This volume presents a series of expertly edited articles given a cohesion by their shared subject matter: not simply the “Merchants in the Ottoman Empire” of the title, but also Ottoman merchants in foreign lands. The emphasis – twelve out of the seventeen articles – is on the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, reflecting the current tendency among Ottoman historians to specialize in the study of this period. The five articles dealing with the earlier period concentrate largely on merchants engaged in trade between the Ottoman Empire and Venice, reflecting not only the importance of this area of commerce, but also of the abundance of source materials, available especially in the Venetian Archives. Each of the articles makes a valuable contribution to the details of its subject matter, and so will be of interest to historians with a special interest in this particular area but, what is perhaps more important, many of the details which the authors present open windows onto topics of much wider interest. To take a few examples at random, Gilles Veinstein's “Les marchands étrangers dans l'Empire ottoman: questions de prix” deals very specifically with the attempts by Venetian merchants to gain exemption from the narh, the fixed price of goods sold in the market place, and the right to enter the retail trade by renting shops. Veinstein thus raises the general question of the function of the narh and other trade restrictions, and the question of whether they were intended primarily to safeguard the public or to control the prices of goods for the army. The articles by Olga Katsiardi-Hering (“The allure of Red Cotton Yarn and how it came to Vienna”) and Katerina Papakonstantinou (“The Pondikas merchant family from Thessaloniki, ca. 1800”), as well as providing detailed insights into the Ottoman–Greek trading diaspora, also illustrate the contrast between the Habsburg government, which in the eighteenth century took steps to encourage domestic trade and manufacturing, and the Ottoman government which did not. For those interested in the general question of the reception and application of the Tanzimat reforms, Mafalde Ade's study (“Ottoman commercial law and its practice in Aleppo province (1850–1880)”), while dealing specifically with the trading activities of one family – the Fratelli-Poche of Aleppo – suggests that traders were reluctant to use the provisions of the new Commercial Code, at least with regard to the collection of debt. Mustafa Kabadayı's contribution (“Mkrdich Cezarliyan or the sharp rise and sudden fall of an Ottoman entrepreneur”) explains the Ottoman government's confiscation of Mkrdich's vast assets in part through a very traditional wish to prevent any single individual acquiring enough wealth and influence to present a challenge to the authority of the government. However, he sees it also as part of a general move to abolish tax-farming – the source of much of Mkrdich's wealth, as promised in the edict of 1839, and to undermine the role of the sarrafs of Galata. This became possible with the establishment of formal banking institutions and the access to new forms of credit after the mid-nineteenth century. The volume, in short, has much to say about trade and traders, while at the same time throwing light on much wider issues.