General manager of the Ottoman Bank from 1975 to 1986 and member of the Bank Committee from 1980 to 1990 André Autheman traces the history of a banking institution which has survived more than a century. Combining systematically the archives of the Bank in Paris London and Istanbul he reconstitutes its evolution from its earliest days (1856) to the 1924 agreement where it lost its imperial privileges. In fact the contribution of André Autheman is in other respects his point of view of a historian with the advantage of being from the "inside" to unveil the history of the Bank through its triple role in an disintegrated empire in the middle of westernization economic crisis and world war.