussions surrounding the so-called cotton question (Baumwollfrage) intensified. The KWK actively contributed with publications, public exhibitions, fairs, and congresses in the German Empire and abroad.

  • 16 Karl Supf, “Zur Baumwollfrage,” in Kolonial-Wirtschaftliches Komitee (ed.), Baumwoll-Expedition nac (...)
  • 17 Karl Helfferich, “Die Baumwollfrage: Ein weltwirtschaftliches Problem,” Marine-Rundschau, vol. 15, (...)
  • 18 Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton, op. cit. (note 13), p. 355.
  • 19 Karl Helfferich, “Die Baumwollfrage: Ein weltwirtschaftliches Problem,” op. cit. (note 17), p. 2; H (...)
  • 20 Karl Helfferich, “Die Baumwollfrage: Ein weltwirtschaftliches Problem,” op. cit. (note 17), p. 21.

8The cotton processing industry employed about one in fifteen German laborers, which according to KWK representatives turned any crisis of this industry into a potential “social threat.”16 Cotton was thereby drawn into the German elite’s ongoing fight against working-class upheaval. This was particularly urgent as the commodity was critical, not only for domestic consumption but also for exports.17 In 1897, for instance, German cotton products were valued at one billion marks, 45 percent more than the country’s iron and steel industry that “symbolized Germany’s economic miracle and all too often overshadows our historical imagination,” as historian Sven Beckert notes.18 Estimates at the time put the yearly net added value to the German economy through cotton at about 225 million marks—all dependent on the import of a foreign raw material and one that was predominantly sourced from one place: German industry still obtained three quarters of its supplies from the US.19 Therefore, in the words of one KWK author, it was “the economic might of old Europe versus its aspiring and power-hungry daughter across the ocean” that was at stake in solving the cotton question.20

  • 21 Richard V. Pierard, “A Case Study in German Economic Imperialism,” op. cit. (note 13), p. 157. See (...)
  • 22 See Frankfurt/Main (Germany), DBHI, OR 707, Max von Oppenheim, “Baumwollkultur im Gebiete der Bagda (...)
  • 23 The central ones were Rudolf Fitzner, “Einiges über den Baumwollanbau in Kleinasien,” Der Tropenpfl (...)
  • 24 See for example Der Tropenpflanzer, vol. 9, no. 8, 1905, p. 476; Der Tropenpflanzer, vol. 10, no. 1 (...)
  • 25 Selig Soskin, “Die Aussichten,” op. cit. (note 23), p. 362.
  • 26 See A. Zimmerman, Alabama in Africa: Booker T. Washington, the German Empire, and the Globalization (...)

9The committee considered investments in German colonies the only way to rectify this situation and aimed to convince the German public of “the economic wealth latent in their colonies.”21 Moreover, the KWK also prompted an exploration of non-colonized territory: that of Ottoman Anatolia. The Baghdad railways were, after all, the single most important German investment overseas—a fact that had propelled German colonialist circles to publicly speculate about how to use Deutsche Bank’s project for their own gains. The railway leg over the Taurus would finally connect Southern Anatolia overland to Constantinople—and thus to Europe. New, previously inaccessible lands would open up for cultivation, colonialists dreamed.22 Beginning in 1902, the KWK sponsored several expeditions to Anatolia to scout the landscape, compile detailed calculations of the financial viability of Cilician cotton cultivation, and determine the potential for German trade expansion into this Ottoman territory.23 By printing reports on these trips and constantly publishing statistics on Anatolian cotton production, the KWK’s journal perpetually reminded its vast readership of the existence of Ottoman cotton and, by implication, of German claims thereon.24 Anatolia was established as “a cotton territory capable of improvement to which Germans can stake a valid claim,” one author wrote.25 Contemporaneously with attempts to source cotton in the German African colonies, influential businessmen, professors, lobbyists, and publicists turned to Anatolia and pointed to Ottoman territory as a contingent part of the extended German imperial reach.26 It was this campaign, headed by the KWK, that ultimately led to the founding of DLBG and to its mission in establishing a new source for cotton.

  • 27 Chris Gratien, Unsettled Plain, op. cit. (note 8), p. 97.

10DLBG arrived in Cilicia in fall 1904. Contrary to the KWK’s propaganda of empty Ottoman land awaiting (German) exploitation, however, the company encountered a flourishing cotton industry. In fact, the region was the center of the Ottoman commercial cotton agriculture and textile industry, producing more cotton than any other Ottoman province.27 This was not an entirely new phenomenon. While Cilicia was mostly considered a barely inhabited marshland well into the 19th century—featuring few settlements and a large nomadic population—, the region’s transformation into an agrarian zone for the production of the cotton cash crop had already begun in the 1830s. This process vastly accelerated in the latter part of the 19th century, driven in part by the global cotton shortage following the American Civil War.

  • 28 Meltem Toksöz, “Family and Migration: the Mavromatis’ Enterprises and Networks,” Cahiers de la Méd (...)
  • 29 On the progress of railway construction, see Manfred Pohl, Von Stambul nach Bagdad: Die Geschichte (...)
  • 30 Meltem Toksöz, Nomads, Migrants, and Cotton, op. cit. (note 8), p. 87-92 and p. 102; Tülin Selvi U (...)
  • 31 Georges Tsapalos and Pierre Walter, Rapport sur le Domaine Impérial de Tchoucour-Ova, op. cit. (no (...)
  • 32 Meltem Toksöz, “Family and Migration,” op. cit. (note 28), p. 378.

11As a consequence, Mersin developed from a natural harbor and small settlement to the “spatial expression” of Cilicia’s transformation—a new port-town to connect the trade network of the large hinterland with a foreign trade network reaching the European metropoles.28 Since the Anatolian Railway, part of the Deutsche Bank-led Ottoman railway project, did not actually reach Cilicia until 1918—when it was completed for troop movement during World War I—shipping via the port of Mersin remained the main form of transportation to and from Cilicia.29 Different modes of transport materialized the trade network within the province. From the fields, buffalo brought the agricultural products to bigger centers in Adana, Tarsus, and Mersin. Workers also used horse-pulled wagons (fig. 3) as well as camels for longer distances over the mountain range. From Adana and Tarsus, traders sent goods to the Mediterranean either down the Seyhan River or via the 67-km-long Mersin-Adana-Railway—a single-lane track Deutsche Bank purchased from a French-British financial syndicate in 1906. Mersin’s urbanization centered around the port where new steam cranes were constructed and offices for shipping lines and mercantile agencies were opened for business. The newly built environment also included a Court of Trade building, a custom house, telegraph infrastructure, and foreigners’ residences and consulates at the waterfront, lined with villas.30 Adana, the province’s inland capital, developed to become the region’s main city centered around its market—the biggest in Southern Anatolia.31 By 1908, Adana was home to 70,000 people and Mersin had about 22,000 inhabitants. Languages spoken in the region on a daily basis included Turkish, Arabic, Armenian, Greek, French, Italian, German, English, Kurdish, and Spanish.32

12Upon DLBG’s arrival in the province, the task of establishing a cotton processing plant was high on the company’s agenda in order to compete with and eventually monopolize the existing industry. The multifaceted aim was as follows: to replace the manual parts of the production process (fig. 4), protect the German enterprise from frauds, and facilitate transport (see a comparison of loose bales (fig. 1 and fig. 5) and pressed bales (fig. 3). The entire program would thus guarantee the German industry qualitatively consistent cotton deliveries that were easily calculable and scalable. The new German factory complex, to be constructed in Adana, was to comprise a cotton press, two gins with 70 saws (with sufficient power supply for up to six gins), and enough space for sorting and processing.

Figure 3: Photograph, pressed cotton bales loaded on carriages for onward transport, 1909.

Figure 3: Photograph, pressed cotton bales loaded on carriages for onward transport, 1909.

Source: Berlin (Germany), BBWA, Philipp Holzmann Bildarchiv, U5/03/1837/2/00174.

Figure 4: Photograph, manual cotton production in Adana, 1909.

Figure 4: Photograph, manual cotton production in Adana, 1909.

Source: Berlin (Germany), BBWA, Philipp Holzmann Bildarchiv, U5/03/1837/2/00082.

Figure 5: Photograph, delivery of cotton to DLBG’s Adana premises, 1909.

Figure 5: Photograph, delivery of cotton to DLBG’s Adana premises, 1909.

Source: Berlin (Germany), BBWA, Philipp Holzmann Bildarchiv, U5/03/1837/2/00086.

  • 33 Frankfurt/Main (Germany), DBHI, OR 708, DLBG Board of Directors, Meeting minutes, Berlin (May 7, 19 (...)
  • 34 Ibid.
  • 35 Most factory buildings, with few exceptions, were conventional brick or masonry structures. See Sib (...)
  • 36 See Itohan Osayimwese, Colonialism and Modern Architecture in Germany, Pittsburgh, PA: University o (...)

13DLBG’s shareholders granted the estimated costs of 30,000 marks, but credited the money to the company accounts at Deutsche Bank Dresden. This decision had significant material ramifications. Firstly, the building had to be the “cheapest possible construction,” meeting the minimal material requirements for ensuring an industrial process (the firm stated the structure needed to protect machines but did not mention workers).33 Secondly, machinery and construction materials were to be imported from the German Empire, functioning as direct capital investment that did not require Ottoman currency. The idea of using tiled roofing for the plant, locally supplied from the brickyard in Mersin, was quickly abandoned. Instead, DLBG’s director Franz Günther decided on a corrugated iron construction for the roof, which implicitly prioritized German materials over locally sourced ones, since iron was shipped from Germany.34 While cast-iron had been used in some new factory buildings in Constantinople since the mid-19th century and at least one example of using corrugated iron sheets for a factory roof is recorded, in the Ottoman countryside the application of corrugated iron appears quite unusual.35 Easily stackable, the material was comparatively inexpensive to ship and had become an element of German prefabricated houses in the colonies in the late 19th century.36 Given the climatic conditions in Cilicia, which in the summer resembled tropical climates, DLBG deemed the material appropriate for Adana. Transport was economical as the sheets could be added to shipments of construction material for the railway (such as Krupp steel). Not only did the sourcing of iron in Germany mean additional business for German industry (in which Deutsche Bank was heavily invested), but importing the material also meant the company did not have to pay for local materials that would have required cash flow in local currency. The design of the factory, both its calculation and its sourcing, thus operated as a financial technique in cross-imperial speculation.

  • 37 Frankfurt/Main (Germany), DBHI, OR 708, Franz Günther, Reports to the DLBG board of directors (Octo (...)
  • 38 Frankfurt/Main (Germany), DBHI, OR 708, Franz Günther, Report to the DLBG board of directors (July (...)
  • 39 Frankfurt/Main (Germany), DBHI, OR 708, DLBG, “Darlegung der Verhältnisse” (July 15, 1905).
  • 40 From the documents, it is not entirely clear whether local administrators prevented the Germans fro (...)
  • 41 Frankfurt/Main (Germany), DBHI, OR 702, Franz Günther, Letter to Deutsche Bank secretariat (Novembe (...)

