CHAPTER 3

TRADE: LOCAL RULERS AND THE WORLD ECONOMY

Now that we have considered the analysis of the political history of Acre and its realm during the period, we shall turn to the economic underpinnings of these developments. It is my contention that only the unique economic opportunities and the specific ways in which they were used made the political developments possible. The focus will be on the development of Acre’s export trade during the eighteenth century, which means mainly the new development of the export of raw cotton to France. Several basic questions may be raised here: How was the cotton trade with Europe handled? Who was engaged in it? Who profited from it? Who controlled it?

During the eighteenth century the shipping and the marketing in Europe of Acre’s exports was almost exclusively in the hands of French merchants from Marseilles, while the responsibility for cotton cultivation and its delivery to the coast was usually in the hands of village shaykhs, local traders, tax collectors, and, eventually, agents of the ruler in Acre. How did the French merchants deal with the local conditions of economy and politics, and how did the local elites cope with the new—but very rewarding—demands of overseas markets? By concentrating on the relationship between the French merchants and their local counterparts I shall highlight the mechanisms that led to the success of this commercial relationship and that eventually caused its collapse.

The trade between Europe and Muslim states had been regulated since the Middle Ages by what came be known as Capitulations, treaties between Muslim rulers and their European counterparts, that granted residence, independent jurisdiction, and trade privileges to European merchants in Muslim cities. In the Ottoman centuries, these rights and privileges waxed, even as the power of the Ottoman Empire waned. The first comprehensive Capitulations with France were negotiated in the year 1569, when Istanbul was seeking the support of France against Venice. They were renegotiated at the time of Colbert in 1673 and expanded again in 1740, when France sided with the Ottomans in the Peace of Belgrade. The right to protect the Catholics in the empire and the reduction of the tax on trade to 3 percent were among the more important privileges the French gained.

When Colbert reorganized French trade at the end of the seventeenth century, Marseilles’ Mediterranean trade monopoly was confirmed. French merchants were organized in each of the various Mediterranean ports as a nation under a consul or vice-consul. A nation’s members consisted of négociants, merchants, and commis, acting as their agents. In addition a physician, a watchmaker, a baker, and other French residents might be members of the nation. The consul, who most of the time was also a négociant, was responsible for the nation. He dealt with the local authorities, protecting the merchants from greedy governors, extortion, and other calamities. He reported to Marseilles and to Paris, sending annual statistics, providing evaluations of the merchants, and giving reports on political affairs. He watched over the behavior of the members of his nation, reprimanding them when necessary and, in severe cases, having them shipped back to France. He also guided the nation, calling assemblies where all important issues were discussed and where the annual issue of fixing prices for buying and selling merchandise was settled.¹

It is striking how well this organization of the French merchants as a guild or corporation, as a nation in the commercial centers, fit into the overall organization of the Ottoman Empire. The parallel to the millet system is remarkable. The French lived more or less together and were recognizable by their different dress. The merchants were treated, like the dhimmīs, as a group. If the local governor, for instance, wanted to raise—legally or not—money from the merchants, he would always address himself to the whole nation. As a group they were held responsible—rightly or wrongly—for such issues as the Maltese pirates who preyed on the coast of Syria. Negotiations with the local authorities were carried out in the name of the nation by the consul, just as the local leader of a millet would deal with the local authorities. If a serious crisis developed, the consul could always turn to Istanbul, where the French ambassador (like the patriarch of a millet) would try to convince the central government to take measures; usually a tedious, expensive, and time-consuming process.

Though the millet and the nation shared a similar style of social interaction and sense of themselves, and were seen as similar institutions by others, the parallel should not be carried too far. The essential difference between millet and nation was that the French were not subjects of the Ottoman sultan and had in the last analysis the ever-increasing strength of the French state to protect them and their privileges. But the power of France in the Ottoman Empire was, as yet, still limited. It could be exercised mainly through diplomatic access in Istanbul. Whether pressure applied in the capital would ameliorate the conditions of the French nation in any given locality of the Ottoman Empire depended very much on the ability of the central government to assert its authority and power in its own provinces, a capability which in the eighteenth century, and especially in the regions we are concerned with, could no longer be taken for granted. Though the French occasionally sent navy ships into the region, usually combating corsairs, they were not yet willing—at least until the Napoleonic invasion of Egypt—to interfere militarily in local politics. Active gunboat politics was to make its appearance only in the following century as part of European imperialism. French merchants could, indeed, be harassed considerably by local authorities and even be expelled, as happened with the French in Acre in 1790.

