Trading with the Ottomans: The Levant Company in the Middle East by Despina Vlami (review)

The most significant contribution of the book is the portrayal of how this family survived and prospered in the borderland between the Ottoman Empire and the Venetians that was sixteenth-century Albania. Members of this family remained Christian and Catholic but they were employed by a wide range of rulers and administrators of varied territories, Venetian, Spanish Habsburg, Austrian Habsburg, Papal, Polish, Moldavian, and Ottoman. These individuals played important roles during this period because of their linguistic abilities , their personal ties across borders, and their ability to look for the most advantageous position for their own personal advancement. Malcolm certainly succeeded in his first goal for Agents of Empire. He was also successful in providing a great deal of information adding to our understanding of the history of Albania during this period. He was less successful in his second aim of building more thematic accounts of relations and interactions between Europe and the Ottomans during this period. The book includes so many details, that to explore themes would need more explicit analysis of the meaning of this wealth of information. It is not absent but proportionally it is overwhelmed. Also while adding an Albanian perspective, more attention to the Ottoman one would greatly add to the book’s value. The historiography of Ottoman relations with Europe remains dominated by those contributions which do not use Ottoman sources. Malcolm explains why he did not use these sources, but their absence prohibits achieving his second aim. Thus, this is a significant contribution that adds to our knowledge of this aspect of Ottoman history, but it fails to make the Ottoman voice heard. For an Ottomanist audience, this is an omission which is significant. Christine Isom-Verhaaren Brigham Young University doi:10.2979/jottturstuass.3.1.11 Despina Vlami. Trading with the Ottomans: The Levant Company in the Middle East. London and New York: I.B. Tauris & Co., 2015, xi+349 pp. Cloth, $99. ISBN: 978-1780768892. For a quarter of a millennium the Levant Company dominated British trade with the Ottomans. As a chartered company, the Levant Company was an association of merchants with a geographic monopoly who adhered to a common set of operational policies but traded on their own accounts. In order Book Reviews 193 to cover administrative costs, the company imposed admission fees on its members and taxed British trade with the Ottomans. Despina Vlami’s Trading with the Ottomans provides a new approach to a much-studied institution, concentrating on the transition of the Levant Company from managing a monopoly to the implementation of British free trade policies. Focusing on the last thirty years of the company, Vlami aims to capture “the long moment of its transition by examining its organization, strategy and performance” (p. 3) and relate this process to the evolution of commercial enterprises and practices. Organized in four parts and eleven chapters, the study investigates the ways in which the Levant Company, as a regulated company, contributed to the evolution of the modern commercial enterprise. In the first part of Trading with the Ottomans, Vlami engages with the institutional history of the Levant Company. Chapter 1 consequently examines the company’s membership profile from its foundation, when only freemen of the City of London were admitted, to the eighteenth century, when such restrictions were lightened and eventually removed. In doing so, she pays particular attention to the relation of the company with the English Crown and government. The second chapter deals with the organizational features of the company. The company’s administration, the salaries of ambassadors and consuls, the hierarchy and power relations within the company, the geographical extension of its factories until the mid-eighteenth century and the politics behind it, company bylaws, and the transmission of information are among the main points of discussion. Taking its starting point from the events of 1753, which forced the Levant Company to reduce its admission fees and to lift barriers on membership, the third chapter investigates the merging of the company’s corporate organization, individual interests, and national identity as well as the effects of the new membership profile on perceptions and interpretations of corporate identity and nationality. The company’s operation...