14Yet importing the material produced its own difficulties. Local Ottoman authorities put “considerable obstacles” in the company’s way and continuously delayed the delivery.37 Furthermore, DLBG had to purchase the property on which to construct the factory. By July 1905, the Germans had succeeded in acquiring a small plot of urban land on the outskirts of Adana, close to the rail station (fig. 6).38 However, to complete the purchase, director Günther reports that “an Arab,” whose identity remains unknown, was hired to appear as the buyer. DLBG did not assume effective ownership until after the deal was finalized.39 Günther justified this method as a strategy to avoid paying hefty bribes, but in fact Ottoman law at that time did not allow foreign nationals to hold property unless they surrendered certain rights.40 DLBG’s director saw no other choice than to act via a “system of straw men,” for which local currency was required.41 An economic study of DLBG’s books shows that sufficient credit was in the company accounts. Reasons for why the company struggled to take hold in Cilicia are revealed only by reading the company’s correspondence from an architectural viewpoint. That angle sheds light on the cheap construction methods, the imported building materials, and the arduous process of land acquisition.

  • 42 Georges Tsapalos and Pierre Walter, Rapport sur le Domaine Impérial de Tchoucour-Ova, op. cit. (no (...)
  • 43 See Matthew Jefferies, Politics and Culture in Wilhelmine Germany: The Case of Industrial Architect (...)
  • 44 Frankfurt/Main (Germany), DBHI, OR 708, Georg Lutz, Letter from Mersin (November 23, 1904).

15The factory complex that was ultimately built was constructed on a small, walled plot (fig. 7). It featured an office building (fig. 8, numbered 1 on fig. 7), some “sheds” (see background in fig. 3, numbered 2 on fig. 7), and a large processing facility, housing the gins and two older presses as well as additional machinery (fig. 1 and fig. 9, numbered 3 on fig. 7). French engineers described it as “the largest and best equipped” ginnery in the region.42 Yet the Adana factory differs significantly from the monumental “temples of industry” built in Germany around the same time, most famously the AEG turbine factory constructed 1908-09 in Berlin, under lead architect Peter Behrens.43 In the Ottoman province, on land the Germans did not own and on territory they did not administer, representational functions moved to the background. Instead, the utilitarian complex, particularly the processing plant, materialized DLBG’s vision of a “completely enclosed, large room … [in which to] assert complete control.”44

Figure 6: Excerpts of Plan of Adana, 1917.

Figure 6: Excerpts of Plan of Adana, 1917.

Source: Produced by the German military (rail station on feuille 1 (top), DLBG factory on feuille 5 (bottom)).

Figure 7: Enlargement of fig. 6 with my annotations.

Figure 7: Enlargement of fig. 6 with my annotations.

Source: Produced by the German military.

Figure 8: Photograph, DLBG factory, office building, Adana. Unknown photographer.

Figure 8: Photograph, DLBG factory, office building, Adana. Unknown photographer.

Source: Berlin (Germany), Bundesarchiv, BILD 137/011131, Asiatische Türkei, Adana, Fabrikhof der DLBG (Asiatic Turkey, Adana, factory yard of the German Levantine Cotton Company) (1921).

Figure 9: Photograph, DLBG factory, cotton processing, Adana, 1909.

Figure 9: Photograph, DLBG factory, cotton processing, Adana, 1909.

Source: Berlin (Germany), BBWA, Philipp Holzmann Bildarchiv, U5/03/1837/2/00228.

16The Adana factory needs to be understood as an active component in the capitalist imperial machine. In addition to adhering to financial logic in its costs and materials, it also had to fulfill the need to “assert complete control” in foreign territory where control, as we shall see, was often lacking for the Germans. Although workers are not mentioned in Deutsche Bank’s archive or DLBG managers’ considerations regarding the compound’s specificities, the photographs attest to their centrality in the process (fig. 1, figs. 3-5 and fig. 9). From cotton sorting to transporting and processing, it was human laborers (sometimes in conjunction with animals) that engaged with the factory architecture, operating the capitalist imperial machine. And they seem to have been aware of their role: each photograph depicts workers gazing warily into the camera, as if challenging the German capitalists behind the lens, and those archiving the images, to take notice of them. Instead of running smoothly, the capitalist imperialist machine coughed and sputtered occasionally, forcing DLBG to find workarounds for issues with the import of materials, the purchasing of land, and the construction of the factory.

Seeds / Land

  • 45 Frankfurt/Main (Germany), DBHI, OR 710, Franz Günther, Report on cash and loans audit (April 14, 19 (...)
  • 46 For this understanding of financialization, see Brett Christophers, “Limits to Financialization,” o (...)
  • 47 On the seeds’ transport, see Frankfurt/Main (Germany), DBHI, OR 708, Rudolf Fitzner, Letter from Me (...)

17In order to “improve” Anatolian cultivation, DLBG planned on convincing individual farmers to plant company cotton seeds. In return, the growers were to promise to sell their harvest to DLBG. This was supposed to standardize quality, increase yield, and ensure the planting of those types of cotton preferred by German industry. Seed delivery was also a way for DLBG to grant credit to farmers in kind, thus circumventing local lenders and importing German capital without requiring any currency exchange. A 1910 overview of DLBG’s finances indeed lists seed claims as “credit” and includes their monetary value among the total sum of loans extended.45 Seeds thus became financialized by undergoing a calculative treatment that approached the commodity as financial.46 Yet difficulties arose. More than technical issues such as the delicate business of shipment—seeds had to be stored in tightly packed sacks close to the engine room, protected from moisture—the main problem was the lack of control over Ottoman farmers and landholders.47 Agreements were difficult to enforce. DLBG quickly realized it operated in distant lands in which the firm did not actually “assert complete control,” as it had aspired to.

  • 48 Frankfurt/Main (Germany), DBHI, OR 709, Franz Günther, Letter to Gwinner (June 15, 1908).
  • 49 Frankfurt/Main (Germany), DBHI, OR 709, DLBG and Fankhaenel & Schifner, Letter to German Foreign Of (...)
  • 50 On Togo, see A. Zimmerman, Alabama in Africa, op. cit. (note 26).
  • 51 See for instance Frankfurt/Main (Germany), DBHI, OR 709, Franz Günther, Letter to Bernhard Dernburg (...)
  • 52 See Sebastian Conrad, Deutsche Kolonialgeschichte, Munich: C.H. Beck, 2008, p. 28-34. Company colon (...)
  • 53 For example, KWK co-founder Otto Warburg, professor of colonial botany in Berlin, and Emil Stark, c (...)

18To gain a foothold in the region, company employees time and again turned to the German state. While DLBG’s director gloated over having “never requested or received a Pfennig in material support from the industry or the German government,” the company certainly depended on German diplomatic services to help facilitate and protect the firm’s business interests.48 The German embassy in Constantinople, for instance, brokered special deals for DLBG to avoid import taxes on seeds and building materials.49 Without formalized government support from the Reichskolonialamt (Imperial Colonial Office), which oversaw the KWK’s cotton exploration in the German colony of Togoland (present-day Togo and parts of Ghana), the Deutsche Bank subsidiary mainly relied on its mother company’s close relations with the Auswärtiges Amt (Foreign Office).50 DLBG presented itself as a quasi-colonial endeavor when it suited its cause, and as a benevolent actor in the service of European advancement when it did not.51 This malleable position towards the German (and also Ottoman) state(s) further differentiated the Deutsche Bank subsidiary from the chartered colonial companies leading German colonialism in Africa in the late 19th century.52 Nevertheless, as we have seen with the KWK, DLBG developed out of the same German colonial discourse and corresponding institutions and was connected to German colonial companies through overlapping shareholders and investors.53 This does not presuppose a coordinated effort on behalf of the German government, but does attest to a robust empire with multiple imperial and colonial projects that often intersected and operated in a contingent, continuously evolving manner.

  • 54 Berlin (Germany), Bundesarchiv, R 8024/53-57; Karl Helfferich, “Die Baumwollfrage,” op. cit. (note  (...)
  • 55 A. Zimmerman, Alabama in Africa, op. cit. (note 26), p. 17 and p. 153.
  • 56 Rudolf Endlich, “Die Baumwoll-Expertise nach Smyrna,” op. cit. (note 23), p. 125-126. See also Chri (...)

19German cotton colonialists exercised significant influence over DLBG. Having invested in the KWK explorations of Cilicia, cotton industrialists demanded that DLBG supply a fully adequate replacement of the American crop variant. Since the German cotton processing industry, including its machinery, was entirely geared towards the length and fiber quality of American cotton (fig. 10), and any changes to this infrastructure would be cost-intensive, DLBG’s task was to find not only an alternative but an equivalent.54 Resulting from an extensive comparative study, (fig. 10) exemplifies the scientific approach to cotton colonialism underlying the horticultural and agricultural engineering the Germans undertook in Anatolia, Togo, and elsewhere. The goals were outfitting the crops with “traits useful to industry” and “confining the biological variability of cotton.”55 After years of experimenting on specific fields in the Adana province, DLBG finally succeeded in cultivating American cotton in the Cilician climatic and soil conditions only to then face resistance from local farmers. Because American variants had been developed in the unfree labor conditions of modern plantation slavery, their harvest was much more labor intensive than the local Ottoman type called yerli.56

Figure 10: Comparison of different cotton staples’ lengths, 1902. American “Sea-Island” types numbers 1-3 (top left) versus the much shorter cotton from Asia Minor, number 9 (second from right, top row).

Figure 10: Comparison of different cotton staples’ lengths, 1902. American “Sea-Island” types numbers 1-3 (top left) versus the much shorter cotton from Asia Minor, number 9 (second from right, top row).

Source: Alwin Oppel, Die Baumwolle nach Geschichte, Anbau, Verarbeitung und Handel, sowie nach ihrer Stellung im Volksleben und in der Staatswirtschaft, Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot, 1902, p. 194.

Figure 11: Photograph, farmer with yerli (image left) and American cotton (image right) in his hands.

Figure 11: Photograph, farmer with yerli (image left) and American cotton (image right) in his hands.

Source : Georges Tsapalos and Pierre Walter, Rapport sur le Domaine Impérial de Tchoucour-Ova (Vilayet d’Adana, Turquie d’Asie), Paris: [s.n.], 1911-1912, p. 60. URL: https://gallica.bnf.fr/​ark:/12148/​bpt6k62025053/​

  • 57 Kemal, Pamuk Ziraati [Cotton farming], Istanbul: Hilal Matbaası, 1931, p. 3-4 and p. 22-23; Selig S (...)

20Fig. 11 shows an Ottoman farmer proudly presenting both types to the photographer. Standing on a field in a headwrap and long loose clothing to protect him from the sun, smiling directly at the camera, he holds two cotton branches. The cotton bolls on the American plant (in his left hand) open easily; when this variety ripens, its fibers burst out of the pod. In contrast, the bolls on the yerli variant (in his right hand) remain closed, in the cotton field. As a result, the cotton-picking process was much faster with the yerli variety. The laborious separation of fibers from the husk would only happen in a secondary step in family workshops (fig. 4). American cotton further often required multiple rounds of harvesting, since the open bolls no longer protected the fiber from rain, making their harvest more time-sensitive. Yerli bolls, in contrast, could be collected all at once. Furthermore, their husks made them more drought-resistant and their cultivation did not require additional irrigation. American variants also required more time to ripen. This did not suit Cilician farmers’ intensive crop rotation between cotton and grain.57

  • 58 Chris Gratien, Unsettled Plain, op. cit. (note 8), p. 101.