At the beginning of the eighteenth century there were three French nations in Syria, each headed by a consul: in Aleppo, Tripoli, and Sidon. In addition, there were individual merchants in Ramla, Jaffa, and Acre. These French merchants, appointed by the chamber of commerce in Marseilles as the only representatives of French trade in the Levant, saw their role as limited to selling imported French merchandise for cash and buying local products for export at prices set by themselves; hoping to avoid at the same time any entanglement in local politics, finances, and business. The reality, alas, was quite different and ever-changing, and therein lies a story.

At the end of the seventeenth century Acre had little to offer merchants. Travelers described it as a spacious ruin with a few miserable cottages in its middle. Its three hundred or so inhabitants eked out a living as fishermen. The only structures that stood out from the city’s rubble were a mosque and a large khan. The latter was the center of all business activity, and the French merchants—in 1691 there were thirteen of them—used it as their base.²

Acre lay unprotected on the tip of the bay. Nomads from land and from sea harassed it frequently. In May 1697, Bedouins moved from the interior right up to Acre, where they took all available cattle and exacted monetary contributions.³ Even neighborhood villages were deserted because of Bedouin incursions. Further east, in Nablus, peasants and Bedouins fought regularly.⁴ Travelers from Acre to Jaffa were well advised to go by boat in order to avoid marauding Bedouins.

But the sea was not safe either. Maltese corsairs raided the coast. Neither the governor of Acre nor the population could curb the activities of the corsairs, who lay in ambush at the entrance to ports and cruised in the bay of Acre trying to capture small ships.⁵ Contrary to French-Maltese agreements, the corsairs even raided in the vicinity of ports where French merchants lived. In 1702 they actually plundered a ship that had beached in the bay of Acre to avoid them.

Corsairs used the hamlet of Haifa across the bay. It was beyond the reach of the authorities. The corsairs could provision themselves there, shelter their boats from storms, and sell their booty. In fact, Haifa was called “la petite Malte” because most of the inhabitants were refugees from the law.⁶ In 1725, the danger from pirates was still so grave that the Ottoman government ordered a fortification built in Haifa to protect the bay from raids. A similar plan for Acre was never implemented.⁷

Acre also had its attractions. The surrounding plain was the city’s wealth: “Il se fait à la plaine de St. Jean d’Acre deux à trois milles balles de coton en laine qui sont les plus beaux et les plus estimés du Levant. Les Anglais et Hollandais qui font la plus grande tenue les achètent des marchands français qui y resident et qui en font les Amas.”⁸* When this condition coincided with a rapidly increasing demand for cotton in France, trade in Acre promised to be highly profitable and well worth all difficulties.

Evidence of a change in mercantile attitudes concerning the cotton trade can be seen in a letter written from Acre on February 3, 1691, to the chamber of commerce in Marseilles. A certain merchant, one Reucrend, had set out to travel as far as Safed and to negotiate directly with its mutasallim, Aḥmad Pasha, for cotton. To assure himself a large quantity of cotton, Reucrend had offered Aḥmad Pasha the exorbitant price of 43 piasters per quintal and promised him additional presents. The outrage of the other French merchants is understandable, especially if one considers that heretofore they had paid only 33 piasters per quintal. The merchants, claiming that such prices were ruinous for them, demanded that Reucrend be punished and warned that the producers would begin to hold back their cotton “in the hope of still higher prices.”⁹

The letter foreshadows two major themes of the cotton trade in Acre during the eighteenth century: the fight against rising prices and the necessity to deal with the local authorities in order to obtain the cotton crop.

Throughout the century, the merchants tried to control the price paid for cotton. The major instrument for exercising a price monopoly was the répartition, by which the merchants agreed among themselves on the quantity of cotton they wanted to buy and the price they were willing to pay. They then would buy the determined amount through one agent and partition it later among themselves. In this way they sought to avoid competitive bidding. But the répartition could not work unless the cotton trade was a French monopoly and the French merchants were willing to exercise price discipline.

According to the official analysis in the consular correspondence, it was personal competition—and cupidité—that raised prices. The link between an increasing demand for cotton and rising prices was, at least officially, not acknowledged. Individual merchants, though, disregarded the discipline of the répartition and paid higher prices in order to obtain more cotton, knowing very well that rising demand in France made ever greater profits possible. The high quality of the cotton assured top prices for most of the century. The merchants in Acre could make handsome profits, but their situation remained precarious.

