Intra-European Litigation in Eighteenth-Century Izmir

Front matter

Tijl Vanneste

Intra-European Litigation in Eighteenth-Century Izmir

The Role of the Merchants' Style

Contents

Acknowledgements 1x List of Figures and Tables xi

The Early Development of Dutch Levant Trade 17

11 Straatvaart: Dutch Navigation into the Mediterranean 17

Introduction

In 1686, the Amsterdam Directorate of Levant Trade and Navigation in the Mediterranean (Directie Levantse Handel en Navigatie in de Middellandse Zee) drafted a proposal with which they hoped to settle all matters related to the jurisdiction of and the litigation done by the Dutch ambassador and consuls in the Levant.! It contained seven articles, the last one specifying that in order to prevent the inhabitants of this state [the United Provinces] in the Levant from annoying each other with lengthy trials, damaging trade and draining all its lifeblood, it is necessary that the States General order the resident [ambassador] and consuls in the Levant, together with their assessors [merchants acting as co-judges], to offer a prompt expedition of justice to the inhabitants of this state who air a dispute before them and to sentence in a short and tactful manner.”

The Directorate of Levant Trade was a board of merchants active in Levantine trade. It was established in 1625 as an institution supervising Dutch trade in the Levant? It provided advice to the political organs in the Dutch Republic

1 In the early modern period, references to the Levant include the whole non-European eastern Mediterranean, including for instance Anatolia and its coast, contrary to today's interpretation of the term, which is limited to the lands along the coast between the Sinai desert and southeastern Anatolia.

2 Klaas Heeringa and J.G. Nanninga, Bronnen tot de geschiedenis van den Levantschen handel (1590—1826) (The Hague, 1917), 2: pp. 251-252, 'Ontwerp-reglement van justitie in de Levant; Amsterdam, 17/01/1686, on p. 252, ‘en opdat de ingesetene van deesen staat in de Levante niet met langhdurige processen malkanderen en mogen vexeeren tot schaade van de negotie, en daartoe alle aderen mochte werden afgesneden, sal mede gansch dienstich sijn, dat H.H.M. den gemelte resident en consuls in de Levante serieuslijcken gelieven te gelasten, ten eyde deselve met haar assessoren, den ingesetenen van deesen staat voor haar eenige saake ventileerende, prompte expeditie van justitie komen te geven, mitsgaders cort en onvertooge recht te doen etc’. The work of Heeringa and Nanninga is an extensive publication of primary sources in Dutch archives related to the Dutch Levant trade. Its first two volumes were edited by Klaas Heeringa and published in 1910 and 1917. The other two were edited by J.G. Nanninga and were published in 1952, 1964 and 1966 (the last volume, like the second, appeared in two parts). The complete work can be consulted online at http://resources.huygens.knaw.nl/ retroboeken/levantschehandel/#page=o&accessor=toc&view=homePane.

3 ‘The Low Countries is used to refer to both the Spanish/Austrian Netherlands and the Dutch Republic; Dutch refers to the Dutch Republic, or the United Provinces, while Holland only refers to the particular Dutch province of that name. In her work, Maartje van Gelder used ‘Netherlandish’ to indicate merchants coming from the Low Countries. I have chosen not to adopt that useful designation as the Dutch community of Izmir did not include merchants

© TIJL VANNESTE, 2022 | D01:10.1163/9789004498235 002 This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the cc By-NC 4.0 license.

and maintained contact with Dutch diplomatic representatives in the eastern Mediterranean.

