At the Crossroads of the Mediterranean: Rethinking trade and mercantile networks in 19th century Aleppo. It has been assumed until recently that trade in the Ottoman Empire was in the hands of the Europeans ever since Mehmet the Conqueror renewed trading rights of the Genoese of Galata following the fall of Constantinople. The willingness of the Ottoman government to offer privileges to European merchants, in the form of lower tariffs and exemptions of certain duties, often put the local merchants at a disadvantage and led to the belief that trade was almost exclusively in the hands of the European merchants. By the nineteenth century these privileges were increased considerably through pressure put upon the Ottoman government by the European powers and were referred to as the capitulations. In addition to these capitulations, chartered trading companies such as the English Levant Company and the Dutch VOC established factories and consular networks in commercial cities like Aleppo and Izmir (smyrna) to look after the interests of the merchants. Both the capitulations and the existence of the representatives of these companies served to increase the power of the merchants and gave rise to the perception that they dominated trade in the Empire. This paper will argue that trade was not solely the privilege of the European merchants and the trading companies as previously thought. Using the example of the Ghantouz Coubbè family, who were a merchant family from Aleppo in the 19th century, I will prove that the flow of trade went both ways. Families such as the Coubbe’s were able to not only migrate, but also set up businesses and subsiduary branches in different European cities and later return to Aleppo to continue to conduct their business from there. In addition, they set up a shipping company, which facilitated not only the transportation of their own merchandise, but also that of the European traders as well, thus playing an important role in the economy of the Ottoman Empire. The Ghantouz Coubbè family were not alone in their trading endeavors outside the Ottoman Empire. Using the archives from the Venetian / Italian consulate in Aleppo plus the family archives, I will complicate the notion that there was a hegemonic control of trade in the Mediterranean by the European merchants. Rather, this paper will demonstrate that there were multiple actors who all took part in commerce across the Ottoman Empire and the