Internal fights among the French opened the way for other foreigners to come to Acre and to establish themselves, some even with the help of individual French merchants. Thus a certain Dutchman, Mashook, functioning as British vice-consul, gained considerable control over the trade in 1703–1704. He established good relations with several shaykhs who assured him of a steady supply of cotton. With the help of some of the French, Mashook controlled the villages around Safed. He cultivated good relations with the shaykh of Shfā ‘Amr and induced him at one point to withhold the cotton from the French merchants. Finally, the French consul of Sidon tried to reestablish harmony among the merchants in Acre and forbade the French to deal with Mashook.¹⁰ Some twenty years later, the presence of another English vice-consul created similar tensions with the French,¹¹ but most European merchants did not seriously challenge the French in Acre. Only their French compatriots could become truly dangerous rivals.

One such challenge came from the French consul in Sidon, who tried to assert control over the merchants in Acre. As early as 1697, the French merchants in Acre had written to the French minister pleading to become independent from the French consul in Sidon. The latter’s response was swift and intense: “L’Eschelle d’Acre a esté toujours attachée et sujette à celle de Seide; si on change cet ordre et qu’on la sépare nous tomberons dans un désordre monstrueux.”¹²* Such disputes between the French in Sidon and Acre were to consume much energy and ink for the next hundred years. The French nation of Acre was trying to obtain an autonomy commensurate with the increasing importance of its trade, while the French consul in Sidon refused to surrender his authority over the merchants in Acre.

Répartition and price monopoly could not eliminate the pressure on cotton prices exerted by the high demand in Marseilles. Ships from Marseilles waited off the coast of Acre before the cotton crop was harvested. In 1699, the merchants in Acre complained that French captains even sent their own agents into the villages to buy the cotton crop directly, and, worse, ships’ captains were willing to buy “à tout prix.”¹³

A potentially dangerous practice developed as French merchants responded to external challenges and to internal competition within the French nation. Traditionally, peasants had brought their merchandise to town and sold it there in the market. In Sidon the peasants came to the market twice a week with spun cotton. In peaceful times Bedouins came to Acre to sell charcoal. Likewise, raw cotton was delivered to the city market. But the pressing demand for cotton drove the French captains to the villages. As the case of Reucrend demonstrated, some merchants had begun dealing directly with village officials as early as 1699. They offered peasants the cash they needed to pay their taxes; particularly when taxes were due before the cotton had been harvested. Pressured by tax collectors, the farmers were willing to accept a lower price for their anticipated harvest. It was but a small step for farmers and merchants to move from these practices to a regular forward market in cotton.¹⁴

Twenty years later a forward market seemed well established. French merchants made advance purchases from village shaykhs of cotton, olive oil, and grain. The Muslim merchants of Nablus engaged in similar practices. In this fashion merchants guaranteed crop deliveries, but they also risked their money. When the cotton crop was bad the merchants lost money.¹⁵ By 1720 the shaykhs of all the villages around Acre were indebted to the French. Their indebtedness made French creditors dependent on them in return.¹⁶ A complex pattern of financial relations developed.

In 1729, the Ottoman government issued a firmān, declaring illegal the French practice of buying directly from the peasants. According to the decree, all cotton had to be sold publicly in the bazaar so the government could collect its taxes.¹⁷ Such declarations, however, had little effect.

In June 1730, Shaykh Sa‘d al-Zaydānī—brother of the future ruler of Acre, Ẓāhīr al-‘Umar—was thrown into jail by the pasha of Sidon. A group of French merchants posted his bail of 22,000 piasters. He was released and reinstated as tax-farmer of Safed. In return for the 22,000 piasters advanced by the French merchants, Sa‘d al-Zaydānī mortgaged the next cotton crop of the villages of Shfā ‘Amr, Thiri, and Abbellin. This deal inspired lengthy discussions in the French consular correspondence. Apparently the merchants involved were from Sidon, and the French merchants in Acre were outraged because they felt their access to the cotton harvest had been cut off. The consul in Sidon denied the existence of the whole deal. But apparently buying “on the cob,” or advancing money against future harvests, was by 1730 a very common practice. The French government was unhappy with the situation. It saw quite clearly the potential dangers if French merchants started interfering in local politics. In principle, the French were not to deal with indigenous intermediaries; they were to buy straight from the primary producer and pay only for cotton actually delivered.

