This paper analyzes how free trade and mercantilism had confronted to each other in the Ottoman Empire and how free trade in the Ottoman Empire had yielded to mercantilism. It particularly, analyzes the case of Aleppo a trading city in the Ottoman Empire. Aleppo evidences that how its liberal...

We use a historical quasi-experiment to estimate the causal effect of trade on capital flows. We argue that fluctuations in regional rainfall within the Ottoman Empire capture the exogenous variation in exports from the Empire to Germany, France, and the U.K., during the period of 1859–1913....

Estimating the effect of trade on capital flows is difficult given the inherent identification problem. We use fluctuations in rainfall to capture the exogenous variation in trade between Germany, France, the U.K., and the Ottoman Empire during 1859-1913. The provisionistic policy of the Ottoman...