Foreign Investment in the Ottoman Empire: International Trade and Relations 1854–1914, is a thorough analysis of the development and consolidation of foreign investment in the Ottoman Empire, and its structural implications for the Ottoman economy and politics.

In the first chapter, focusing on the pre-nineteenth century, the author intends to examine the backwardness of the Ottoman economy. She lists several scholars who explain why Ottoman and Islamic economic institutions did not create an economic system that was competitive or compatible with the economic development in the Western world. The Ottoman backwardness resulted in the domination of industrialized countries over the vulnerable and unproductive Ottoman economy in the age of free trade following the 1838 Anglo-Ottoman trade treaty. In chapter two, Necla Geyikdağı examines the foreign capital movements into the Ottoman Empire and the construction of the Ottoman Bank in 1856, following the Crimean War. The Ottoman financial market became very attractive for foreign investors with its high interest rates. The incorporation of the Ottoman economy into the European financial system also expanded possibilities for European exports to the Ottoman markets. However, the mismanagement of foreign capital resulted in bankruptcy. The severe situation was further intensified by the crisis triggered by the Ottoman-Russian War of 1877/78 and the national uprisings in the Balkans. As a result, the Ottoman administration accepted the institutionalization of a Public Debt Administration under the supervision of France and England in 1881, which disconnected the Ottoman central bureaucracy from the tax resources in the provinces. Chapters 3 and 4 examine the direct British, French, German, Belgian, Italian, and American investments in industrial complexes and infrastructure. Geyikdağı argues that the motivations behind these investments were not purely economic. In each case, political concerns were also in play. The author, for instance, illustrates how the railroad contracts carried out by British, French, and later German companies, in fact, were instrumental in creating political and military control within the Ottoman lands and in the neighboring regions. In Chapter 4, the author examines the details of direct investments in transportation (railroads, ports, and docks), finance (banking and insurance), urban development, mining including oil, and agriculture (tobacco). This chapter is also a very handy summary that enables the reader to see developments and structures in different sectors of the Ottoman economy in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Chapter 5, entitled, “Foreign Investment Policy and Political Risk,” is an analysis of perceptions of and discourses on European investments in the Ottoman markets by Ottoman bureaucrats and intellectuals, as well as policymakers, investors, and the general public in European countries. Here, Geyikdağı depicts the transformation of the Ottoman attitude toward the foreign capital from favorable to critical, a parallel to the transformation of Ottoman political and economic thought before the Great War. However, she argues, in spite of the political risks and concerns, neither the Ottoman public nor policymakers had a very negative or xenophobic attitude toward the foreign investors and business, in contrast to what happened in Russia and newly independent Balkan countries.

The primary assumption of the book is the inherent underdevelopment of the traditional Ottoman economy, which left the Ottoman markets unprotected and vulnerable to the growing financial and industrial expansion of European powers in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Geyikdağı makes three main arguments. The process of inflow of foreign investment in the Ottoman markets had a negative impact in the Ottoman economy and industrialization, and as a result Ottoman underdevelopment was perpetuated. The process is not to be understood without political motivations and concerns. The Ottomans did not develop an alternative policy or mechanisms to convert this process to on favorable to the Ottoman economy. These are well-known arguments that are not original to Geyikdağı’s monograph. In fact, the book is mainly based on the existing secondary scholarship of, among others, Kazgan, Isaawi, Quataert, Gallagher, Robinson, and Kuran, without any critical engagement with the literature, and on European newspapers and journals of the period. It is unfortunate that Geyikdağı does not mention the two most important studies on the Ottoman debts, Emine Kiray's Osmanlı’daekonomikyapıvedışborçlar (Istanbul, 1993) and Murat Birdal's, The Political Economy of Ottoman Public Debt: Insolvency and European Financial Control in the Late Nineteenth Century (London, 2010), which is based on extensive archival research. In sum, the book presents a through narrative of the history of the foreign investments in the Ottoman Empire in the light of the existing literature and some primary material extracted from newspapers and journals. However, it would be misleading to say that Geyikdağı revises our understanding of the period with an original and nuanced analysis or with quantitative data on the impact of foreign investments on branches and components of the Ottoman economy (such as prices in different sectors, technology transfer, and regional integration) or on specific sectors, groups, and regions that might have had favorable or unfavorable engagements with foreign investment.