This individual paper examines Baring Brothers & Co.'s financial involvement in Mexico between 1827 and 1861, a turbulent period often labeled the "Mexican era of chaos" in the literature. Despite Mexico's default in 1827, the Barings, one of the world's most prestigious merchant banking firms, continued acting as its financial agent on the London Stock Exchange. While this decision defied the professional logic of protecting their reputation as first-class intermediaries committed to the investing public, the Barings maintained their role for a decade after the default. Based on Mexican and British archival materials, this paper explores the Barings' motivations for persisting financial connections to Mexico, where they sought commercial gains to support their global network of supply chains despite the country's exclusion from credit markets. The paper argues that reputational risks in Britain were outweighed by significant commercial benefits in Mexico, which the Barings secured by manipulating Mexican sovereign debt and domestic loans. This allowed them to exploit personal discounts on import duties, leveraging loan contracts with the government amid restrictive protectionist policies.By presenting Baring's motivations and strategies, the paper demonstrates the interdependence of sovereign lending and trade in 19th-century Mexico, revealing the often-overlooked duality of merchant banking practices. It also underscores the role of Mexican domestic debt in sustaining commercial activities throughout this politically unstable period. Lastly, the paper examines the broader impact of domestic loan contracts on Mexico's revenue accumulation, offering insights into how these financial mechanisms influenced both international trade and Mexican fiscal policies.

This study reveals the nuanced interplay between the Great Powers, the Barbary Regencies—Algiers, Tunis, and Tripoli—and the Ottoman Empire. By examining Ottoman diplomatic correspondence, including letters, orders, intelligence reports, and imperial decrees, and employing a philological-translational method alongside a focus on para-diplomatic actors, this research offers a more complex interpretation of the historical dynamics at play. The Ottoman stance during this period, while reflective of a position of weakness, challenges the notions of passivity in light of the significant institutional changes that emerged from the Congress of Vienna and the broader framework of the Concert of Europe. Between 1815 and 1822, a fundamental shift occurred in Europe that significantly impacted the politics and diplomacy of the Mediterranean, Persian Gulf, and even reached India and the Americas, particularly in relation to the suppression of piracy and the abolition of slavery and the slave trade. The Ottoman Empire's role in this transition was complex; over the course of 50 years, it evolved from an opponent to a co-opted and integral part of the emerging international legal framework. However, existing studies have primarily focused on British and, more recently, other European sources, often neglecting the perspective of the Ottoman Empire and the Islamic world. Despite a wealth of archival material available, the reception of these changes within the Islamic context has been overlooked, partly due to the scarcity of consistent literature on Ottoman and non-European sources (also related to the difficulty of locating and interpreting them).

In 1868 a Portuguese diplomat stationed in Rio de Janeiro reported to Lisbon that there were “frequent cases of fraudulent bankruptcies and simple robberies” in the city. In these cases, criminals “first take refuge in Río de la Plata Republics”, and the pass back through Rio de Janeiro “under the protection of a foreign flag” on their way to Portugal where they “calmly enjoy the fortunes they had dishonestly obtained” and “prepare new attacks on private property.” Concerns with fraudulent bankruptcies, embezzlement and forgery grew with the development of finance capitalism from the 1840s onwards. Forms of private credit like bills of exchange and promissory notes but also money counterfeiting opened new possibilities for crime that threatened a system that had in the confidence between its agents a major characteristic of its development. Embodying the awareness to these new criminal risks, Brazil and several European countries signed extradition treaties in 1872. Diplomats and the diplomacy apparatus were central actors in the perception and representation of the threat of transnational crime, especially financial crime. Based in diplomatic sources from several archives in Europe and South America, this paper aims to examine how diplomatic discourses helped create an image that finance capitalism was being threaten by an array of swindlers, embezzlers and counterfeiters that were taking advantage of the new ease of circulation and the national territoriality of the criminal justice systems. 

The study aims to elucidate the relationship between the evolution of political boundaries in state formation and the associated shifts in public revenues, as reflected in the macro-historical phenomenon of taxation. The variation is analyzed from the first decades of the 19th century up to World War II, a period that coincides with the more or less defined borders claimed by different states. Greece and Poland are cases in point. These states formed a nation with a common language and culture, but they have crossed various political borders over time. The Greek nation, for instance, has experienced eastern and western dominations, including Ottoman rule, the Venetian, French, and English empires. For the Greek state, the beginning of the research on "political territorial" is intertwined with the capacity of national territory and state sovereignty. In the period following the First World War and up to the Second World War, a new concept of boundary control was created and found expression in the territorial form of sovereignty, which refers to the European nation-state.
The findings of the research indicate that taxes do not all emerge concurrently and that the bases for taxation are not entirely homogeneous. In order to gain a comprehensive understanding of the role of taxes in public revenues and state-building processes, it is essential to undertake a detailed examination of the composition of public revenue streams. The following questions must be addressed:
(a) What is the bureaucracy's perception of the resources that constitute public revenue?
(b) What is the amount of revenue that enters the public coffers, and how is it achieved?
(c) What is the discrepancy between the forecasting and collection of public revenue caused by tax behavior and international economic relations under conditions of changing territory and state power?