o_19heefouak9i9v4do11ac41pi7a.pdf

THE COMPLEX NATURE OF AN OTTOMAN COMMERCIAL NETWORK
brothers’ commercial network. The analysis of their collaborators according to both
their geographical and ethno-religious distribution in the provincial branch showed
that familiarity overcame both the geographical and religious divide when it came
to deciding who to collaborate with. The collaborators of the provincial branch,
mainly members of prominent local families of the eastern Black Sea region, accumulated
social, economic and political power over the course of several generations.
Some of them were able to transfer their local economic power to important centres
of commerce like Istanbul or Manchester from the second half of the nineteenth
century. The move from inter-regional centres to trans-regional ones required commercial
know-how, and Ottoman Armenian commercial subjects, who were already
prominent figures in all the branches of the Ottoman cotton market, were of great
use to their Muslim counterparts who followed in their wake.
If we are to broadly generalize in our analysis of the Istanbul data within the
categories under scrutiny, the Greeks were mostly absent from the commercial realm
in 1914 and were replaced by Armenians rather than Muslims, who appear as either
stable or with a slightly increased commercial presence between 1904 and 1914.
This is unsurprising especially in the areas of specialization under scrutiny –traders
of textiles and manufactured goods and commission agents– as they both require
substantial expertise, including the acquisition of language and market information
regarding international trade, which had already been accumulated by the Armenian
subjects of the Empire. These findings contradicting the expectations created by
the National Economy discourse, the development of the Muslim entrepreneurial
class yet to wait World War I.
Turning to the Manchester branch, why did the Mataracızâde brothers have to go
all the way to Cottonopolis 36 , when they already had a well-established network in the
eastern Black Sea region? A possible explanation may be the need to compete with the
Ottoman Greek domination in the Black Sea and the Armenian domination in other
provinces. As late-comers in a well-established, non-Muslim dominated textiles import
market, they could use two main assets to differentiate themselves: i) their Muslim identity,
which the economic policies of the period made into an asset, and ii) more convenient
prices than those of the traders already dominating the current market, for which
they had to go to the source, Cottonopolis, just like others from all over the world. The
brothers based their market strategies in their integration into the Ottoman cotton market
on these two main assets, which were promoted to Muslim commercial subjects in
the provinces who, like them, also were emerging markets.
Last but not least, despite the wave of nationalism blowing over the long Ottoman
nineteenth century in general and the CUP governance in the aftermath of the Balkan
Wars in particular, the network under scrutiny was still able to preserve its imperial
texture. In this respect, it was an Ottoman network operating across ethno-religious
boundaries and hence, first to be introduced into the rich literature on commercial
36 Cottonopolis was the name attributed to Manchester due to its central position in the
world cotton market during the nineteenth century.
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