21Cilician cultivators generally alternated their fields between cotton and wheat or barley. They sowed yerli in the spring and harvested it in September. In October, farmers proceeded to plant the land with grain, to be gathered in May or June the following year. They could then use these fields again for the planting of grain in the fall or leave them fallow until the cotton-growing began anew in March and April.58

  • 59 Selig Soskin, “Die Baumwollkultur,” op. cit. (note 57), p. 338. See also Donald Quataert, “Part IV: (...)
  • 60 Hollyamber Kennedy, “Infrastructures of ‘Legitimate Violence’: The Prussian Settlement Commission, (...)
  • 61 A. Zimmerman, Alabama in Africa, op. cit. (note 26), p. 16.
  • 62 Frankfurt/Main (Germany), DBHI, OR 709, Franz Günther, Letter to Arthur von Posadowsky-Wehner (Apri (...)

22The work in the fields was done predominantly as sharecropping (ortakci): cultivators were loaned the land and provided with seeds and a place to live; in exchange, they owed half of the profits from the harvest to the landlord.59 In the late 1800s and early 1900s, sharecropping was a common regime of labor control all over the globe. According to architectural historian Hollyamber Kennedy, it preserved the “social stability that had characterized feudalism, but within the economic and legal framework of capitalism.”60 Sharecropping was not foreign to the Germans. In fact, German social scientists such as Max Weber regarded American sharecropping—which had come to dominate the American South with the end of slavery—as a model for the control of “free” agricultural labor.61 Similarly, DLBG’s director claimed American cotton cultivation had proven that sharecropping was the most efficient way to grow cotton.62

  • 63 Georges Tsapalos and Pierre Walter, Rapport sur le Domaine Impérial de Tchoucour-Ova, op. cit. (no (...)
  • 64 Kristen Alff, “Landed Property, Capital Accumulation, and Polymorphous Capitalism: Egypt and the Le (...)
  • 65 Chris Gratien, Unsettled Plain, op. cit. (note 8), p. 103-4.

23It was therefore not only the plants that required discipline; those who cultivated them were also subject to constraint. Biological control was inextricably linked to regimes of economic and social control. Given the large size of Cilician estates and the region’s general labor shortages, seasonal wage laborers often supplemented sharecropping arrangements. Migrant workers from Northern Syria and Eastern Anatolia streamed into the fertile plains during the labor-intensive cotton planting and harvesting seasons. They were mostly responsible for their own lodging and often faced grueling working conditions. Nevertheless, they came in the thousands each season, thanks to comparatively high wages.63 Different regimes of labor control therefore existed simultaneously, even on the same parcels of land—in historian Kristin Alff’s words, a “comingling of labor relations in the service of capital accumulation.”64 The scale of Cilicia’s overall commodification of wage labor was unmatched throughout most regions of the Ottoman Empire at the time.65

  • 66 See Rudolf Endlich, “Die Baumwoll-Expertise nach Smyrna,” op. cit. (note 23), p. 126; Frankfurt/Mai (...)
  • 67 Charles Doughty-Wylie, Report by the Acting Vice-Consul, op. cit. (note 57), p. 12.

24In this stratified system of employment, cultivators exerted considerable power. Precisely because American cotton was much more labor intensive than yerli, Ottoman agricultural laborers partly defied the German directives and mixed imported American seeds with local variants to make harvesting more manageable.66 Some farmers reportedly took the American seed that was provided, fed them to their buffaloes in the winter, and sowed yerli seeds instead.67 Hence they opposed the German colonial vision of “improving” both land and agricultural products, which tended to devalue the farmer’s labor.

  • 68 Frankfurt/Main (Germany), DBHI, OR 708, DLBG Board of Directors, Meeting minutes, Berlin (May 7, 19 (...)
  • 69 The photograph was taken by two French engineers examining the province’s cultivation potential (an (...)

25This practice brings another difficulty encountered by DLBG to light. Once the seed had been distributed, it was impossible for the Germans to assert control over what the cultivators sowed: “the farmers just say that the cotton was from the new seed.”68 Lacking any enforcement mechanisms, DLBG had no choice but to accept the mixed or yerli strains it was offered. The cultivators thus had a decisive share in determining what to plant—an ability to contest the Europeans’ sense of superiority that might explain the peasant’s confident smile in fig. 11.69

  • 70 Frankfurt/Main (Germany), DBHI, OR 709, Franz Günther, Letter to Gwinner (June 15, 1908).
  • 71 Frankfurt/Main (Germany), DBHI, OR 711, F. E. Eggerichs, Travel report to Asia Minor (June 30, 1913 (...)

26To win over Ottoman farmers, the German company set about establishing its own large-scale model farm (Musterfarm) in Cilicia that would also include a planters’ school on the premises to “educate” locals.70 Attempting to establish tighter control over the cultivation process, DLBG constructed property walls surrounding a large farmstead, a barn to house agricultural workers, living quarters for the local inspector and liaison officer, and, above the storage facilities (“always kept under wraps”), an apartment for the temporary residence of a German, Adana-based DLBG employee.71 This built environment and its description by a company delegate suggest ongoing tension with local intermediaries: it mentions outside walls first, emphasizes the living quarters of supervisory personnel, and notes that the only German present on the estate was housed right above the storage rooms, whose prized commodities were additionally secured by locks.

  • 72 Frankfurt/Main (Germany), DBHI, OR 702, Richard Stöckel for DLBG Adana, “Die Baumwollkultur im Vila (...)
  • 73 Additional legal classifications of land were the so-called vakıf (pertaining to pious endowments) (...)
  • 74 See Kristen Alff, “Landed Property,” op. cit. (note 64); Huri Islamoglu, “Property as a Contested D (...)
  • 75 Roger Owen, “Introduction” in New Perspectives on Property and Land in the Middle East, op. cit. (n (...)
  • 76 Abolished in Europe in the early 19th century, the Ottomans continuously transformed tax farming to (...)
  • 77 Kristen Alff, “Levantine Joint-Stock Companies,” op. cit. (note 8).

27The model farm, however, never became operational, because its much-delayed ribbon-cutting in 1914 coincided with the onset of World War I.72 What had taken so long? The main problem was in fact acquiring the land on which to build this tightly controlled structure in the first place. Earlier, to purchase the real estate in the town of Adana for the factory, DLBG had found a workaround via an Ottoman intermediary. This was more difficult for agricultural land. Ottoman land ownership—vastly simplified—had two prominent categories: mülk and miri land.73 Mülk resembled freehold ownership of predominantly urban property whereas miri land was agricultural property belonging to the state. Importantly, proprietors, particularly in the latter category, did not hold an absolute claim over the land. Instead, the Ottoman government granted rights to miri land for different purposes, such as cultivation, usufruct, or tax collection, meaning that one parcel could have multiple claims held by different people associated with it.74 Claimants to land could be differentiated in two broad groups: those who cultivated it (primarily through sharecropping arrangements) and those with access to surplus generated from it.75 The Ottoman state taxed this surplus with the tithe (öşür, pl. âşâr), a direct tax on agricultural production. The government mainly gathered the tithe through so-called tax farming (iltizam), delegating tax collection to private individuals for profit. In this process, the Ottoman state auctioned regional taxation rights. The highest bidder became that region’s tax farmer (mültezim) and was subsequently indebted to the government: tax farmers owed the state fixed regular payments. The purchased taxation rights, in turn, allowed for tax farmers to collect tax revenues directly from cultivators and to keep the difference between the money collected (from peasants) and the payments owed (to the government) for their own gains—an oftentimes lucrative business.76 Yet as we have seen with the choice of seeds, cultivators were not necessarily in an inferior position: claims to land were an area of dynamic contestation. Land surveys and the registration of title deeds, beginning with the 1858 Land Code (Arazi Kanunnamesi), codified this system across the Ottoman provinces. Crucially, there was nothing inherently “unmodern” or “pre-capitalist” about this; on the contrary: Ottoman merchant families were able to build large joint-stock companies based on the distributed control over agricultural land.77

  • 78 Rosa Luxemburg, The Accumulation of Capital, op. cit. (note 3), p. 423-424.
  • 79 See Berlin (Germany), Bundesarchiv, R 901/2271, Richard Stöckel for DLBG Adana, “Bericht über unser (...)
  • 80 Leila Tarazi Fawaz, Merchants and Migrants, op. cit. (note 79), p. 93; Kristen Alff, “Landed Proper (...)

28Luxemburg notes that the tithe, collected by tax farmers, was used to amortize Deutsche Bank’s loans to the Ottoman government.78 Although her analysis thus encompasses finance’s reach into the rural zone, her focus on the capital accumulated by Deutsche Bank is too general. It overlooks the power the system granted to Ottoman tax farmers. These ranged from local notables to mid-size merchants and small-scale entrepreneurs. Crucially, following the registration of title deeds, tax farmers were often also landholders (continually enlarging their holdings, since land served as collateral for debts that accrued on unpaid taxes). Many of the large landholders of the Adana province resided in Beirut, the capital of the neighboring province. In the case of DLBG, the cotton the Germans exported was cultivated largely on land held by the Beiruti Greek Orthodox Sursock family, whose origins can be traced to Mersin.79 Tax farmers from the 17th century onwards, the Sursocks had resettled in Beirut in the 18th century. Speculating on emerging stock markets and commodity trades, working as moneylenders and creditors in Ottoman and European banks, and acquiring extensive real estate, several family members rose to spectacular prominence in Beirut and maintained ties to Constantinople’s highest circles.80 Unlike early-modern long-distance traders, the Sursock mercantile companies ascended together with and as part of the new 19th-century capitalist economic order.

  • 81 See Kristen Alff, “Levantine Joint-Stock Companies,” op. cit. (note 8), p. 173. Registering propert (...)
  • 82 Berlin (Germany), Bundesarchiv, R 901/2271, Richard Stöckel for DLBG Adana, “Bericht über unsere Fa (...)
  • 83 Berlin (Germany), Bundesarchiv, R 901/227, Richard Stöckel for DLBG Adana, “Bericht über unsere Far (...)

29Understanding the landholding, tax farming, and sharecropping systems and identifying who held which claim to what land and who might be willing to sell the appropriate title seems to have taken the Germans years to figure out. The Sursocks even instructed DLBG on how to use various permissions granted by different courts to transfer land titles through private contracts, thus avoiding having to change the names in the official land registry.81 In 1912, DLBG acquired about 370 hectares of miri land near Ceyhan and its surrounding plains (“Djihan” in the German archives). The land belonged to a “Miss Sursok” who according to the German company’s documents resided in Adana and was highly indebted. DLBG gave the title owner a loan so that she could pay the mortgage encumbering her land (corresponding to the land’s tax arrears). In return for this credit, the title deed was registered “in the name of our [DLBG’s] representative in Tarsus, Aziz M. Sursock.” Aziz then delivered a legal cession to DLBG. This contract was valid for a five-year period. With this, DLBG assumed it was “protected against all eventualities within the framework of Ottoman law.”82 It is unclear whether the DLBG managers really did not notice that the owner of the land and the German firm’s local representative belonged to the same extended family (the company documents do spell the name differently in each case) or whether they noticed but did not care. Either way, this private lease agreement granted DLBG the rights to land on which to construct its Musterfarm in 1913. The company expected the arrangement to guarantee the safety of the invested capital and the independence of cultivation since the owner had, in the Germans’ view, made herself “financially dependent” on the Germans.83 For the Sursocks, definitely not as indebted as DLBG made them out to be, this contract allowed the family business to secure its title holdings and charge commission on top.

