İzmir Commodity Exchange

İzmir Commodity Exchange (ICE) was established in İzmir, the 3rd largest province of Türkiye, in 1891 as the first commodity exchange of Türkiye. İzmir has always been an important hub for agricultural production and one of the leading centres for domestic and foreign trade throughout the Ottoman Empire and the Turkish Republic. In fact, İzmir harbour was the greatest export harbour of the Ottoman Empire in the early 20th century, which made the city the host for the first efforts to systemize the agricultural markets and the first commodity exchange of Türkiye. In the second half of the 19th century, the boost in the volume of the trade in İzmir urged the merchants to seek for new methods and regulations in order to catch up with novelties. Although new warehouses had been built to store the goods, unbalanced price adjustments, lack of proper statistics to determine demand and supply, and uncertainty of the money markets used to negatively affect the commercial life of the city. These problems caused the tradesmen and producers to suffer great losses. The tradesmen of İzmir commenced to make several attempts to overcome these problems. The Commercial Assembly and İzmir Chamber of Commerce were established in 1850 and 1885, respectively. The English, French, Italians and the Dutch had their own chambers of commerce in İzmir. However, these attempts had fallen behind in creating solutions to the problems of the market. https://itb.org.tr/dosya/the.history.of.the.izmir.commodity.exchange.pdf?v=1