1/2 Livre Law of 18 October RC1331

The Imperial Ottoman Bank was a Franco-British joint enterprise — nominally private, functionally the Ottoman state's central banking arm. Its note issues during the First World War were made under Ottoman government authorization rather than independent commercial decision, as the bank had by 1914 already lost much of its operational independence to wartime fiscal pressures from Constantinople.

The "Law of 18 October" reference embedded in the title denotes the Ottoman legal instrument (Rumi calendar 1331) authorizing this fractional issue — a signal that coin shortages had grown severe enough to require paper coverage of sub-livre denominations, something the bank had historically resisted.