30Even though DLBG managed to move seeds to the Ottoman countryside, the political and material structures to make the seeds operational in the firm’s capitalist enterprise were subject to friction. The German company, facing defiance from cultivators, an assertive local bourgeoisie of tax-farmers and landholders, and difficulties with Ottoman laws that complicated land ownership (and also prevented the Germans from mortgaging locals’ property titles), struggled to establish itself. Examining the flow of capital in the form of seeds architecturally, we thus see where the capitalist imperial scheme faltered: land was the grain of sand in the Deutsche Bank’s machine.

Money / Mansion

  • 84 Frankfurt/Main (Germany), DBHI, OR 708, Rudolf Fitzner, Letter from Mersin (December 24, 1904).
  • 85 Frankfurt/Main (Germany), DBHI, OR 708, DLBG market report (June 30, 1906).
  • 86 Frankfurt/Main (Germany), DBHI, OR 709, DLBG, “Die Baumwolle in Kleinasien” (June 1908).
  • 87 Aaron G. Jakes, Egypt’s Occupation: Colonial Economism and the Crises of Capitalism, Stanford: Stan (...)

31The third mobile element of the capitalist imperial machine was money in cash, required, as we have seen, to obtain property claims, pay local intermediaries and, additionally, to directly grant advances to local peasants in order to “financially control the farmers we [DLBG] work with.”84 Credit became one of the techniques, if not the only technique, to “assert complete control” over Ottoman cultivation: a financial mechanism to acquire a more powerful market position and thus counter DLBG’s dependency on local actors and their financial speculation.85 The Germans justified this method by claiming that freeing farmers from the hands of “ruthless” local lenders allowed these cultivators to “finally enjoy their work, their own belongings, and thus their existence.”86 German capitalists understood themselves to be virtuous while presenting local moneylenders as usurers. Effectively, however, the system needs to be understood as engineered indebtedness. With this financial technique, farmers were mortgaging their future harvest. Parts of their projected income were already allocated in the present; particularly as Cilician sharecroppers usually also paid the tithe before dividing the produce with the landholder. In this way, interest payments on agricultural credit, historian Aaron Jakes argues, “projected—and indeed mandated—the increased productivity of the soil and the farmers who worked it.”87 Cash advances thus most directly tied international finance to the agricultural soil.

  • 88 Frankfurt/Main (Germany), DBHI, OR 709, DLBG, “Die Baumwolle in Kleinasien” (June 1908).
  • 89 Frankfurt/Main (Germany), DBHI, OR 707, Deutsche Bank, Letter to the directory of the Anatolian Rai (...)

32DLBG attempted to access the existing system of rural debt by materially supporting sharecroppers, thus establishing the company as the peasants’ creditor.88 But how did DLBG actually move money in and out of Ottoman territories? If Deutsche Bank was to advance the money DLBG then granted as credits to peasants, how were these cross-border financial flows materialized? Here we once again see how the physical organization of the flows of capital impeded the German firms’ capitalist imperial project: the architectural lens helps explain what the economic cannot. In 1904, DLBG employees brought parts of the firm’s capital stock of 150,000 marks in bullion to Cilicia.89 This money had to be exchanged for Ottoman currency; furthermore, the credit Deutsche Bank granted DLBG to the company’s German accounts had to be made operational in Southern Anatolia. DLBG thus required local banking services, for which it had to rely on existing economic, social, and material structures. These, I have found, were operated through the mansion of Gustave Christmann, the German consul, in the province’s port town Mersin. The villa emerged as the crucial transactional space to transform German capital into available financial resources in the Anatolian countryside. Deutsche Bank’s global dominance was irrelevant for DLBG if the subsidiary could not make that power operational on the ground in Cilicia. Christmann’s mansion thus shifts our gaze away from metropolitan bank offices to the less formalized financial spaces in the “hinterland.” The building actively participated in mediating between international finance and the local economy.

  • 90 See Patrick Grigsby, “Mersin Map,” Levantine Heritage Foundation (2011). URL: http://www.levantineh (...)
  • 91 See also Filiz Yenişehirlioğlu, “Mersin: The Formation of a Tanzimat City in Southern Turkey,” in(...)
  • 92 Joseph O’Neill, Blood-Dark Track: A Family History, New York, NY: Vintage Books, 2001, ch. 1; Patri (...)
  • 93 Patrick Grigsby, “Mersin,” Levantine Heritage Foundation (n.d.). URL: http://www.levantineheritage. (...)
  • 94 Suzanne Marchand, Down from Olympus: Archaeology and Philhellenism in Germany, 1750-1970, Princeton (...)
  • 95 Meltem Toksöz, “Family and Migration,” op. cit. (note 28), p. 372. See also Evangelia Balta, “The G (...)

33Known as Palais de Christmann or Krizman Binasi, the seaside mansion was built in 1897 and located close to the port.90 Designed in a style typical for late 19th-century Mediterranean port cities, the mansion was constructed from locally quarried limestone. It had a symmetrical façade with a shallow pitch, red-tiled roof and featured a lush garden (figs. 12-13). The street façade showcased neo-classical elements then fashionable in Constantinople (fig. 14).91 In memoirs, guests who visited the house in the early 20th century describe it as “the biggest and most prestigious home in Mersin” with “enormous proportions,” a “truly palatial” interior characterized by a “magnificent marble stairway” at its center, a ballroom, and painted ceilings, thus attesting to the enormous wealth Christmann had accumulated.92 A particularly noteworthy feature, one of the house guests recalled, were the murals of Grecian scenes painted in oil.93 During the 19th century, Germany’s cultural and scientific institutions had appropriated ancient Greek aesthetic ideals to establish a specific German cultural and racial elitism.94 German visitors to the villa might have interpreted the large-scale art works in the German consulate as a nod to this (invented) tradition. On the shores of the Mediterranean, however, the Grecian scenes more likely spoke to the heritage of Christmann’s Greek Orthodox wife Kalyopi, née Mavromati, whose father had migrated from Cyprus to the Mersin area in the mid-19th century (and who had most likely co-financed the villa).95 The mansion’s art works hence allude to a tension that we encounter throughout this story, between a German sense of superiority and entitlement and a local rootedness that provided actual power and influence.

Figure 12: Postcard “Mersin, German consulate,” Christmann Mansion, Mersin, ca. 1910.

Figure 12: Postcard “Mersin, German consulate,” Christmann Mansion, Mersin, ca. 1910.

Source: Levantine Heritage Foundation. URL: http://www.levantineheritage.com/​mersina.htm.

Figure 13: Postcard “Mersin, Governor’s house,” Christmann Mansion, Mersin, ca. 1910.

Figure 13: Postcard “Mersin, Governor’s house,” Christmann Mansion, Mersin, ca. 1910.

Source: Levantine Heritage Foundation. URL: http://www.levantineheritage.com/​mersina.htm.

Figure 14: Photograph, Christmann Mansion, Mersin, ca. 1913.

Figure 14: Photograph, Christmann Mansion, Mersin, ca. 1913.

Source: Levantine Heritage Foundation. URL: http://www.levantineheritage.com/​mersina.htm.

  • 96 Meltem Toksöz, Nomads, Migrants, and Cotton, op. cit. (note 8), p. 127.
  • 97 See André Autheman, The Imperial Ottoman Bank, [trans. J.A. Underwood], Istanbul: Ottoman Bank Arch (...)
  • 98 Edhem Eldem, A History of the Ottoman Bank, Istanbul: Ottoman Bank Historical Research Center, 1999 (...)
  • 99 Berlin (Germany), Bundesarchiv, R 901/2268, Hoffmann, Letter from Constantinople to German Consul S (...)

34The villa’s proprietor, Christmann, was a Swiss-German financier who acted as the first director of the Imperial Ottoman Bank’s Adana branch in the 1890s.96 Serving urban merchants in particular, the Imperial Ottoman Bank had opened a branch in Adana in 1889 and in Mersin in 1892.97 The eastward move of the Constantinople-based, French-controlled bank led to a sharp increase in the circulation of Ottoman banknotes across the Ottoman Empire. The bank transported cash to and from the provinces according to the needs of the market: in the summer months, it sent large amounts of specie to the hinterland to satisfy the merchants’ need to purchase crops, whereas gold and silver would be returned to Constantinople during the winter following the sale of the harvest.98 For local cultivators, particularly of cash-intensive cotton, the annual cycles of debt operated on a diametrically opposed calendar: farmers, particularly sharecroppers, generally required loans in February to March of each year to finance their planting and tax levies, repaying the loan by the end of the harvest season (end of September through early November). As the Imperial Ottoman Bank did not lend money to farmers or landholders directly, the creditors for these loans were predominantly spinning mills in the regional cities, such as the Mavromati family firm founded by Christmann’s father-in-law.99 The two circuits of cash and debt—from and to Constantinople and within the province—thus merged in Christmann’s mansion, interlocking imperial Ottoman and local credit operations.

  • 100 Julia Elyachar, “Relational Finance: Ottoman Debt, Financialization, and the Problem of the Semi-Ci (...)
  • 101 See Şevket Pamuk, A Monetary History of the Ottoman Empire, Cambridge; New York, NY: Cambridge Uni (...)

35Anthropologist Julia Elyachar notes that “sophisticated global debt markets and regularized channels of finance existed in the Global East long before 19th-century capitalism in the West.”100 She thus refutes finance’s persistent origin story in which it is presented as a product of Europe, exported to financialize non-capitalist countries—a framework within which Luxemburg’s essay also operates. In the Ottoman Empire, an extensive financial system had in fact been established as far back as the 16th century, with moneylenders granting loans to private businesses as well as the state.101 What is at stake in the case of Cilicia, therefore, is how these longstanding financial operations intersected with European capital streaming into Ottoman territory in the late 19th century. Luxemburg’s portrayal of the smooth machinery of capital flows, moving West to East, to be accumulated in the East and returned West with additional surplus, errs by failing to consider local elites. They were the critical link in the chain, determining how and where the capital flows were channeled, and also sometimes redirecting certain streams (to stay in the province or move farther east to cities like Beirut).

  • 102 Meltem Toksöz, “Family and Migration,” op. cit. (note 28), p. 368.
  • 103 Ibid.
  • 104 Meltem Toksöz, Nomads, Migrants, and Cotton, op. cit. (note 8), p. 61. See also Pauline Lucy Lewis, (...)
  • 105 See Meltem Toksöz, Nomads, Migrants, and Cotton, op. cit. (note 8), p. 109-116.
  • 106 Julia Elyachar, “Relational Finance,” op. cit. (note 100), p. 324. See also Biray Kolluoğlu and Mel (...)

