Gold, frankincense, and myrrh: French consuls and commercial diplomacy in the Ottoman Levant, 1660--1699

In 1683, in Algiers, soldiers of the Dey loaded the French consul into a large cannon and shot him at the French fleet in retaliation for the French bombardment of the city. Many French consuls in the echelles of the Levant and North Africa suffered harassment, imprisonment, or worse during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.; Consuls dominated the French diplomatic-commercial apparatus in the Levant. Standing between Paris and the Porte, they led French merchants in their commercial diplomacy with Ottoman officials. As French commercial expansion in Asia and the Atlantic faltered and failed, the French economy came to rely on Levantine markets and raw materials. This dissertation argues that the consuls, in cooperation with the Chamber of Commerce of Marseilles, shaped and shepherded this vital commerce in the seventeenth century and eighteenth centuries. Ignoring how the consulates functioned as an institution, older studies of French commerce dismissed the consuls as incompetent, decadent, and abusive. Using documents generated in the Levant, the dissertation examines how the consuls operated and finds that the consuls were capable administrators. A focus on their interaction with local Ottoman officials is key to understanding the consuls' central role in French trade. In areas where the consul earned the goodwill of Ottoman officials, trade flourished. Without a consul who was an effective diplomat, trade suffered.; Faced with a powerful and cohesive Ottoman state, violence was not an option the French could employ to protect and enhance French commerce in the Mediterranean. Thus, this dissertation joins debates on the nature of early modern global expansion and the validity of world systems models. The few seventeenth-century French attempts to use force in support of commerce had disastrous results for French trade. Instead, the policies directed and inspired by the merchants bore fruit. In the eastern Mediterranean, French merchants successfully defeated Dutch and English rivals. In the Levant, mercantilist policies and the use of force failed, leaving commerce in the hands of individual French merchants and their representatives; French success depended on the pots of jam the consul gave to the local judge, the kadi .