Why did a number of big businesses face financial difficulties in the eve of the Constitutional Revolution in the Ottoman Empire in 1908 and how did they overcome them? By utilizing hitherto overlooked Armenian-language business magazines and periodicals, this paper revolves around the relations between financial and commercial institutions and the broader society, and it will focus on a number of cases of financial difficulties and bankruptcies from the provinces in Anatolia in the last years of the reign of Abdulhamid II to answer this question. The scholarship has approached the economic crisis in the period preceding the Constitutional Revolution as the material basis which prepared the ground for political change. Some scholars have particularly questioned the possible links between the worsening living conditions of different groups in the society such as workers and state officials and their susceptibility to political agitation. Others focused on the protest movements against rising taxes in various provinces of the empire as a prelude to the revolution. Yet, I argue, due to their focus on the ensuing political change, these works hinder us from seeing how the major economic crisis—a shrinking economy, failure of credit institutions, unemployment—was experienced in different part of the Ottoman economy. Therefore, the paper examines how the crisis was addressed and discussed by different groups, creating new forms of interactions between financial institutions, merchants and the broader society. By focusing on the impact of the crisis on one of the main actors of commercial and financial networks, namely the big merchants and entrepreneurs, the paper highlights three interrelated aspects the economic crisis of 1906-1908. First, it explains the domino effect of the crisis which disturbed various local and regional credit and commodity markets, slowed down businesses and left tens of small businesses and hundreds of workers in a precarious position throughout the country. Second, it deliberates upon the agency of the Hamidian state and Ottoman financial institutions during the crisis, particularly the ways in which they dealt with the worsening economic situation and tried to assure confidence in the business community. Thus, through analyses of the news and the language used in business magazines and newspapers it allows us to understand how financial difficulties of the merchants were addressed and discussed as problems of the broader society—while the Ottoman local and regional commercial and credit markets were firmly linked to the global economy, hence its crisis.