36To develop a money economy across the Cilician region, fairs and markets—particularly in Adana, Tarsus, and Mersin—played a crucial role, connecting the rural and urban populace in a shared economy. In the absence of banks, these fairs “not only provided the basis of commerce between the port and the hinterland,” argues historian Meltem Toksöz, “but also the means of exchange.”102 To translate this local monetary circuit of the fairs in the plain into long-distance transactions at the port, merchants used bills of exchange and various other forms of letters of credit, such as bills of lading. However, since the port in Mersin was relatively new to international trade routes in the 1870s, it did not allow for bills of exchange to be negotiated in different currencies. Instead, to cash in on the proceeds of Cilician exports, traders had to physically send these paper forms of credit to Beirut, Izmir, or Alexandria for negotiation; the proceeds returned to Mersin in bullion.103 Merchants in Mersin thus depended on correspondents in the trading ports of the wider region and on a functioning system of communication. In fact, Mersin became one of the first places in the eastern parts of the Ottoman Empire to install a telegraph office in the 1870s.104 The correspondents were often distant relatives or members of the same ethnic or religious communities, such as the Beiruti Greek Orthodox community in the case of the Mavromatis.105 While the Sursocks, and Beiruti families like them, formed the large tax-farming and landholding class, the Mavromatis provided the commercial network. Through such connections, a complex regional hierarchy was established. Finance was, Elyachar argues, “relational” and intertwined with political belonging (through tax and tribute), kin relations, and religious ties.106

  • 107 See Itohan Osayimwese, Colonialism and Modern Architecture, op. cit. (note36), p. 212-223; Lauren J (...)

37It is this local credit system based on personal networks that DLBG entered when it started offering cash advances to peasants. The Germans hired Christmann as the company’s banker, tasked with mobilizing bullion in Ottoman currency. For this service, he demanded high fees, sharply increasing the German company’s transfer costs. His mansion thus not only served as the German consulate, but it was also the base from which Christmann conducted DLBG’s banking business. Private living quarters were placed upstairs on the second floor, while business was conducted on the more public entrance level. On this ground floor, Christmann seems to have freely interwoven his different tasks of consul, bank manager, private banker, and family man. The space that particularly expresses this entanglement is the villa’s ballroom in which, we can only assume, the Christmanns hosted a wide array of official diplomatic and private events. In contrast to metropolitan bank buildings or government offices, the ballroom facilitated the interpersonal aspects of financial transactions, highlighting the societal functions of the mansion’s interior space. In this way, Christmann’s villa, despite its official, diplomatic character, functioned less like contemporaneous colonial government mansions. It was more akin to the 15th-century Palazzi Medici, which fulfilled domestic functions and simultaneously played a crucial role in enabling banking activities across distances—with the decisive difference that Christmann’s mansion operated in the context of 19th-century empire.107 Reading his mansion as a transactional space thus provides a novel understanding of how capitalist imperialism materialized on the ground, mediating the global and the local in unexpected ways.

  • 108 Charles Doughty-Wylie, Report by the Acting Vice-Consul, op. cit. (note 57), p. 10; Hilmar Kaiser, (...)
  • 109 See Frankfurt/Main (Germany), DBHI, OR 708, Georg Lutz, Letters from Mersin (March 1905); Frankfurt (...)
  • 110 Frankfurt/Main (Germany), DBHI, OR 708, DLBG, “Darlegung der Verhältnisse” (July 15, 1905).

38DLBG was not the only trading company Christmann worked for. As noted, by marriage he was joined to the Mavromatis, one of the province’s leading family dynasties. They not only owned the region’s most important cotton merchant house with several ginneries in Adana but also the local bank Banque Mavromatis et Fils—next to the Imperial Ottoman Bank the only other bank operating in Cilicia when DLBG launched its business in 1904.108 DLBG became the Mavromatis’ direct competitor, in both the local credit and local cotton businesses. Crucially, from the mansion, Christmann served the interests of his relatives first, the German company second. Deutsche Bank’s archives are filled with accusations of conflicts of interest, exemplified in one instance in which Christmann used cash from DLBG’s accounts to purchase cotton for the Mavromatis. When DLBG managers demanded the money be refunded, they received paper credit—which was of little value as they had to purchase their supplies in cash.109 However, nothing much came from complaining: the German company was in dire need of local banking services and the only two locally operating banks were Imperial Ottoman Bank and Banque Mavromatis et Fils—both controlled by Christmann. DLBG managers also could not turn to the German diplomatic services for support since the German consul was, well, Christmann. And even the Vali (the Ottoman governor of the province) was allegedly in the hands of the Mavromatis.110 At first glance, Christmann’s mansion, with its many windows and open, street-facing balcony, had a welcoming appearance. Yet the latticed window design and the walled-off garden (figs. 12-13) seem to articulate the tight family bonds between Christmann and the Mavromatis. DLBG struggled to penetrate these barriers, even when invited inside.

39The power asymmetry between the German company and its local intermediaries is also expressed spatially if the luxury of Christmann’s mansion is compared with the plain architecture of DLBG’s Adana premises (fig. 8). The office space where the DLBG managers worked thus stood in sharp contrast to the environment Christmann resided in and worked from. Even though DLBG’s Dresden headquarters, with a floorplan comprising 260 square meters (fig. 15), probably provided an equally splendid environment for the firm’s directorate, in order to transport this German purchasing power to the Anatolian countryside, the company had to go through Christmann and the transactional space that was his mansion. The institutional backing of Deutsche Bank and access to seemingly endless amounts of capital in the German Empire required transferral and translation to be operational in the field. Christmann’s mansion facilitated the cross-imperial financial flows; the riches inside the mansion were a product of precisely these flows. In Luxemburg’s conceptualization, capitalist imperialism was a machine specifically designed to enrich Deutsche Bank directors and shareholders alone. However, the splendor of the Palais de Christmann speaks to additional profiteers. The mansion’s grandiosity moreover marks it as a site of violence. The opulence stems from and articulates the exploitation of both imperial subjects and nature’s resources—an exploitation that is occluded from the photographs stored in German company archives. Whereas architectural histories predominantly locate the display of appropriated capital in the metropole, Christmann’s mansion redirects our attention to the provinces, where these riches, instead of imperial grandeur, denote local capitalist hierarchies.

Figure 15: DLBG, floor plan of DLBG headquarters, 2nd floor, Dresden, 1910s.

Figure 15: DLBG, floor plan of DLBG headquarters, 2nd floor, Dresden, 1910s.

Source: Frankfurt/Main (Germany), DBHI, OR 711.

Conclusion

  • 111 Rosa Luxemburg, The Accumulation of Capital, op. cit. (note 3), p. 423-424.

40I want to end by returning to Luxemburg’s conceptualization of capitalist imperialism, in which “money rolls from the hands of the … [Ottoman] government into the coffers of Deutsche Bank … and its shareholders.”111 Focusing, as I have, more closely on exactly how that “money rolls”—meaning in what forms (machines, seeds, and cash) and through which spaces or structures (factory, land, and mansion)—highlights the less stable, rougher parts of Luxemburg’s otherwise smooth machine. A wider net of actors is revealed to be participating in the “machine,” from provincial politicians delaying delivery of construction materials, to farmers mixing seeds, regional tax farmers and landholders reaping benefits, and local bankers sabotaging the business. Crucially, their opposition was not expressed as an utter refusal to work with the German company, but an insistence to do so on their own terms. The intransigence was further not anti-capitalist—withstanding the intrusion of (foreign) capital—but instead took the form of capitalist competition and claims to profit participation by a new bourgeois class of local merchant capitalists, landowners, and moneylenders. As we see in the case of the Sursocks and Mavromatis, foreign capital opened the space for local merchants to expand their businesses, conducting cross-border trade themselves or facilitating (for high fees) the business of foreign companies.

41Furthermore, in Luxemburg’s account, Deutsche Bank was the one institution that was in complete control of the whole process. Looking more closely at the machine’s mobile and immobile elements as they interact on the ground reveals that establishing control was in fact a constant struggle for the Germans, in particular because Ottoman subjects laid claim to the spatial components such as land and mansion. By focusing not only on the sites of production—the factory or the farm—but the financial techniques these sites actualize, architectural historians are uniquely positioned to study the real-world effects of allegedly abstract systems of finance. Sites of industry are always already sites of finance, relying on mechanisms of debt and property. Studying them together architecturally reveals the social and political scales in which they operate. Further, alternative sites that organize capitalist imperialism come to the foreground. Despite the international dominance of Deutsche Bank, the built structure that actually made “money roll” in Cilicia was not a bank building but a private mansion. In 1909, Deutsche Bank eventually opened an official branch in Constantinople, attempting to secure the bank’s continuous influence in the debt and railway businesses following a change of government in Constantinople. However, in the Ottoman provinces, Deutsche Bank continued operating through less formalized spaces, which were primarily interlinked not with metropolitan bank architectures in distant Constantinople or Berlin but with regional centers such as Beirut. Further research should focus on the architectural traces of these regional links—often overlooked due to the national framework’s dominance in historiography—, revealing additional transactional spaces that connect processes of industrialization and financialization.

  • 112 See Peter Christensen, Germany and the Ottoman Railways, op. cit. (note 5); Ghassan Moazzin, “Netwo (...)
  • 113 See Rosa Luxemburg, The Accumulation of Capital, op. cit. (note 3); Aaron G. Jakes, Egypt’s Occupat (...)

42Deutsche Bank’s attempt at recasting the Cilician countryside was embedded in a larger system of debt and infrastructure investment. And the Ottoman Empire was not Deutsche Bank’s sole focus of foreign investments; the bank was also central to railway construction in East Africa (a German colony) and financing foreign trade with China.112 Other prominent cases of capitalist imperialism include British capitalists’ influence in Argentina and their impact in the Egyptian countryside.113 A “colonization through lending” argument, which underlies Luxemburg’s work but is prominent also in discourses surrounding informal empire and company colonialism, suggests that through controlling finances, (European) capitalists and their respective governments attempted to exert political control. My work not only demonstrates the obstacles they continually encountered in that undertaking but also the significance of regional networks, which shaped these sites’ histories long after European capitalists retreated or transformed their approach. To understand the functioning of imperial power structures based on debt, we thus need to follow the specific capital flows and multiple actors through the informal spaces that mostly go unacknowledged in both economic and architectural history. Focusing on the intricacies of DLBG’s day-to-day operations shows that control through debt did not actually operate unidirectionally. The financing of cotton in the capitalist imperialist system was ultimately a markedly local business. Centering the material reality of the seemingly abstract system of finance reveals how capitalist power operates on the ground.

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Notes

1 For more on the “incommensurability” of financial regimes, see Łukasz Stanek, Architecture in Global Socialism: Eastern Europe, West Africa, and the Middle East in the Cold War, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2020, p. 181.

2 Frankfurt/Main (Germany), Deutsche Bank AG, Historisches Institut (DBHI), Orientbüro (OR) 707, Committee for the Establishment of a German-Levantine Cotton Company, “Deutsch-Levantinische Baumwollgesellschaft” (n.d.) (all translations are mine unless otherwise stated).

3 Rosa Luxemburg, The Accumulation of Capital: A Contribution to an Economic Explanation of Imperialism, [First published in 1913, trans. Agnes Schwarzschild], London: Routledge, 2003.

