The Trading Companies Rallis and Zafiris in the long 19th century. A Contribution to the Global History of the Ottoman Empire

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This project will contribute to the research of the social, economic and transcultural links between the Ottoman Empire and regions of Western and Central Europe, Russia and Asia. Taking the trading houses of the Greek families Rallis and Zarifis as a vantage point it aims at scrutinizing the mobility of people, capital, raw materials and goods between different world regions during the development of global capitalism in the long 19th century. The focal point will be on the social and cultural history of these two transimperial entrepreneurial dynasties as a whole as well as the phenomenon of typical transimperial (or transottomanic) biographies. The aim of the project is to lay the foundations for a comparative history of merchants and entrepreneurs, which includes Southeast European and Transottoman spaces. The follow-up project aims at working out the female part of entrepreneurially relevant activities in the merchant houses of the Rallis and Zarifis families in their economical and socio-cultural dimensions. An important task of the second phase of the project will be developing research strategies to reconstruct this “female part” from the sources and to place it in the larger context of the general network activities. By expanding the previous project to include the women of the family and the enterprise, a completer and more differentiated picture of Transottoman trading houses and individual Transottoman biographies, male and female, will be drawn. This opens up new perspectives of social change, the peculiarities of family business and the emergence of modern entrepreneurship in the 19th century.