What were the characteristics of the cottage industry in the Ottoman East in the late nineteenth century? This presentation centers itself on this question and examines the dynamics of textile making in the Armenian villages in the Shatakh (Çatak in contemporary Turkey) in the broader Van province. The cottage industries in the region began to develop among the landless peasants in the second half of the nineteenth century and began to dominate the local economy by the early twentieth century. About one hundred households who produced textiles only in the Tagh district, the center of Shatakh, illustrates this point. Due to its dependence on labor-intensive production and organization by merchants in the town, the manufacturing activities in these districts in many ways constitute a text-book example of cottage industry in the Ottoman country side. Yet, the textile production in Shatak is still worth examining on various grounds. This paper, by using contemporary ethnographic studies of the region and local sources, will discuss various types of economic and social relations and networks embodied in the cottage industries in the region. These relations included (gendered) hierarchies of labor within the communities as well as relations between merchants in the towns and producers in the countryside. Through the commercial networks of the merchants, the products reached a wider geography both in the broader region and across the border, in Caucasia. Moreover, the paper will discuss the conditions of the propertyless Armenian peasants and their relations with the Kurdish tribes who were both producers of raw materials and consumers of the textile products. Last but not least, the case study aims to contribute to the broader economic history of the empire by approach the Ottoman East on par with the other regions of the empire, such as the Balkans and the Arab provinces, where the cottage industry has been a subject of scholarly analyzes. Thus, the case study of the cottage industries in Van region will provide us a complex set of vertical and horizontal networks which characterize the broader social and economic dynamics of the Ottoman East in the nineteenth century. This presentation is based on research project supported by the Boğaziçi University Research Fund Grant Number 17941.