4 Kurt Grunwald, “Pénétration Pacifique: The Financial Vehicles of Germany’s Drang nach Osten,” in Jehuda L. Wallach (ed.), Germany and the Middle East 1835-1939, Tel Aviv: Israel Press, 1975, p. 85-100; Şevket Pamuk, The Ottoman Empire and European Capitalism, 1820-1913: Trade, Investment and Production, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987 (Cambridge Middle East Library, 12), p. 64-66.

5 For diplomatic and military histories, see Gregor Schöllgen, Imperialismus und Gleichgewicht: Deutschland, England und die Orientalische Frage 1871-1914, Munich: Oldenbourg, 1984; Erik Grimmer-Solem, Learning Empire: Globalization and the German Quest for World Status, 1875-1919, Cambridge; New York, NY: University Press, 2019. In architectural history, a large body of scholarship examines the work of German architects in Turkey, concentrating predominantly on the republican era from 1923 onward. Discussions of German influence in the preceding Ottoman era mostly focus on train stations and railway infrastructure. See Bernd Nicolai, Moderne und Exil: Deutschsprachige Architekten in der Türkei, 1925-1955, Berlin: Verlag für Bauwesen, 1998; Esra Akcan, Architecture in Translation: Germany, Turkey, and the Modern House, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012; Burcu Doğramacı, Kulturtransfer und Nationale Identität: Deutschsprachige Architekten, Stadtplaner und Bildhauer in der Türkei nach 1927, Berlin: Mann, 2008; Ali Cengizkan and N. Müge Cengizkan (eds.), The Construction of a New City: Ankara 1923-1933, Istanbul: Koç University Press, 2022; Burak Beyhan and Selçuk Uğuz, “Planning as a Tool for Modernization in Turkey: The Case of Hermann Jansen’s Plan for Mersin,” METU Journal of the Faculty of Architecture, vol. 29, no. 2, 2012, p. 1-34; Peter Christensen, Germany and the Ottoman Railways: Art, Empire, and Infrastructure, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2017.

6 Luxemburg’s emphasis of the role of debt is also what differentiates her theory of capitalist imperialism from the highly influential study of “informal empire” by John Gallagher and Ronald Robinson. It seems that by the time of their essay’s publication in 1953, Gallagher and Robinson had not read Luxemburg’s book, which was first translated into English two years before. See John Gallagher and Ronald Robinson, “The Imperialism of Free Trade,” The Economic History Review, vol. 6, no. 1, 1953, p. 1-15.

7 Rosa Luxemburg, The Accumulation of Capital, op. cit. (note 3), p. 423-424.

8 See Meltem Toksöz, Nomads, Migrants, and Cotton in the Eastern Mediterranean: The Making of the Adana-Mersin Region 1850-1908, Leiden; Boston, MA: Brill, 2010 (The Ottoman Empire and its Heritage, 45); Chris Gratien, The Unsettled Plain: An Environmental History of the Late Ottoman Frontier, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2022; Filiz Yenişehirlioğlu, Eyüp Özveren and Tülin Selvi Ünlü (eds.), Eastern Mediterranean Port Cities: A Study of Mersin, Turkey—From Antiquity to Modernity, Cham: Springer, 2018 (The Urban Book Series); Kristen Alff, “Levantine Joint-Stock Companies, Trans-Mediterranean Partnerships, and Nineteenth-Century Capitalist Development,” Comparative Studies in Society and History, vol. 60, no. 1, 2018, p. 150-177. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0010417517000445.

9 See for instance Şevket Pamuk, The Ottoman Empire and European Capitalism, 1820-1913, op. cit. (note 4), p. 103. The notable exception here is German historian Hilmar Kaiser’s unpublished dissertation, see Hilmar Kaiser, Baghdad Railway Politics and the Socio-Economic Transformation of the Çukurova, PhD diss., European University Institute Florence, Florence, 2001.

10 The language used in internal bank and government correspondence is German, with some sources in French for diplomatic communications. This essay also engages scholarship produced in at least six languages (English, French, Ottoman, Turkish, Armenian, and Arabic).

11 Jasper Ludewig and Maren Koehler, “Financialized Space,” Architectural Theory Review, vol. 26, no. 1, 2022, p. 1-6, here p. 6 (my emphasis). DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/13264826.2022.2106083.

12 See Brett Christophers, “The Limits to Financialization,” Dialogues in Human Geography, vol. 5, no. 2, 2015, p. 183-200. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1177/2043820615588153; Mary Poovey, “On ‘the Limits to Financialization’,” Dialogues in Human Geography, vol. 5, no. 2, 2015, p. 220-224. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1177/2043820615588159.

13 See Richard V. Pierard, “A Case Study in German Economic Imperialism: The Colonial Economic Committee, 1896-1914,” Scandinavian Economic History Review, vol. 16, no. 2, 1968, p. 155-167. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/03585522.1968.10411497; Sven beckert, Empire of Cotton: A Global History, New York, NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 2014, p. 356.

14 Allen Isaacman and Richard Roberts, “Cotton, Colonialism, and Social History in Sub-Saharan Africa: Introduction,” in Allen Isaacman and Richard Roberts (eds.), Cotton, Colonialism, and Social History in Sub-Saharan Africa, Portsmouth: Heinemann, 1995 (Social History of Africa), p. 7. See also C. A. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World, 1780-1914: Global Connections and Comparisons, Malden: Blackwell, 2004 (The Blackwell History of the World), p. 161-165.

15 See Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton, op. cit. (note 13), p. 294.

16 Karl Supf, “Zur Baumwollfrage,” in Kolonial-Wirtschaftliches Komitee (ed.), Baumwoll-Expedition nach Togo, Berlin: Mittler, 1901, p. 2-16, here p. 8. See also A. Zimmerman, “Decolonizing Weber,” Postcolonial Studies, vol. 9, no. 1, 2006, p. 53-79, here p. 61-62. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/13668250500488827.

17 Karl Helfferich, “Die Baumwollfrage: Ein weltwirtschaftliches Problem,” Marine-Rundschau, vol. 15, 1904, p. 2.

18 Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton, op. cit. (note 13), p. 355.

19 Karl Helfferich, “Die Baumwollfrage: Ein weltwirtschaftliches Problem,” op. cit. (note 17), p. 2; Hans Koch, “Die Baumwollfrage,” Jahrbücher für Nationalökonomie und Statistik/Journal of Economics and Statistics, vol. 33, no. 5, 1907, p. 681-703, here p. 693.

20 Karl Helfferich, “Die Baumwollfrage: Ein weltwirtschaftliches Problem,” op. cit. (note 17), p. 21.

21 Richard V. Pierard, “A Case Study in German Economic Imperialism,” op. cit. (note 13), p. 157. See also Der Tropenpflanzer, vol. 1, 1897, p. 17; Frankfurt/Main (Germany), DBHI, OR 707, Emil Stark, “Die Bedeutung der Baumwolle in der Weltwirthschaft,” Bremer Baumwollbörse, 1902, p. 1-10.

22 See Frankfurt/Main (Germany), DBHI, OR 707, Max von Oppenheim, “Baumwollkultur im Gebiete der Bagdadbahn” (July 1900); Max Fesca, “Anatolien: Über die landwirtschaftlichen Verhältnisse,” Der Tropenpflanzer, Beiheft, vol. 3, no. 1, 1902, p. 1-35. See also Hilmar Kaiser, “German Railway Investment in the Ottoman Empire: The Colonial Dimension,” in Claus Schönig, Ramazan Çalik and Hatice Hayraktar (eds.), Türkisch-Deutsche Beziehungen: Perspektiven aus Vergangenheit und Gegenwart, Berlin: Klaus Schwarz, 2012, p. 154-170.

23 The central ones were Rudolf Fitzner, “Einiges über den Baumwollanbau in Kleinasien,” Der Tropenpflanzer, vol. 5, no. 11, 1901, p. 530-536; Rudolf Endlich, “Die Baumwoll-Expertise nach Smyrna,” Der Tropenpflanzer Beiheft, vol. 3, no. 4, 1902, p. 125-126; Selig Soskin, “Die Aussichten für die Baumwollkultur in Vorderasien,” Der Tropenpflanzer, vol. 7, no. 8, 1903, p. 362-368. Not only German but also British and French engineers and cotton experts toured the region, but could not match the Germans’ investment. See for example Georges Tsapalos and Pierre Walter, Rapport sur le Domaine Impérial de Tchoucour-Ova (Vilayet d’Adana, Turquie d’Asie), Paris: Villeneuve-Saint-Georges, 1912.

24 See for example Der Tropenpflanzer, vol. 9, no. 8, 1905, p. 476; Der Tropenpflanzer, vol. 10, no. 10, 1906, p. 681.

25 Selig Soskin, “Die Aussichten,” op. cit. (note 23), p. 362.

26 See A. Zimmerman, Alabama in Africa: Booker T. Washington, the German Empire, and the Globalization of the New South, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010 (America in the World).

27 Chris Gratien, Unsettled Plain, op. cit. (note 8), p. 97.

28 Meltem Toksöz, “Family and Migration: the Mavromatis’ Enterprises and Networks,” Cahiers de la Méditerranée, no. 82, 2011, p. 359-382, here p. 360. DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/cdlm.5754.

29 On the progress of railway construction, see Manfred Pohl, Von Stambul nach Bagdad: Die Geschichte einer berühmten Eisenbahn, Munich: Piper, 1999, p. 81-89.

30 Meltem Toksöz, Nomads, Migrants, and Cotton, op. cit. (note 8), p. 87-92 and p. 102; Tülin Selvi Ünlü and Melike Kayam, “The Port of Mersin from the Nineteenth Century to the Twentieth Century,” in Eastern Mediterranean Port Cities, op. cit. (note 8), p. 155-177.

31 Georges Tsapalos and Pierre Walter, Rapport sur le Domaine Impérial de Tchoucour-Ova, op. cit. (note 23), p. 23.

32 Meltem Toksöz, “Family and Migration,” op. cit. (note 28), p. 378.

33 Frankfurt/Main (Germany), DBHI, OR 708, DLBG Board of Directors, Meeting minutes, Berlin (May 7, 1905).

34 Ibid.

35 Most factory buildings, with few exceptions, were conventional brick or masonry structures. See Sibel Bozdoğan, “Industrial Architecture and Nation-Building in Turkey: A Historical Overview,” in Mohammad al-Asad (ed.), Workplaces: The Transformation of Places of Production: Industrialization and the Built Environment in the Islamic World, Istanbul: Istanbul University Press, 2010, p. 17-40; Donald Quataert, Ottoman Manufacturing in the Age of the Industrial Revolution, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993 (Cambridge Middle East History, 30).

36 See Itohan Osayimwese, Colonialism and Modern Architecture in Germany, Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2017 (Culture, Politics and the Built Environment), p. 89 and p. 187-241.

37 Frankfurt/Main (Germany), DBHI, OR 708, Franz Günther, Reports to the DLBG board of directors (October 3, November 1 and 30, December 7, 1905).

