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The relation of The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) to The Wealth of Nations (1776) has been much debated. While Smith did not conceive any important contradiction or inconsistency among his two major works, moving from The Theory of Moral Sentiments to The Wealth of Nations he took a simplifying step concerning human nature, motives, and concomitant economic rationality. This step troubled many a scholarly mind so much so as to become known as the persistent “Das Adam Smith Problem” since the nineteenth century.  Behind this remains at least as important a problem as how important the underlying economic man actually was from the viewpoint of Smithian economics. There is good reason think that it was not a sine qua non for much of Smith’s analytical construct as conceived in the overall spirit of classical economics. Smith’s individual did not conform to the economic agent crystallizing into homo economicus, yet the place of homo economicus was retrospectively exaggerated in light of its rising fortunes and eventual indispensability in the neoclassical organon.

Adam Smith’s economics exerted a formative influence on the development of classical economics in the Ottoman Empire. Because French was the intellectual lingua franca of the time, Smith’s ideas came in French clothing in general but in Jean-Baptiste Say’s clothing in particular, and Smithian ideas were selectively adapted to the realities of the Ottoman Empire. This paper overviews this process of adoption via a series of optical distortions originating from the peculiarities of successive French and Ottoman adaptation, and then focuses on a relatively latecomer theme in the Ottoman Empire, that is, the advent of ‘homo ottomanicus’ as the explanatory corollary of ‘homo economicus’. After tracing the textual status of ‘homo economicus’ from Smith to Say, we explore its position in Sakızlı Ohannes Pasha’s Mebadi-i İlm-i Servet-i Milel (Principles of the Science of Wealth of Nations, 1881), the crowning achievement in Ottoman classical economics along with Ahmet Midhat Effendi’s conception of ‘homo ottomanicus’ as an alternative to ‘homo economicus’. We identify its sources of inspiration and emphasize its contextual relevance.  Finally, we address the following question: “If ‘homo economicus’ did not arrive as part of Smithian economics in the Ottoman Empire, does this not provide us with further evidence for the scaled-down and ‘anti-neoclassical’ reinterpretation of the role of economic agency from the viewpoint of Smith’s classical analytical construct?