Natalia Lanko

Through the lens of a monopolistic trading corporation called the British Levant Company, I explore the history of political economic ideas as they were elaborated through a commercial engagement in the Eastern Mediterranean in the 18 th and 19 th centuries. I analyse how the management of jurisdictional belongings and the control of maritime sea-lanes, through legal and diplomatic means, were part of a distinct strand of political economic thought that contributed to the contested debates on mercantilism and free trade, and effectively to the transition to the British informal empire.

I argue that the particularities of the Eastern Mediterranean context, that included the Ottoman control of the region, the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, the Continental Blockade, the expansion of Russia, the Greek War of Independence, and the British legal reform movement, shaped a distinct political economic outlook of the men on the ground, whose personal, political, and professional lives were closely embedded in the shifting geopolitical circumstances and the rapidly changing trade patterns.

I use legal cases pertaining to extraterritorial rights, the movement of people, the issuance of passports, and the every-day breach of commercial agreements, as discussed in the business, private, and diplomatic correspondence, and legal sources, such as prize appeals published by the Admiralty courts, to show that the management of the legal belongings of the inhabitants of the British protectorate in the Ionian Islands, or the Ottoman Christian intermediaries with extraterritorial rights, along with discussions on the control of strategic passageways through the re-interpretation of commercial treaties and reconfiguration of the maritime law, were the foci of the political economic thinking of the members of the British Levant Company.

The project argues that, in their political economic outlook, the members of the Company differed to large extent from their opposite numbers in the world of the British trading corporations, and therefore, that the Eastern Mediterranean theatre merits its own place in the scholarship on the role of corporations in the intellectual history of political economy. The project also advances the current state of scholarship on the Levant Company, by arguing that its eventual dissolution in 1825 was not a natural result of the growing obsolescence of monopolistic policies, but an actively pursued project that was intertwined with a systemic change in the trading patterns and the rise of the British hegemony in the Eastern Mediterranean.

Awards, Fellowships, Language Training

• 2025 – research scholarship of the Centre for History and Economics in Paris.
• 2023 – Turkish Language and Culture Summer Program at Boğaziçi University in Istanbul.
• 2023 – received Bayly Winder Summer Funding Fellowship at New York University.
• 2022 – awarded MacCracken Fellowship at New York University.
• 2022 – History Department Masters’ Dissertation Prize at the School of Oriental and African
• Studies, University of London (SOAS) for my thesis on the intertwined history of trans-
• imperial knowledge production and radical politics.
• 2021 – Turkish Language and Culture Summer Program at Boğaziçi University in Istanbul.