The Market as a Means of Post-Violence Recovery: Armenians and Oriental Carpets in the Late Ottoman Empire (c.1890s–1910s)

Abstract

Carpet production in the late Ottoman Empire developed during the second half of the nineteenth century in a context of growing trade with Western markets, until, by the turn of the century, carpets had become the empire's leading manufacturing export. This article examines the expansion of oriental carpet production in Armenian communities affected by violence in the mid-1890s and in 1909, and its role in their recovery. It shows that output of oriental carpets rose and production was moved into regions with limited or no “pre-violence” experience of carpet production. We shall see that the increases in production were firmly linked to market-based efforts to reconstruct those communities. Different actors, including local and regional merchant-entrepreneurs and multinational companies as well as individual transnational actors such as missionaries, all began to involve themselves in Armenian communities, both to promote trade in carpets and to offer the production of them as a solution to the post-violence ills. As a result, Armenian women and children in post-violence communities became an integral part of the global market in oriental carpets as a vulnerable, organizationally weak but cost-efficient workforce. The whole process was justified in the name of assistance to the needy and was closely associated with changing definitions of the work ethic and morality in the late Ottoman Empire.