Wages of Empire: Armenian Transnational Finance, Banking, and Diplomacy, 1913-1914

• In Event: War, Peace, and Diplomacy on the Russo-Ottoman Borderlands, 1860–1920

Abstract

This paper looks at how in the period just before the outbreak of World War I Ottoman and Russian Armenian financiers and bankers came together to found two Armenian “national” banks in the Ottoman Empire. The banks were intended to redress the dire economic conditions of Armenians peasants in the eastern Anatolian provinces, making credit, bonds, and other financial instruments easily accessible to them. A project with small beginnings, the Armenian banks scheme eventually drew in imperial Russian, Ottoman, and French involvement, forming an important, if now largely forgotten, part of the history of prewar international finance and Great Power relations.

Author

• Armen Manuk-Khaloyan, Georgetown U