Currency transition: the use of foreign coins and ‘dollarization’ in seventeenth-century Ottoman Istanbul

This article investigates the seventeenth-century Ottoman Empire’s transition from domestic to foreign currency, a striking episode in early modern monetary history. Drawing on over 22,000 Istanbul court records, we provide the first large-scale quantitative account of how European currencies, especially the Spanish dollar and the Dutch lion dollar, displaced Ottoman currency in everyday legal and economic transactions. Our analysis combines descriptive trends with regression models to examine variation across gender, religion, socio-economic status, case type and court district. We show that while men and non-Muslims initially dominated foreign coin use, women and Muslims disproportionately adopted foreign currencies in commercial cases and in Istanbul’s central courts, revealing the social complexities of access to and reliance on foreign monies. These findings challenge state-centered narratives of Ottoman monetary history by highlighting the routine practices through which currency transitions occurred. More broadly, the study situates the Ottoman experience within global patterns of early modern money, demonstrating how fragmented and socially differentiated currency transitions were across time and space.