Most of the Levant was controlled by the Ottomans, and by the time the proposal was drafted, the Dutch had maintained a diplomatic relationship with the Sublime Porte for almost seventy-five years in support of various Dutch trading communities active in several Levantine échelles, where they were active as commission traders, handling the merchandise of and for colleagues in the Dutch Republic as well as the Spanish Netherlands. Goods were bought and sold through Ottoman middlemen in Greece, Aleppo, Istanbul, Ankara and, most importantly, Izmir.* The Dutch, like other European trading communities, were guests, staying at the discretion of the Ottoman hosts, and their presence was regulated through an expanding set of privileges given by the Ottoman sultan that were known as the capitulations, or ahdnames.” These allowed for Europeans to stay indefinitely in Ottoman territory and provided them with several fiscal and commercial privileges, such as tax exemptions and lower custom tariffs. One of the main privileges that was granted to the Europeans was their right to legal autonomy. The capitulations stipulated that the various trading communities fell under the jurisdiction of consuls, vice-consuls or ambassadors, who also had the right to adjudicate disputes within their communities. This meant that Europeans could use their own 'national' laws, statutes and procedures in intra-community litigation, with the consul (or ambassador) acting as judge.

The Sublime Porte giving permission to trading communities to settle disputes amongst their members autonomously matched the European medieval custom of legal autonomy given to foreign trading communities headed by a consul. While the privilege of autonomy was thus not an exotic one for Europeans, it did not mean that the legal context within which European consuls in the Ottoman Empire needed to operate was always unambiguous and clearly delineated. Early modern European states did not have one codified from the Austrian Netherlands. Maartje van Gelder, Trading places: The Netherlandish merchants in early modern Venice (Leiden and Boston, 2009).

4 This book has opted to refer to Ottoman cities under their current Turkish names. Early modern Smyrna is thus referred to as Izmir, Constantinople as Istanbul and so on. In quotes, the place name is kept the way it was written down, including its spelling.

5 The term ‘capitulation’, or capitula in Latin, was used for the 1304 treaty between Genoa and Byzantium and also designates late-medieval treaties concluded between Christian and Muslim states in the Mediterranean. Viorel Panaite, 'The legal and political status of Wallachia and Moldavia in relation to the Ottoman Empire, in The European tributary states of the Ottoman Empire in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, eds. Gábor Kármán and Lovro Kunécevic (Leiden and Boston, 2013), p. 37.

body of national law.$ Legal pluralism and a variety of local jurisdictions were commonplace. Thus, it was not so easy to transplant ‘national’ law onto the ‘national’ trading communities operating abroad.” An additional complication was the nature of disputes that were solved by consular litigation. European presence in the Ottoman Empire was a consequence of trade, and by far, most of the European individuals living in an Ottoman city were traders, and when they took each other to court, it was usually to settle a commercial dispute. There are two reasons why it was not so easy to use state law to settle such disputes.

The first one is that the legal autonomy granted by the Ottomans applied to intracommunity resolutions, and commercial relationships, almost without exception, extended beyond the community, which made legal autonomy insufficient and necessitated additional agreements between different actors, Ottoman as well as European, on jurisdiction. The second one is that there was no readily available corpus of written ‘national’ law that was developed enough to be used in all matters of commercial litigation, particularly when considering the increasingly international context of early modern trade.

Historians have pointed to the existence of an informal body of rules used by traders from different backgrounds to settle their disputes, the so-called ‘law merchant, a concept that offers a solution for both problems mentioned above. The concept, which originated in the Middle Ages and was considered universal, or at least highly cosmopolitan, is still the subject of academic debate. While some scholars consider the law merchant one of the medieval institutions that helped revive and expand Europe's trade with the world, others have argued that the law merchant is an artificial concept introduced

6 While there were certainly European states with a strong degree of centralisation, such as France, others, such as the Dutch Republic, were fundamentally different. In general, the use of the term 'nation-state' for the period under study is complicated and does not do justice to the sophisticated political fragmentation and local autonomies that existed within the borders of many European states. For an analysis of the process of state formation in Europe, see Thomas Ertman, Birth of the leviathan. Building states and regimes in medieval and early modern Europe (Cambridge, 1997).

