Alongside political developments and the emergence of Armenian revolutionary parties in the last decades of the nineteenth century, the “Armenian question” has been largely associated with the emergence of an Armenian mercantile bourgeoisie in Anatolia during that period. Mainstream Armenian and Turkish historiographies have both emphasized this phenomenon—the former underlining the success and eventual wealth of an Armenian upper class, a prototype of a “national bourgeoisie” that was destroyed during World War I, and the latter analyzing the same phenomenon as a development of a fifth column within Ottoman society, a “comprador bourgeoisie” whose allegiances were not primarily to the Ottoman state. However, these approaches examine neither the larger social and economic transformations taking place in the Ottoman state and society during the nineteenth century nor the local conditions within which an Armenian mercantile bourgeoisie emerged in Anatolian towns. Moreover, since mainstream historiographies treating the Armenian question have been developing almost as independent subfields with their own agendas, they have failed to follow developments in other fields of Ottoman social and economic history (with only a few notable exceptions). The result is the failure to analyze the social and economic structures of Ottoman Armenian communities and, consequently, the power of the mercantile elite in within those groups before 1915. This paper, using local Armenian sources in conjunction with Ottoman archival documents and consular reports, examines textile manufacturing in the town of Yerzinka/Erzincan in the second half of the nineteenth century. It considers the social dynamics of the Armenian community in the town by making the manufacturing system the center of analysis. The paper does not approach the topic via well-known debates in Ottoman historiography about “resistance” and the “deindustrialization” of Ottoman manufacturing in the context of integration native into European markets; rather, it delves into hitherto underexamined questions regarding the social and economic organization of work, the hierarchical putting-out system (in which women workers were at the bottom), workplace organization, and accumulation of capital in the hands of Armenian merchant-entrepreneurs. Thus, the paper seeks to understand the structural basis of class relations among Armenians in a small Anatolian town during the second half of the nineteenth century. In doing so, it aims to help integrate historiography on Ottoman Armenians into larger debates about Ottoman social and economic history.