The greatest economic world power up to the 17th century, Portugal faced grave challenges throughout the 1800s. Setting its economic hopes on South America and Africa rather than the Middle East, it played a key role in the European powers’ 1885 agreement to carve up Africa among themselves for colonialisation and economic exploitation.

While powerful stock exchanges and national banks controlled major financial transactions in the later 19th and early 20th centuries, many ordinary people and small and medium-scale businesses still relied on the services of traditional moneylenders and private bankers. In many areas these remained the only reliable source for informal credit and funds for some time.

The Alexandria Stock Exchange was opened in 1883, followed in 1903 by the one in Cairo. Initially focused exclusively on transactions relating to the cotton trade with Europe, the exchange soon became the focus of the city’s entire financial community.

Alongside powerful financial centres such as London and Amsterdam, Paris also provided considerable investment capital for economic and other projects across the Southern Mediterranean. Many brokers at the Paris Stock Exchange dealt in shares and bonds related to reformist government schemes.

In the later 19th century, the London Stock Exchange became the world’s most powerful financial centre. By 1914, one-third of the public capital available to investors anywhere in the world was listed and traded on the London Stock Exchange. Other European powers tried to establish rival institutions, but none could match it in scale, scope or available resources.

The Ottoman (later Imperial Ottoman) Bank was established in Istanbul in 1856. Sustained by British, French and some Ottoman capital, it functioned as the state’s bank in advancing credits, managing debt, issuing currency and overseeing the state’s budgets.

This archaeological notebook belonged to Robert Hamilton Lang, the Scottish manager of the Imperial Ottoman Bank in Larnaca, Cyprus, between 1863 and 1872. He later held other IOB posts in Alexandria, Romania and Constantinople, where he became director general of the bank in 1875.

Following severe financial predicaments in the 1870s, Ottoman financial officials were increasingly forced to work under foreign financial control. Under the terms of the Ottoman Public Debt Administration established in 1881, thousands were instructed and managed by European financiers.

The foundation of the State Bank of Morocco came in the wake of the Algeciras Conference in 1906, during which European powers and the USA agreed on how to apportion control over the most crucial of Morocco’s political, economic and financial affairs. The State Bank gave credit, issued currency and oversaw state finance.