7 Anational trading community abroad is more regularly referred to as a trading nation, both in contemporary and modern literature. It should not be equated with a nation-state — as the Dutch case makes abundantly clear. I will use both trading community and trading nation throughout the book. For an extensive study of the interaction of European trading nations with the institutions of a host society through a diplomatic and legal prism, see Roberto Zaugg, Stranieri di antico regime. Mercanti, giudici e consoli nella Napoli del Settecento (Roma, 2011).

by historians attempting to find the historical roots of early attempts at globalisation.®

This book argues that, while the law merchant did not exist in the way its advocates suggested, the international merchant community was nonetheless able to rely on a large and heterogeneous web of rules, customs and uses that merchants themselves labelled the ‘merchants’ style’ (koopmansstijl is the term used in most Dutch sources).? Furthermore, analysis of several commercial disputes adjudicated by the Dutch consul in Izmir shows that the merchants' style was used in litigation as the central criterion on which the court based its legal verdicts. Legal procedure and the court's modus operandi were fully accommodating towards this merchants' style and the variety of merchants' customs, something that equally applied to various courts in different areas of the world — without there being an actual codified system of international law in existence.

The central thesis of this book is that the use of the merchants' style in courts adjudicating commercial disputes in an international context should be considered the legal equivalent of the commercial customs that underpinned early modern intercultural and international trade. It expressed what was

8 For criticism, see Emily Kadens, ‘The myth of the customary law merchant’, Texas law review, go (2012): pp. 1153-1206; and ‘The medieval law merchant: The tyranny of a construct, Journal of legal analysis, 7:2 (2015): pp. 251-289; Stephen Sachs, ‘From St. Ives to cyberspace: The modern distortion of the medieval “law merchant”, American University international law review, 21:5 (2006): pp. 685-812; Emily Kadens, ‘Order within law, variety within custom: The character of the medieval merchant law’, Chicago journal of international law, 5:1 (2004): pp. 39-65; and Albrecht Cordes, ‘The search for a medieval lex mercatoria Oxford University comparative law forum 5 (2003), consulted online at http://ouclf.iuscomp.org/the-search-for-a-medieval-lex-mercatoria/. For early defenders, see William Mitchell, An essay on the early history of the law merchant (Cambridge, 1904); and Levin Goldschmidt, Handbuch des Handelsrechts (Erlangen, 1868). Goldschmidt (1839-1897) was a professor in commercial law at Berlin University who studied with Max Weber. For an excellent recent analysis, see Dave De ruysscher, 'La lex mercatoria contextualisée: Tracer son parcours intellectuel, Revue historique du droit francais et étranger, 90:4 (2012): pp. 501—504; see also J.H. Baker, 'The law merchant and the common law before 1700, The Cambridge law journal, 38:2 (1979): pp. 295- 322; and for the argument on the revival of European trade, see Paul R. Milgrom, Douglass C. North, and Barry R. Weingast, ‘The role of institutions in the revival of trade: The law merchant, private judges, and the champagne fairs, Economics & politics, 23 (1990): pp. 1-23. Historians have also considered the existence of a similar lex maritima for maritime law. For a discussion on this, see Dave De ruysscher 'Maxims, principles and legal change: Maritime law in merchant and legal culture (Low Countries, 16th century), Zeitschrift der Savigny-Stiftung für Rechtsgeschichte, 138 (2021): pp. 260-275.

9 Onthe idea of a pluralism of custom, see Kadens, ‘Order within law’.

considered reasonable and equitable én law as the legal consequence of what was considered reasonable and fair behaviour in trade.