38 Frankfurt/Main (Germany), DBHI, OR 708, Franz Günther, Report to the DLBG board of directors (July 19, 1905).

39 Frankfurt/Main (Germany), DBHI, OR 708, DLBG, “Darlegung der Verhältnisse” (July 15, 1905).

40 From the documents, it is not entirely clear whether local administrators prevented the Germans from registering property in their own names or the Germans deliberately chose not to give up the privileges they held as foreigners. On these restrictions, see Sibel Zandi-Sayek, “Ambiguities of Sovereignty: Property Rights and Spectacles of Statehood in Tanzimat Izmir” in Sahar Bazzaz, Yota Batsaki and Dimiter Angelov (eds.), Imperial Geographies in Byzantine and Ottoman Space, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013 (Hellenic Studies, 56), p. 133-157; Abdul-Karim Rafeq, “Ownership of Real Property by Foreigners in Syria, 1869 to 1873,” in Roger Owen (ed.), New Perspectives on Property and Land in the Middle East, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000 (Harvard Middle Eastern Monographs, 34), p. 175-239.

41 Frankfurt/Main (Germany), DBHI, OR 702, Franz Günther, Letter to Deutsche Bank secretariat (November 8, 1910).

42 Georges Tsapalos and Pierre Walter, Rapport sur le Domaine Impérial de Tchoucour-Ova, op. cit. (note 23), p. 27-28. Holzmann’s archival records do not specify that figures 1, 3, 5, and 9 show the DLBG premises; this assessment is my own.

43 See Matthew Jefferies, Politics and Culture in Wilhelmine Germany: The Case of Industrial Architecture, Oxford: Berg Publishers, 1995. One Constantinople-based factory, the Silahtarağa electric power plant, is sometimes likened to the AEG factory: while being “rather unremarkable” in comparison, it did illustrate “a distinctly German brand of modern factory design.” Sibel Bozdoğan, “Industrial Architecture and Nation-Building in Turkey,” op. cit. (note 35), p. 22.

44 Frankfurt/Main (Germany), DBHI, OR 708, Georg Lutz, Letter from Mersin (November 23, 1904).

45 Frankfurt/Main (Germany), DBHI, OR 710, Franz Günther, Report on cash and loans audit (April 14, 1910).

46 For this understanding of financialization, see Brett Christophers, “Limits to Financialization,” op. cit. (note 12), p. 189.

47 On the seeds’ transport, see Frankfurt/Main (Germany), DBHI, OR 708, Rudolf Fitzner, Letter from Mersin (December 24, 1904).

48 Frankfurt/Main (Germany), DBHI, OR 709, Franz Günther, Letter to Gwinner (June 15, 1908).

49 Frankfurt/Main (Germany), DBHI, OR 709, DLBG and Fankhaenel & Schifner, Letter to German Foreign Office (August 29, 1905).

50 On Togo, see A. Zimmerman, Alabama in Africa, op. cit. (note 26).

51 See for instance Frankfurt/Main (Germany), DBHI, OR 709, Franz Günther, Letter to Bernhard Dernburg (April 17, 1907); Frankfurt/Main (Germany), DBHI, OR 709, DLBG, “Die Baumwolle in Kleinasien” (June 1908).

52 See Sebastian Conrad, Deutsche Kolonialgeschichte, Munich: C.H. Beck, 2008, p. 28-34. Company colonialism was most prominent in the British Empire, see Philip J. Stern, Empire, Incorporated: The Corporations that Built British Colonialism, Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2023.

53 For example, KWK co-founder Otto Warburg, professor of colonial botany in Berlin, and Emil Stark, cotton industrialist and representative of the Saxon spinning mills, were both among the first shareholders of DLBG and also invested in German colonial companies in Africa.

54 Berlin (Germany), Bundesarchiv, R 8024/53-57; Karl Helfferich, “Die Baumwollfrage,” op. cit. (note 20), p. 12.

55 A. Zimmerman, Alabama in Africa, op. cit. (note 26), p. 17 and p. 153.

56 Rudolf Endlich, “Die Baumwoll-Expertise nach Smyrna,” op. cit. (note 23), p. 125-126. See also Chris Gratien, Unsettled Plain, op. cit. (note 8), p. 104.

57 Kemal, Pamuk Ziraati [Cotton farming], Istanbul: Hilal Matbaası, 1931, p. 3-4 and p. 22-23; Selig Soskin, “Die Baumwollkultur in der Kilikischen Ebene und ihre Ausdehnungsmöglichkeiten hier sowie in Nordsyrien,” Der Tropenpflanzer, vol. 19, no. 5, 1916, p. 255-272; Rudolf Endlich, “Die Baumwoll-Expertise nach Smyrna,” op. cit. (note 23), p. 125-126; London (United Kingdom), British House of Commons Parliamentary Papers, No. 4235 Annual Series (1909), Charles Doughty-Wylie, Report by the Acting Vice-Consul on the Trade of the Province Adana for the Year 1908, p. 12-13.

58 Chris Gratien, Unsettled Plain, op. cit. (note 8), p. 101.

59 Selig Soskin, “Die Baumwollkultur,” op. cit. (note 57), p. 338. See also Donald Quataert, “Part IV: The Age of Reforms, 1812-1914,” in Halil İnalcık and Donald Quataert (eds.), An Economic and Social History of the Ottoman Empire. 2. 1600-1914, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994, p. 759-943, here p. 863; Meltem Toksöz, Nomads, Migrants, and Cotton, op. cit. (note 8), p. 144-145.

60 Hollyamber Kennedy, “Infrastructures of ‘Legitimate Violence’: The Prussian Settlement Commission, Internal Colonization, and the Migrant Remainder,” Grey Room, vol. 76, 2019, p. 58-97, here p. 79-80. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1162/grey_a_00272.

61 A. Zimmerman, Alabama in Africa, op. cit. (note 26), p. 16.

62 Frankfurt/Main (Germany), DBHI, OR 709, Franz Günther, Letter to Arthur von Posadowsky-Wehner (April 13, 1907). See also Frankfurt/Main (Germany), DBHI, OR 709, DLBG, “Die Baumwolle in Kleinasien” (June 1908); Rudolf Endlich, “Die Baumwoll-Expertise nach Smyrna,” op. cit. (note 23), p. 150.

63 Georges Tsapalos and Pierre Walter, Rapport sur le Domaine Impérial de Tchoucour-Ova, op. cit. (note 23), p. 19-20; Chris Gratien, Unsettled Plain, op. cit. (note 8), p. 102-103.

64 Kristen Alff, “Landed Property, Capital Accumulation, and Polymorphous Capitalism: Egypt and the Levant,” in Joel Beinin, Bassam Haddad and Sherene Seikaly (eds.), A Critical Political Economy of the Middle East and North Africa, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2021 (Stanford Studies in Middle Eastern and Islamic Societies and Cultures), p. 25-45, here p. 27-28.

65 Chris Gratien, Unsettled Plain, op. cit. (note 8), p. 103-4.

66 See Rudolf Endlich, “Die Baumwoll-Expertise nach Smyrna,” op. cit. (note 23), p. 126; Frankfurt/Main (Germany), DBHI, OR 708, Franz Günther, September report, Dresden (October 3, 1905).

67 Charles Doughty-Wylie, Report by the Acting Vice-Consul, op. cit. (note 57), p. 12.

68 Frankfurt/Main (Germany), DBHI, OR 708, DLBG Board of Directors, Meeting minutes, Berlin (May 7, 1905).

69 The photograph was taken by two French engineers examining the province’s cultivation potential (and hence ways to compete with the Germans).

70 Frankfurt/Main (Germany), DBHI, OR 709, Franz Günther, Letter to Gwinner (June 15, 1908).

71 Frankfurt/Main (Germany), DBHI, OR 711, F. E. Eggerichs, Travel report to Asia Minor (June 30, 1913). I have yet to identify visual documentation of the model farm.

72 Frankfurt/Main (Germany), DBHI, OR 702, Richard Stöckel for DLBG Adana, “Die Baumwollkultur im Vilayet Adana” (August 1916). The Ottomans militarily entered the war in November 1914 after having agreed to a secret alliance with the German and Austro-Hungarian empires shortly after the outbreak of the war on July 28, 1914.

73 Additional legal classifications of land were the so-called vakıf (pertaining to pious endowments) as well as mevat (wasteland such as marshes) and metruk (common land such as public roads and pastures). While these categories are less relevant for my case, what is critical is the dynamic relationship between the legal classifications, the various claims they substantiated, and the social relations they engendered.

74 See Kristen Alff, “Landed Property,” op. cit. (note 64); Huri Islamoglu, “Property as a Contested Domain: A Reevaluation of the Ottoman Land Code of 1858,” in Roger Owen (ed.), New Perspectives on Property and Land in the Middle East, op. cit. (note 40), p. 3-61.

75 Roger Owen, “Introduction” in New Perspectives on Property and Land in the Middle East, op. cit. (note 40), p. ix-xxiv.

76 Abolished in Europe in the early 19th century, the Ottomans continuously transformed tax farming to become part of a modern public-finance infrastructure that forged political coalitions between central and regional elites. See Nadir Özbek, “Tax Farming in the Nineteenth-Century Ottoman Empire: Institutional Backwardness or the Emergence of Modern Public Finance,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History, vol. 49, no. 2, 2018, p. 219-245. URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/48556044. Accessed 13 December 2024. See also Eva Schreiner, “Building (on) Trust: The Architecture of Debt in the Late Ottoman Empire,” Architectural Theory Review, vol. 26, no. 1, 2022, p. 169-194, here p. 182. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/13264826.2022.2067203.

77 Kristen Alff, “Levantine Joint-Stock Companies,” op. cit. (note 8).

78 Rosa Luxemburg, The Accumulation of Capital, op. cit. (note 3), p. 423-424.

79 See Berlin (Germany), Bundesarchiv, R 901/2271, Richard Stöckel for DLBG Adana, “Bericht über unsere Farmwirtschaft in Kilikien” (August 1915). See also Leila Tarazi Fawaz, Merchants and Migrants in Nineteenth-Century Beirut, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983, p. 91; Kristen Alff, “Levantine Joint-Stock Companies,” op. cit. (note 8), p. 172.

80 Leila Tarazi Fawaz, Merchants and Migrants, op. cit. (note 79), p. 93; Kristen Alff, “Landed Property,” op. cit. (note 64).

81 See Kristen Alff, “Levantine Joint-Stock Companies,” op. cit. (note 8), p. 173. Registering property in the name of a third party who was an Ottoman subject was a long-standing practice across the Ottoman Empire even before foreigners were granted the official right to hold property in 1867, see Sibel Zandi-Sayek, “Ambiguities of Sovereignty,” op. cit. (note 40), p. 136-137.

82 Berlin (Germany), Bundesarchiv, R 901/2271, Richard Stöckel for DLBG Adana, “Bericht über unsere Farmwirtschaft in Kilikien” (August 1915); Frankfurt/Main (Germany), DBHI, OR 711, F. E. Eggerichs, Travel report to Asia Minor (June 30, 1913).

83 Berlin (Germany), Bundesarchiv, R 901/227, Richard Stöckel for DLBG Adana, “Bericht über unsere Farmwirtschaft in Kilikien” (August 1915).

84 Frankfurt/Main (Germany), DBHI, OR 708, Rudolf Fitzner, Letter from Mersin (December 24, 1904).

85 Frankfurt/Main (Germany), DBHI, OR 708, DLBG market report (June 30, 1906).

86 Frankfurt/Main (Germany), DBHI, OR 709, DLBG, “Die Baumwolle in Kleinasien” (June 1908).

87 Aaron G. Jakes, Egypt’s Occupation: Colonial Economism and the Crises of Capitalism, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2020, p. 91-95.

