British 'informal imperialism' in the Eastern Mediterranean in the long eighteenth century.

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This study will investigate how the activities of British merchants in the Ottoman Empire contributed to British informal empire in the Eastern Mediterranean. Scholars have long recognised the significance of British imperialism in the eastern Mediterranean in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, particularly inEgypt and Palestine (Darwin 1981, Wasserstein 1991), yet its general complexion and expression in the early modern period has been neglected. British economic interests were highly commercial in terms of credit activities and landownership in the region. Therefore, informal means of control through merchantactivities abroad were vital for helping state control over commercial goods and facilitating far-flung market integration. This study will demonstrate that this was the case for the English Levant merchants trading with the Ottomans in the eighteenth century.As an undergraduate, I studied Ottoman history, particularly Cyprus under Ottoman rule. I also learned to read Ottoman Turkish. I completed a Master of Arts in Early Modern History at the University of Birmingham in 2019, where I learned about current discussions on historical methods, approaches to primary sources, and the historiography of early modern world. I also learned to read French and early modern English secretary handwriting (I received 92 out of 100). My MA dissertation examined English commerce with Cyprus in the early eighteenth century, through which I uncovered English merchant investments in agricultural lands and credit extension to the island's people which enabled these merchants to acquire direct access to commercial goods such as cotton and silk and facilitated a certain degree of control over the traded goods. This might constitute one of the processes for establishing informal empire through trade and investments. (Gotteland 2017). Indeed, a longitudinal study of English merchants' activities within the Ottoman Empire will reveal British informal empire in the eighteenth-century Eastern Mediterranean.Undertaking such research requires expert supervisions from British and Ottoman historians. Sheryllynne Haggerty at the University of Nottingham has demonstrated the importance of traders in facilitating the commerce of the British Empire through market integration and would therefore contribute a vitalperspective on British merchant activity in the Mediterranean (Haggerty 2012). Christopher Markiewicz at the University of Birmingham is one of the few historians in the UK expert in early modern Ottoman history and his recent work on a period of transformation within the Empire through the life of astatesmen are both significant and inspiring for this study (Markiewicz 2019).