A great deal of historiography on early modern intercultural trade has been motivated by an attempt to explain how such trade was possible in the absence of formal international institutions that could successfully sanction fraudulent behaviour. The absence of a legal framework able to adjudicate international mercantile disputes and the reluctance of traders to go to court are often considered givens in discourse on the development of commercial networks based on trust. Scholars such as Francesca Trivellato, Sebouh Aslanian, Gunnar Dahl, Xabier Lamikiz and others have all analysed such networks in the early modern period, demonstrating the efforts undertaken by the international merchant community to reduce risk and enhance trust. These efforts include the careful construction of long-lasting business correspondences, peer judgment through reputation and creditworthiness and the consideration of mutual interest.10

In recent years, a number of studies have begun to consider the importance of litigation as a way to solve commercial disputes. Scholars have asserted that litigation was not as uncommon or eschewed as hitherto has been thought, particularly after a boom that began in the late sixteenth century: ‘almost every man — and more women than expected — went to law in England before the eighteenth century. Civil litigation was a common, almost universal experience in some areas, and many people appeared as prosecutors of suits as well as defendants, at least above the level of the desperately poor’! This observation was not only true for England and it also applied to commercial disputes. Even though friendly settlement was often attempted as a first step, merchants frequently did take each other to court. Not only do archives contain a substantial amount of commercial litigation, merchants regularly, and without much questioning, acted on each other's behalf in court, carrying power of attorney

10 See for instance Sebouh Aslanian, From the Indian Ocean to the Mediterranean: The global trade networks of Armenian merchants from New Julfa (Berkeley and New York, 201); Tijl Vanneste, Global trade and commercial networks: Eighteenth-century diamond merchants (London, 2011); Xabier Lamikiz, Trade and trust in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world: Spanish merchants and their overseas networks (Woodbridge, 2010); Francesca Trivellato, The familiarity of strangers: The Sephardic diaspora, Livorno, and cross-cultural trade in the early modern period (New Haven and London, 2009); and Gunnar Dahl, Trade, trust and networks: Commercial culture in late medieval Italy (Lund, 1998).

11 David Lemmings, Law and government in England during the long eighteenth century. From consent to command (Basingstoke and New York, 2011), p. 56.

for an overseas merchant who could be more of a stranger than the party they were facing in court}

A growing number of studies have started to look at court cases between traders, providing a much-needed addition to the literature on the behaviour of merchants during the early modern period. These studies, however, often focus on a particular spatial context, such as early modern France, and thus do not fully address the possibility of litigation in an international and intercultural context.? More recently, a collection of essays on consuls operating in the Mediterranean between the seventeenth and twentieth centuries has addressed forms of litigation adjudicated by consuls in the contexts of major port cities like Livorno, Tunis, Barcelona, Cadiz and Sicily.

While a *merchant culture' is often recognised in these studies on commercial litigation, for instance in the excellent monograph on the Parisian merchant court by Amalia Kessler, its analysis is not fully reconciled with existing discourse on trade networks. The law merchant, the reliance on trust-generating mechanisms by the merchant community and litigation before a particular court have often been researched separately from each other in historiography. This book is meant as an attempt to cross the methodological and conceptual bridge that still exists between the law merchant, trust-generating mechanisms on which international trade was founded and commercial litigation by analysing trials between litigants of different backgrounds that were adjudicated at the Dutch consular court of Izmir during the second half of the eighteenth century. The central argument is that in places with a strong intercultural commercial presence, the customs of merchants involved in international trade, combined with political agreements and several bodies of ‘national’ and local law, were used to resolve legal disputes that arose as a consequence of international trade. The ability to resolve such disputes relied on

12 For powers of attorney as a form of support for international trade in a Mediterranean context, see Maria Fusaro, Political economies of empire in the early modern Mediterranean: The decline of Venice and the rise of England, 1450-1700 (Cambridge, 2015), pp. 202-203, 234-235, and 254-255. For a short history on the context of Roman law, see Reinhard Zimmermann, The law of obligations: Roman foundations of the civilian tradition (Oxford, 1990), pp. 53-54-

13 See for instance Julie Hardwick, Family business: Litigation and the political economies of daily life in early modern France (Oxford, 2009); and Amalia D. Kessler, A revolution in commerce: The Parisian merchant court and the rise of commercial society in eighteenth-century France (New Haven, 2007); both focusing on France.

