A Business History: The Transition of Fratelli Allatini from a Multi-National Enterprise Based in Ottoman Selânik to a Local Company of Greek Salonica and WWI Economy (1906-1926)

In this paper we’ll examine through the archives of the Allatini enterprises, the Orient Bank, and others how the owners of Allatini enterprises managed to overcome difficulties and problems which caused the gradual dissolution of the Ottoman Empire and the emergence of national states in Balkans. The Allatinis were a family of doctors, rabbis, and intellectuals who came to Salonica from Tuscany in 18th century. From 1880 to 1906, they created several enterprises: one of the most modern industrial mills in the Ottoman Empire and in Europe, a bank, a tile factory, a prosperous tobacco company, mining companies, several commercial agencies all over Europe, a real estate company, etc. They had a strong influence on society – together with other social and economic changes of the era – by bringing modernity into the city: clubs, schools, extended charities, new work practices, industrial buildings – true models of technology for that time, new ways of communication for the workers, and new identities. However, it seems that from 1906 they started facing problems: the gradual dominance of Greek banking capital in the city, the financial crisis of 1908 in the Ottoman Empire, the financial crash of 1911 (the Italio-Turkish War) and the ensuing incorporation of Salonica into the Greek state (new taxes, the intervention of the Greek state, etc.), a ten-year war period (1912–1922) led to the relocation of the Allatini, as well as of other big Jewish industrialists, and the merging of their companies, or their appropriation by Greek businessmen (in 1923, K. Panoutsos became the main shareholder of the Allatini mills and in 1926, he bought them).