Pan-Islamic bonds and interest: Ottoman bonds, Red Crescent remittances and the limits of Indian Muslim capital, 1877–1924

Abstract

This article analyses the Ottoman government’s attempt to encourage Indian Muslims to purchase its treasury bonds during the Balkan Wars in 1912–13. It contrasts this largely unsuccessful scheme with the enormous contributions of Indian Muslims to the parallel campaign to raise relief funds for Ottoman soldiers and refugees. While this latter movement involved the intermittent dispatch of remittances to the Ottoman Ministry of Finance and Red Crescent, the bond drive demanded a multi-year commitment and conjured up a variety of financial and religious dilemmas for Indian Muslim constituencies. To better contextualise these divergent outcomes, this article first examines the infrastructures of Indian Muslim religious and financial exchange with the Ottoman Empire from the mid-nineteenth century. It then charts the charitable campaigns organised by Indian Muslims between 1877 and 1912, before turning to the Balkan Wars. The foundering of the bond drive stemmed from problems on both the supply and demand side, namely, International Financial Control (IFC) in the Ottoman context, informational asymmetries, fears of Ottoman insolvency and an aversion by some to accepting interest. Nevertheless, Indian Muslim capital enjoyed a freer degree of circulation than in the post-Ottoman environment, where new powers sought to curtail or control it in an age of financial de-globalisation.