88 Frankfurt/Main (Germany), DBHI, OR 709, DLBG, “Die Baumwolle in Kleinasien” (June 1908).

89 Frankfurt/Main (Germany), DBHI, OR 707, Deutsche Bank, Letter to the directory of the Anatolian Railway Company (October 24, 1904).

90 See Patrick Grigsby, “Mersin Map,” Levantine Heritage Foundation (2011). URL: http://www.levantineheritage.com/mersinmap.htm. Accessed 13 December 2024.

91 See also Filiz Yenişehirlioğlu, “Mersin: The Formation of a Tanzimat City in Southern Turkey,” in Jens Hanssen, Thomas Philipp and Stefan Weber (eds.), The Empire in the City: Arab Provincial Capitals in the Late Ottoman Empire, Beirut: Orient-Institut, 2002, p. 253-274, here p. 269.

92 Joseph O’Neill, Blood-Dark Track: A Family History, New York, NY: Vintage Books, 2001, ch. 1; Patrick Grigsby, A Life Apart: The Fate of an Outsider, London: Pen Press, 2015, ch. 1; Idem, “Photo Album,” Levantine Heritage Foundation (n.d.). URL: http://levantineheritage.com/grigsby.htm. Accessed 13 December 2024. The mansion is the only preserved example of painted ceilings in domestic architecture in Mersin, see Filiz Yenişehirlioğlu, “Mersin,” op. cit. (note 91) p. 269.

93 Patrick Grigsby, “Mersin,” Levantine Heritage Foundation (n.d.). URL: http://www.levantineheritage.com/mersina.htm. Accessed 13 December 2024.

94 Suzanne Marchand, Down from Olympus: Archaeology and Philhellenism in Germany, 1750-1970, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996.

95 Meltem Toksöz, “Family and Migration,” op. cit. (note 28), p. 372. See also Evangelia Balta, “The Greek-Orthodox Community of Mersin (Mid-Nineteenth Century to 1921),” in Eastern Mediterranean Port Cities, op. cit. (note 8), p. 111-125.

96 Meltem Toksöz, Nomads, Migrants, and Cotton, op. cit. (note 8), p. 127.

97 See André Autheman, The Imperial Ottoman Bank, [trans. J.A. Underwood], Istanbul: Ottoman Bank Archives and Research Center, 2002, p. 135 and p. 145; Christopher Clay, “The Origins of Modern Banking in the Levant: The Branch Network of the Imperial Ottoman Bank, 1890-1914,” International Journal of Middle East Studies, vol. 26, no. 4, 1994, p. 589-614. URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/163804. Accessed 13 December 2024.

98 Edhem Eldem, A History of the Ottoman Bank, Istanbul: Ottoman Bank Historical Research Center, 1999, p. 154-163; André Autheman, Imperial Ottoman Bank, op. cit. (note 97), p. 148.

99 Berlin (Germany), Bundesarchiv, R 901/2268, Hoffmann, Letter from Constantinople to German Consul Schröder in Beirut (June 11, 1906). See also Şevket Pamuk, The Ottoman Empire and European Capitalism, 1820-1913, op. cit. (note 4), p. 4; Meltem Toksöz, Nomads, Migrants, and Cotton, op. cit. (note 8), p. 132.

100 Julia Elyachar, “Relational Finance: Ottoman Debt, Financialization, and the Problem of the Semi-Civilized,” Journal of Cultural Economy, vol. 16, no. 3, 2023, p. 323-336. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/17530350.2023.2189146.

101 See Şevket Pamuk, A Monetary History of the Ottoman Empire, Cambridge; New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2000 (Cambridge Studies in Islamic Civilization).

102 Meltem Toksöz, “Family and Migration,” op. cit. (note 28), p. 368.

103 Ibid.

104 Meltem Toksöz, Nomads, Migrants, and Cotton, op. cit. (note 8), p. 61. See also Pauline Lucy Lewis, Wired Ottomans: A Sociotechnical History of the Telegraph and the Modern Ottoman Empire, 1855-1911, PhD diss., University of California Los Angeles, 2018.

105 See Meltem Toksöz, Nomads, Migrants, and Cotton, op. cit. (note 8), p. 109-116.

106 Julia Elyachar, “Relational Finance,” op. cit. (note 100), p. 324. See also Biray Kolluoğlu and Meltem Toksöz, “Mapping Out the Eastern Mediterraneann: Toward a Cartography of Cities in Commerce,” in Biray Kolluoğlu and Meltem Toksöz (eds.), Cities of the Mediterranean: From the Ottomans to the Present Day, London: I.B.Tauris, 2010, p. 1-13.

107 See Itohan Osayimwese, Colonialism and Modern Architecture, op. cit. (note36), p. 212-223; Lauren Jacobi, The Architecture of Banking in Renaissance Italy: Constructing the Spaces of Money, Cambridge; New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2019, p. 101-109.

108 Charles Doughty-Wylie, Report by the Acting Vice-Consul, op. cit. (note 57), p. 10; Hilmar Kaiser, Baghdad Railway Politics, op. cit. (note 9), p. 158.

109 See Frankfurt/Main (Germany), DBHI, OR 708, Georg Lutz, Letters from Mersin (March 1905); Frankfurt/Main (Germany), DBHI, OR 708, DLBG Board of Directors, Meeting minutes, Berlin (May 7, 1905).

110 Frankfurt/Main (Germany), DBHI, OR 708, DLBG, “Darlegung der Verhältnisse” (July 15, 1905).

111 Rosa Luxemburg, The Accumulation of Capital, op. cit. (note 3), p. 423-424.

112 See Peter Christensen, Germany and the Ottoman Railways, op. cit. (note 5); Ghassan Moazzin, “Networks of Capital: German Bankers and the Financial Internationalization of China (1885-1919),” Enterprise & Society, vol. 20, no. 4, 2019, p. 796-808. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/eso.2019.61.

113 See Rosa Luxemburg, The Accumulation of Capital, op. cit. (note 3); Aaron G. Jakes, Egypt’s Occupation, op. cit. (note 87).

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Table des illustrations

Titre Figure 1: Photograph, delivery of cotton to DLBG’s Adana premises, 1909.
Crédits Source: Berlin (Germany), Berlin-Brandenburgisches Wirtschaftsarchiv e.V. (BBWA), Philipp Holzmann Bildarchiv, U5/03/1837/2/00218.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/abe/docannexe/image/16827/img-1.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 438k
Titre Figure 2: DLBG, map of Cilician cotton cultivation, 1904.
Crédits Source: Frankfurt/Main (Germany), DBHI, OR 707, Sketch of areas of cotton cultivation in Asia Minor and North Syria.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/abe/docannexe/image/16827/img-2.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 304k
Titre Figure 3: Photograph, pressed cotton bales loaded on carriages for onward transport, 1909.
Crédits Source: Berlin (Germany), BBWA, Philipp Holzmann Bildarchiv, U5/03/1837/2/00174.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/abe/docannexe/image/16827/img-3.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 384k
Titre Figure 4: Photograph, manual cotton production in Adana, 1909.
Crédits Source: Berlin (Germany), BBWA, Philipp Holzmann Bildarchiv, U5/03/1837/2/00082.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/abe/docannexe/image/16827/img-4.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 509k
Titre Figure 5: Photograph, delivery of cotton to DLBG’s Adana premises, 1909.
Crédits Source: Berlin (Germany), BBWA, Philipp Holzmann Bildarchiv, U5/03/1837/2/00086.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/abe/docannexe/image/16827/img-5.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 492k
Titre Figure 6: Excerpts of Plan of Adana, 1917.
Crédits Source: Produced by the German military (rail station on feuille 1 (top), DLBG factory on feuille 5 (bottom)).
URL http://journals.openedition.org/abe/docannexe/image/16827/img-6.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 689k
Titre Figure 7: Enlargement of fig. 6 with my annotations.
Crédits Source: Produced by the German military.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/abe/docannexe/image/16827/img-7.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 441k
Titre Figure 8: Photograph, DLBG factory, office building, Adana. Unknown photographer.
Crédits Source: Berlin (Germany), Bundesarchiv, BILD 137/011131, Asiatische Türkei, Adana, Fabrikhof der DLBG (Asiatic Turkey, Adana, factory yard of the German Levantine Cotton Company) (1921).
URL http://journals.openedition.org/abe/docannexe/image/16827/img-8.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 478k
Titre Figure 9: Photograph, DLBG factory, cotton processing, Adana, 1909.
Crédits Source: Berlin (Germany), BBWA, Philipp Holzmann Bildarchiv, U5/03/1837/2/00228.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/abe/docannexe/image/16827/img-9.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 474k
Titre Figure 10: Comparison of different cotton staples’ lengths, 1902. American “Sea-Island” types numbers 1-3 (top left) versus the much shorter cotton from Asia Minor, number 9 (second from right, top row).
Crédits Source: Alwin Oppel, Die Baumwolle nach Geschichte, Anbau, Verarbeitung und Handel, sowie nach ihrer Stellung im Volksleben und in der Staatswirtschaft, Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot, 1902, p. 194.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/abe/docannexe/image/16827/img-10.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 400k
Titre Figure 11: Photograph, farmer with yerli (image left) and American cotton (image right) in his hands.
Crédits Source : Georges Tsapalos and Pierre Walter, Rapport sur le Domaine Impérial de Tchoucour-Ova (Vilayet d’Adana, Turquie d’Asie), Paris: [s.n.], 1911-1912, p. 60. URL: https://gallica.bnf.fr/​ark:/12148/​bpt6k62025053/​
URL http://journals.openedition.org/abe/docannexe/image/16827/img-11.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 292k
Titre Figure 12: Postcard “Mersin, German consulate,” Christmann Mansion, Mersin, ca. 1910.
Crédits Source: Levantine Heritage Foundation. URL: http://www.levantineheritage.com/​mersina.htm.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/abe/docannexe/image/16827/img-12.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 306k
Titre Figure 13: Postcard “Mersin, Governor’s house,” Christmann Mansion, Mersin, ca. 1910.
Crédits Source: Levantine Heritage Foundation. URL: http://www.levantineheritage.com/​mersina.htm.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/abe/docannexe/image/16827/img-13.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 365k
Titre Figure 14: Photograph, Christmann Mansion, Mersin, ca. 1913.
Crédits Source: Levantine Heritage Foundation. URL: http://www.levantineheritage.com/​mersina.htm.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/abe/docannexe/image/16827/img-14.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 567k
Titre Figure 15: DLBG, floor plan of DLBG headquarters, 2nd floor, Dresden, 1910s.
Crédits Source: Frankfurt/Main (Germany), DBHI, OR 711.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/abe/docannexe/image/16827/img-15.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 545k
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Eva Schreiner, « Financing Cotton, Building Empire: Deutsche Bank in Late Ottoman Anatolia »ABE Journal [En ligne], 24 | 2024, mis en ligne le 31 décembre 2024, consulté le 24 janvier 2026. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/abe/16827 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/1393c

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Auteur

Eva Schreiner

Postdoctoral Fellow, Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz, Max-Planck-Institut and ANAMED, Koç University Istanbul, Turkey ORCID ID: 0009-0003-5815-749X

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