14 See the essays in De l'utilité commerciale des consuls. L'institution consulaire et les marchands dans le monde méditerranéen (XVIIe-Xxe siècle), eds. Arnaud Bartolomei, Guillaume Calafat, Mathieu Grenet, and Jörg Ulbert (Rome and Madrid, 2017). The work is available through open access at http://books.openedition.org/efr/3253.

some sort of consensus amongst traders on what constituted the merchants' style and on an agreement between consular judges on the principles determining competence and jurisdiction.

Any attempt (this book included) to reconcile these three aspects of the regulation of intercultural trade in the early modern period encounters three important obstacles. First, the scholarly debate on the law merchant has obscured the role governments played in creating a legal environment in which litigation based on the customs and usages of merchants was possible, an omission further enlarged by the realisation that early modern European states harboured a hodgepodge of local laws, regulations and statutes inherited from the Middle Ages. This has rendered research more complicated, not least in areas that had a high degree of local legal autonomy and a large number of inhabitants participating in early modern international trade, such as the United Provinces. Concepts such as the law merchant and the merchants' style can only be applied if they were embedded within more formal systems of national or local law. In other words, merchants agreed upon the use of the merchants' style, but states still had to allow for its application in courts — analysis of the legal framework created to support the consular court of Izmir shows that states indeed did allow for this application. It is thus important to consider the development of state law in Europe to discover the exact place of the merchants' style and adjudication based on its use in the legal framework, but without making the mistake of considering the merchants' style as informal and subordinate to more formal systems of state and local law.

A second obstacle has to do with the legal fragmentation that was common in early modern Europe. It makes it hard to establish which jurisdiction applied in a particular commercial dispute, especially in an international context. In the United Provinces, traders could resort to urban institutions such as aldermen courts, and from the mid-seventeenth century onwards, they could also seek recourse at specialised courts, such as the maritime courts that were established in Amsterdam, Rotterdam and Zeeland. Additionally, merchants could bring cases before provincial and state courts, such as the States General, High Council (Hoge Raad) or Court of Holland (Hof van Holland ).5

15 For an overview of courts in the Dutch Republic, see Oscar Gelderblom, Cities of commerce. The institutional foundations of international trade in the Low Countries, 1250-1650 (Princeton and Oxford, 2013). The States General was also the representative governmental body of the United Provinces — each of the seven provincial states had representatives in it that dealt with matters of national interest, such as defence, military matters and foreign policy. Jan de Vries and Ad van der Woude, Nederland: De eerste ronde van moderne economische groei (Amsterdam, 1995), p. 125.

Additionally, Dutch merchants abroad could seek recourse to their consular representatives, if they had any. This fragmentation, combined with the growing international nature of trade, complicated adjudication, as it created a need to understand the sometimes complex agreements between different political entities on jurisdiction as well as a need to assert to what extent merchants had knowledge of different jurisdictions and the ways to access them.

A third obstacle is practical, as legal archives can be difficult to navigate. Even if a researcher knows which court to look at to find commercial litigation, archival records may be lost or destroyed. Most documents of the maritime courts in Rotterdam and Amsterdam, for instance, have not been preserved. When legal archives do exist, they are often hard to navigate. Often, for instance in the archives of the Hof van Holland, case documents have been preserved as series of the same types of documents and not as full cases in their entirety. This makes it hard to reconstruct the paper trail of a particular dispute, especially as a number of legal archives have not been properly inventoried. The possibility of appealing a sentence at a higher court further complicates the reconstruction of a full case.