The French merchants in Acre, however, pointed out the advantages of local alliances. In times of great unrest in the country, they had to rely on shaykhs and other political figures to insure delivery of the cotton harvest to them.¹⁸ All well-intentioned rules,¹⁹ attempts at répartition, and the warning not to get involved in local politics, etc. did nothing to improve the commercial discipline among the French. As long as profits on cotton were 150 percent and on wheat 100 percent,²⁰ the temptation to insure individual access to the largest quantity possible remained high. With such enormous profits one could risk some bad loans to peasants or shaykhs. Securing sufficient supply was the overriding concern.²¹

Rather than abstaining from local politics, the French merchants became more deeply involved. When it turned out that the cotton harvest of 1730 was poor and Sa‘d al-Zaydānī could not deliver enough cotton to pay back the loan of 22,000 piasters, the French merchants of Sidon traveled to Tiberias to collect from him personally. In Tiberias they had to deal for the first time with Ẓāhīr al-‘Umar al-Zaydānī, his brother. He offered to pay them back the 22,000 piaster in silver at 12 percent interest. However, money was not what the merchants wanted. They insisted on cotton, and if cotton was not forthcoming, they threatened to have Ẓāhīr al-‘Umar held for ransom in Sidon.²² Soon, however, it would be Ẓāhīr al-‘Umar’s turn to threaten them.

During this period of prosperity, when cotton prices rose to 60 piasters per quintal,²³ the French nation in Acre grew. By 1730 there were fourteen merchants, two commissioners, one painter and paperhanger, one translator from Marseilles, two bakers, one cook, one shoemaker, and eight other foreign merchants under French protection. The nation also included thirty members of religious orders distributed among convents in Acre, Nazareth, and the Carmel. There were also at least nine wives and eleven children.²⁴ Many lived in the khan, others had rented houses.

Cotton had been cultivated at least since the seventeenth century in the Marj ibn ‘Āmir and possibly other areas of the Galilee. The production was brought to Nablus, from where it was traded to Damascus or via Jaffa to Egypt. The possibility of high profits in the cotton trade began to attract the attention of local authorities. In 1731 the local pasha of Sidon and the customs inspectors of Acre and Sidon tried their hand at the trade. Some local shaykhs even tried to sell on their own directly to Europe—at prices the French consul found exagéré. This first attempt of local interest groups to export on their own failed.²⁵

Within a few years, however, control over the cotton market on the coast was contested by Ẓāhīr al-‘Umar al-Zaydānī. He was to contest the control of the French merchants on the coast, on the one hand, and the dominance of the trade route Damascus-Nablus-Jaffa-Egypt, on the other. By linking the Galilee with the coast and establishing his political control over both, he constructed a new and profitable commercial connection.

The Zaydānī family lived in the eastern Galilee area and made Tiberias their base. Originally the family had commercial contacts with Damascus. Ẓāhīr al-‘Umar, himself a merchant, went frequently with caravans to Damascus. His first marriage was with a girl from a Ḥusaynī Sharīf family in Damascus.²⁶ But the Zaydānī family had also begun to extend its contacts to the west. An uncle of Ẓāhīr al-‘Umar settled in Dāmūn, close to Acre, and became the multazim there.²⁷ Ẓāhīr al-‘Umar systematically expanded his power base in the Galilee. After securing his control over the region of Safed and Tiberias his ambition led him irrevocably to a clash with the people of Nablus, who saw their control over cotton-growing regions in the Galilee and cotton trade diminished. By gaining control over Nazareth he was able to secure his southern flank against Nablus, and to finally move in on Acre.

Ẓāhīr al-‘Umar had already established personal contacts in Acre. A certain Yūsuf al-Qassīs, a Greek Catholic merchant, became his agent in all commercial affairs and later, when Ẓāhīr al-‘Umar moved to Acre, his confidant and vezier.²⁸ Ẓāhīr al-‘Umar also found supporters among the French. Whenever he came to Acre Ẓāhīr al-‘Umar stayed in the house of Joseph Blanc, who was considered by the rest of the French community to be Ẓāhīr al-‘Umar’s collaborator. The French consul accused Blanc of having encouraged Ẓāhīr al-‘Umar to impose all sorts of avanias on the French so that he, Blanc, could recoup the loans he had advanced to Ẓāhīr al-‘Umar.²⁹

