Although the days of territorial expansion had ended by the second half of the seventeenth century, and although some provinces were more tenuously tied to Istanbul than others, with good cause could the head of the House of Osman claim the title 'sultan of the two lands and ruler of the two seas '. The Ottoman Empire in the eighteenth century was a major world power.
In the following essay, I will give an introduction to the historical setting and the background of British-Ottoman relations, followed by a discussion of some of the key events of the period, and finished off with a summary of some of the key themes that emerge from the archival record. This change is reflected in this collection of diplomatic correspondence, and also shows some of the features of daily diplomacy between the British and the Ottomans, and with other European ambassadors resident in Istanbul. The British ambassadors, who had acted largely as commercial agents, slowly became more distinctly political figures, driven by an ever more strident and aggressive foreign policy in the Mediterranean. The history of British-Ottoman relations between 17 is therefore one of commerce and diplomacy intertwined, with foreign policy aims beginning to edge out commercial interest by the end of the period. This system would last until the British crown assumed full control of the embassy in 1804. With British interests in the realms of the Ottoman Empire largely commercial, a system was established whereby the Levant Company had the right to collect dues and customs from British merchants trading in Ottoman ports and emporia, but in return had to use that income to support the ambassador in his efforts to protect mercantile interests. This is in no small part due to the fact that during this period, the British embassy was financed by the Levant Company, a commercial monopoly established at the end of the sixteenth century.
The records of the British embassy in Istanbul in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, now held at The National Archives in Kew, provide one of the most comprehensive collections of a resident embassy in Istanbul in the early modern period.
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