When trial documents are found, it is a time-consuming affair to analyse even a relatively small case, as a minor dispute could produce a mass of documents, interrogations, memoirs, extracts of business books and accounts that can go on for dozens of pages in (frequently) hard-to-read handwriting in three or four different languages. Historians can get lost following this paper trail, which often includes sophisticated financial transactions, with payments in currencies that no longer exist and to which it might be complicated to attribute a modern value. And even if the logic of the case, and the string of events leading up to it, can be discerned, there will almost always be documents lost that could serve to contextualise it. If power of attorney was given to someone, we hardly know why it was given to that person. If an appeal was made, it is hard to find. If judges convened to discuss an outcome of a trial, they rarely left any documents related to it behind, and although proceedings at the Dutch consular court were based on written statements, and not on physical appearance in court and oral interrogations, the verbal aspect of the legal interaction between traders who lived near one another has mostly disappeared, references to it in written documents being the exception.

The Dutch consular court of Izmir was chosen for several reasons. Izmir was an important intercultural locale and a hub for international trade that involved Dutch traders, Englishmen, Frenchmen, ‘Italians’, ‘Greeks’, Armenians, Jews and Muslim Ottomans amongst others, rendering their constant interaction a suitable laboratory to test hypotheses on the use of litigation and the law in international commerce.!6 The functioning of European-Ottoman trade relied on those customary arrangements that were characteristic of intercultural international trade in the early modern period, but it was also subject to a legal context that was necessary in order to arrange the physical settlement of non-Ottoman subjects in Ottoman territories. This legal context consisted of privileges granted through capitulations as well as additional stipulations laid out through fermans, which were what decrees issued by the sultan were called. Although separate capitulations were concluded between the Ottoman Empire and the different European states present in the Ottoman Empire for centuries, the principle introduced in 1740 — that privileges granted to one European power became immediately active for the other powers as well — meant that there was a legal context that applied to all European nations, who further concluded a number of arrangements to regulate relationships between one another. The combination of legal arrangements between Europeans and Ottomans, but also between Europeans and Europeans, makes the Levantine context particularly interesting in the second half of the eighteenth century.

Contrary to French and English Levant trade, Dutch Levant trade was relatively open to foreigners, which led to the high participation of non-Muslim Ottoman traders, and subsequently to a higher amount of intercultural legal disputes." The Dutch, like other European nations, took foreigners under their protection, and during the eighteenth century, the Dutch consul in Izmir extended diplomatic protection to traders from the Holy Roman Empire, Tuscany, Sweden, Denmark, Russia and Poland. Amongst his legal subjects, the Dutch consul also counted several non-Muslim Ottomans who had purchased protection. This added to the diversity of the litigants that entered litigation at the Dutch consular court.

Finally, there is a practical advantage to looking at the Dutch mercantile community of Izmir. Litigation that fell under Dutch jurisdiction was adjudicated by the Dutch consul, and the legal archives of the Dutch consular court

16 ‘Greeks’ and ‘Italians’ are placed between quotation marks here because at the time there were no clear Greek or Italian nation-states with Greek or Italian subjects. Both terms, however, do carry important meaning related to ethnicity, language and religion and will be used throughout the book without quotation marks. For the Greeks, see Victor Roudometof, ‘From Rum millet to Greek nation: Enlightenment, secularization and national identity in Ottoman Balkan society’, Journal of modern Greek studies, 16:1 (1998): pp. 1-48.

17 Ismail Hakla Kadi, Ottoman and Dutch merchants in the eighteenth century. Competition and cooperation in Ankara, Izmir, and Amsterdam (Leiden and Boston, 2012). For an overview of Dutch Levant trade prior to the eighteenth century, see Mehmet Bulut, Ottoman- Dutch economic relations in the early modern period 1571-1699 (Hilversum, 2001).

