As part of its efforts toward economic reform and industrialization in the 19th century, the Ottoman state sought to encourage the private sector through the granting of concessions to private companies. As a result of these incentives, private companies established themselves in a broad range of sectors, from textiles to railroads and shipping, making their impact felt not only in economic life, but also in working life and social life. The shipping and transportation industry was one important sector where the emergence of private companies dramatically transformed the lives of workers, whose deeply rooted economic practices were suddenly overturned. In 1880, the Ottoman state granted concession contracts for its ports to a number of foreign capital companies, endangering the livelihoods of the porters and boaters who had for centuries handled the work of commodity transportation at these ports according to a system of individual licenses (gediks). When the privately-owned companies began to install barges and cranes in the ports in order to mechanize the loading and unloading process, porters and boaters experienced a decline in the value of their gediks. The companies presented them with a difficult choice: they could either grant the companies a predetermined share of their incomes, or else they could become direct employees of the companies who owned these newly-built barges and cranes. In so doing, they would be dispossessed of the privileges of their gediks and forced to join the proletarian class. Starting in the 1890s and lasting through 1915, the clash between Ottoman porters and private companies spread to almost every port in the empire, from Istanbul to Thessaloniki, Zonguldak to Beirut, and Izmir to Samsun. The porters' tactics ranged from attacks on machines and company-owned commodities to attacks on company employees. Although these tactics helped to delay the transformation, we can observe that they did not succeed in preventing the elimination of the old gedik system and its replacement with a workplace controlled by privately-owned companies. Drawing mainly on archival documents and periodical sources, this paper offers a case study in evaluating the effects of economic transformation on Ottoman working life and social life.