Of Capitulations, Capital, and Collateral: Russian Imperial Banking in Late Qajar Persia (1891 – 1921)
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Of Capitulations, Capital, and Collateral: Russian Imperial Banking in Late Qajar Persia (1891 – 1921)
Ghasemi, Soheil | Eghbalizarch, Mohammadreza
German Yearbook of International Law, Vol. 66 (2023), Iss. 1 : pp. 237–258
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Soheil Ghasemi, ,
Mohammadreza Eghbalizarch, ,
Abstract
Abstract: The historic ebb and flow of Russian imperialism in the 19th and early 20th centuries was inseparably tied to the circulation, expansion, and contraction of finance capital. At the height of the first age of financial globalisation (1871 – 1914), with its industrialisation projects and the limits of territorially expansionist policies, the Tsarist empire increasingly capitalised on the Russian commercial and banking institutions in its Asian peripheries, i. e. China and Persia, informally extending the perimeters of its imperial interventions. Along these lines, this paper investigates the case of the Russian majority-State-owned Loan and Discount Bank of Persia over its three-decade-long history (1891 – 1921). It focuses on the numerous ways in which, at the interface of imperial public authority and private financial practices, the Russian informal empire-building projects were facilitated by the local interventions of imperial banking during the ‘“golden age” of Russian rule’ in Persia. Initially driven by the ever-present possibilities that legal extraterritoriality and economic concessions had generated, the bank – only rivalled in this jurisdiction by the British-owned Imperial Bank of Persia – increasingly resorted to diverse and, at times, peculiar financial practices to extend its debt relations with the Persian government and society at large. This paper traces these banking practices from two interrelated angles: on one hand, sovereign debt and extreme conditionality, and, on the other, land appropriation. By doing so, this reflection seeks to lay the groundwork for further attention to imperial banking and its bifurcated public-private constellations within the critical histories of international law.
Table of Contents
| Section Title | Page | Action | Price |
|---|---|---|---|
| Soheil Ghasemi and Mohammadreza Eghbalizarch\nOf Capitulations, Capital, and Collateral: Russian Imperial Banking in Late Qajar Persia (1891–1921) | 237 | ||
| I. Peripheral Sovereignty on a Cross of Global Capital: International Law and Imperial Banking | 238 | ||
| II. Trajectories of Extraterritoriality, Concessions, and Banking in 19th-Century Persia | 242 | ||
| A. Capitulations and Foreign Trade | 244 | ||
| B. Concessions and Imperial Banking | 246 | ||
| III. Liquidity, Loan, and Land: The Multiple Faces of Russian Imperial Banking in Persia | 248 | ||
| A. Sovereign Debt and Extreme Conditionality | 249 | ||
| B. From Pawnbroking to Land-Grabbing | 253 | ||
| IV. Concluding Remarks: ‘Agent of Empire’ or Agent of Capital? | 256 |