in Izmir have been well preserved in the National Archives in The Hague. They consist of about 200 cases, which generally were kept in their entirety! These archives provide excellent primary source material on which to build a historical analysis. Next to the richness of these archives, a great deal of diplomatic correspondence between consuls and ambassadors in the Levant and political institutions in the United Provinces has also been preserved and made accessible in a publication edited by Klaas Heeringa and J.G. Nanninga between 1910 and 1966. This work is now available online and is equipped with a search engine, which provides an invaluable addition to the primary sources of the consular court.!9 In addition, historians have already done crucial work studying the Dutch presence in the Ottoman Empire. Alexander de Groot is a pioneer when it comes to work on the Dutch capitulations and the history of Ottoman-Dutch relationships.?? Ismail Hakla Kadi has written an important work on Ottoman and Dutch traders in the eighteenth century, while Maurits van den Boogert has analysed the legal framework surrounding the Dutch presence in the eighteenth century in detail.?! Without the existence of this body of work, it would have been impossible to manage the current study. Something needs to be said about the time period. The consular archives only contain cases from the second half of the eighteenth century and a few from the early nineteenth century. Nothing has been preserved about litigation in earlier periods. The legal and commercial framework that was developed around the Dutch presence in the Levant and the Ottoman Empire, however, was created in the seventeenth century. This means that the theoretical part of this book focusses on seventeenth-century developments, while the cases studies that are examined in the more empirical section of the book all date from the eighteenth century. However, this time differential is not problematic for two reasons. First, the framework that was developed in the seventeenth century was still fully applicable in the eighteenth. Second, when analysing the position of commercial custom in the realm of law, it makes sense to look at it a substantial amount of time after the theoretical framework was

18 BJ. Slot, Inventaris van het archief van het Nederlandse Consulaat te Smyrna, (161) 1685-1811 (1837) (The Hague, 1988), pp. 37-55, N°s 235-259 and N°s 316—462.They do not, however, include appeals very often.

19 Seefootnote 2 on page 1 for the full reference.

20 Alexander H. de Groot, The Ottoman Empire and the Dutch Republic. A history of the earliest diplomatic relations 1610—1630, revised ed. (Leiden, 2012). See the bibliography for more references to de Groot's work.

21 Hakkı Kadi, Ottoman and Dutch merchants; and Maurits van den Boogert, The capitulations and the Ottoman legal system. Qadis, consuls and beratlis in the 18th century (Leiden and Boston, 2005).

created — because it meant the legal framework surrounding consular litigation had fully matured in practice.

This book is divided into five chapters. The first chapter discusses the development of Dutch Levant trade and the establishment of the Dutch merchant community in Izmir from the late sixteenth to the eighteenth century. Dutch trade with the Levant was mostly commission trade, based on the import of raw materials used in the textile industry at home and the export of colonial merchandise, arms and finished textiles such as sheets and linen produced in Dutch cities. This traded expanded significantly in the early seventeenth century, leading to the establishment of the first Dutch Ottoman consulate in Aleppo in present-day Syria. By the middle of the seventeenth century, Izmir had become the main trading centre for Europeans, including the Dutch, and the development of the Dutch consulate there was plagued by periodic quarrels about competence, taxes and fraud between consuls and merchants, a phase that came to an end with the arrival of the first scion of the de Hochepied family, who would provide consuls in Izmir for the whole eighteenth century. The first chapter also discusses the institutional development of the consulate in Izmir by researching the legal framework produced in the United Provinces that aimed to settle disputes between the traders and consuls there. It ends with a brief description of the Dutch trading community of Izmir.

The second chapter is concerned with the development of the adjudicating authority of the Dutch consulate in Izmir. The laws establishing this authority all came about during the seventeenth century and can be said to have originated with the first Dutch capitulations given in 1612 by Sultan Ahmed 1, which included the clause on legal autonomy. Additional laws on consular litigation were issued by the States General, the Dutch governing body concerned with international affairs, following the establishment of the first consulate in Aleppo in 1612. There were no formal arrangements that settled the specific argumentation European courts in the Ottoman Empire should follow to reach a verdict, except for the procedural aspect. This was codified in the seventeenth century in a number of ordinances specifically issued to assure the good functioning of Dutch consular courts in the Levant and can be labelled as the 'formal' aspect of litigation.?? These ordinances defined the rules of