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ALIYE F. MATARACI<br />
well as in food and raw materials from periphery to centre. However, their trade<br />
also reached beyond the boundaries of the Ottoman world. Moreover, in addition to<br />
their established trade business, they were sufficiently ambitious to launch new lines<br />
of business such as warehousing and shipping. They even explored such opportunities<br />
as exporting hazelnuts to the United States or importing gas and sugar from<br />
Romania after the beginning of World War I.<br />
This work, beginning with a brief description of the business composition, ethnoreligious<br />
profile and geographical distribution of the commercial parties engaged in<br />
business with the brothers, is primarily based on the information provided by the<br />
available commercial collection of the Mataracızâde merchant house, which covers a<br />
period of approximately seven months in 1914, from 28 March to 25 November, a<br />
month after the Ottoman Empire entered World War I. This collection consists of 355<br />
pages including 312 commercial letters, 32 invoices and seven pages of debt registers.<br />
All the correspondence is about their trade business, including the letters exchanged<br />
between the brothers, with scarcely any references to family issues. The rest consists<br />
of letters written to merchants in various regions within the Ottoman, Russian and<br />
British Empires. Urban directories and secondary literature are also exploited in this<br />
work to contextualize the information provided by the collection.<br />
Due to the nature of the source from which the commercial network is derived,<br />
the focus of the network is the Mataracızâde brothers. Hence, all relations and factual<br />
information about the network should be considered as narrated from their<br />
particular point of view. Within the boundaries of this study, the term network is<br />
used to refer to all parties with whom the brothers had commercial transactions or<br />
contacts. They appear either as a correspondent, or just as a name referred to within<br />
the correspondence. Each party that appears as involved in some form of commercial<br />
activity with the Mataracızâde brothers is referred to, interchangeably, as a collaborator<br />
or a commercial/business partner. Collaborators within the network may<br />
be individual merchants or family businesses consisting of partnerships among family<br />
members (either siblings or father and son(s)) or partnerships of two or more<br />
merchants from different families.<br />
Collaborators are grouped under three main categories according to their location:<br />
the provinces, Istanbul and Manchester. As the majority of the letters within<br />
the collection were addressed to correspondents located in various provinces,<br />
mostly within the boundaries of the Ottoman Empire, the collection provides more<br />
information on the profile of the provincial branch than any other. Hence, the information<br />
in the collection regarding collaborators in the immediate proximity of<br />
the brothers located in Istanbul and in Manchester is limited compared to those in<br />
the provinces. In view of the limited data on the other branches, the analysis of<br />
the network that evolved around the Mataracızâde brothers focuses on the provincial<br />
category.<br />
The second part of the paper places this network in a broader context. Urban<br />
commercial directories published in the Ottoman Empire, specifically the Annuaire<br />
Oriental, are the main sources that have been exploited to create the data necessary<br />
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