After having secured his rule over the hinterland of Acre and having established his commercial base in the eastern Galilee, Ẓāhir al-‘Umar attempted to gain control over Acre itself and to integrate his commercial activities, as it were, downstream. Ẓāhir al-‘Umar asserted his economic and political authority in Acre. In September 1746 he had a French merchant arrested; the man was set free only after a ransom of 1,100 piasters had been paid. But this was not a simple case of kidnapping and extortion, as the French sources would have us believe. Ẓāhir al-‘Umar was clearly setting forth a new policy: the French merchant was punished for having been in the house of a local merchant. Ẓāhir al-‘Umar was determined to prevent any direct contact between the French and the local population, and to set himself up as the only agent with whom the French were allowed to deal.³⁰ During the next twenty-five years this policy was again and again enforced.³¹ Ẓāhir al-‘Umar’s secretary and general agent, Ibrāhīm al-Ṣabbāgh, took similar measures to prevent any direct contact between French merchants and local farmers or brokers.³² Seeing the potential profits in the cotton trade, Ẓāhir al-‘Umar established an effective monopoly over the delivery and sale of this cash crop. In a new configuration of politics and economics this monopoly was complemented by a monopoly of the French merchants on the buying of cotton and its export to the world market. Economic monopolies established and exploited by the political powers were in themselves not a new phenomenon in Muslim states, although they had not been used in the recent past. About the Fatimid period Goitein observed: “First, both as a producer and a consumer the government was the largest customer in the country. Agricultural products were largely bought from or through government agencies. This applied in particular to flax, the main export staple of Egypt in that period.” For the Mamluk period it is stated that the government enforced the purchase of products owned or produced by the government. Merchants were compelled to buy wheat, rice, meat, textiles, etc. at fixed prices.³³ In the seventeenth and eighteenth century the Neo-Mamluks in Egypt were satisfied with profiting from trade by imposing custom fees at certain points without, however, possessing most crops or establishing fixed prices. The policy of establishing a monopoly over a cash crop was to become a permanent feature of successive governments in Acre. The monopoly began with its establishment over the export trade of cotton; later other items were added, most notably grain. But even sesame and olive oils and products such as soap were added. The extent and the permanence of the government monopolies constituted a departure from past patterns of trade and economy. Political power and economic interests were joined in an unprecedented symbiosis. The dominant monopoly policy played, as we will see, a decisive role in the social formation of Acre and its realm as well as its political strength, but also in its eventual economic failure and political downfall.

In January 1748 the French consul, reporting to Paris in exasperation, described Ẓāhīr al-‘Umar as “Chek Daher, cet homme si redoutable à tous ceux qui ont le malheur de vivre sous sa domination.”³⁴* Incidents between the French and the inhabitants of Acre increased during that year. Perhaps this was coincidental, but the result was that tensions rose and the French had to rely more and more on Ẓāhīr al-‘Umar for protection and for settling disputes with the local population. A year later the French were very pessimistic: “The trade in this port city of Acre is lost … if its form is not changed promptly, in view of the bad faith of the shaykh [Ẓāhīr al-‘Umar] and the people in the countryside who under the disingenuous pretense of bad harvests have refused for about the last four years to pay their debts.” The French turned to their ambassador in Istanbul to demand that the Ottoman government cease tolerating a tyrant who had his own troops and possessed two castles, one in Dayr al-Ḥanā, and another one in Tiberias.³⁵

Once more the French tried to organize themselves into a united monopoly of buyers. A memoir drafted by the consul stated: (a) that the French merchants should not advance any more money to Ẓāhir al-‘Umar, to local merchants, or to peasants; (b) that merchandise should be paid for only upon delivery; and (c) that before each cotton harvest, the French nation of Acre should assemble to decide a fair price for cotton and stick to it. This, it was assumed, would keep price hikes at bay.³⁶ But the plan was not implemented, and in the spring of 1750 it was observed “que le commerce de cette échelle est totalement désolé.”³⁷* Although Acre’s cotton trade was brisk otherwise, the French were not making any money. At the end of the year, the French merchants in Acre reported to the consul of Sidon that they could not possibly buy cotton at the price of 69 piasters decided upon by the French in Sidon. Even the customs official in Acre had begun to buy from the peasants at 75 and 80 piasters. Neither could the merchants exert pressure on rich village shaykhs who had paid their land tax, the mīrī. They were under no pressure to sell cotton at low prices. In addition, boats arrived daily from Cyprus, and merchants all along the coast were moving to buy cotton at any cost. The French in Acre were in no position to dictate prices.³⁸

The consul in Sidon was outraged that the French merchants in Acre paid up to 80 piasters for cotton “sans une permission exprès de la nation de Seyde.”³⁹* He demanded their instant “soumission.” But for some time already the true center of commerce of the region had been Acre, and the French consul in Sidon fought a losing battle to keep control over the French merchants there. He tried to blame the rising price of cotton on their disobedience and lack of discipline. At the same time he had to admit that profits on cotton during the past two years had been 45 and 50 percent respectively and that the merchant houses of Marseilles had sent considerable sums in cash to Syria to buy cotton, without setting a price limit. The prices of raw cotton had roughly doubled since the beginning of the century, but the value of cotton exports to France had increased by a factor of ten.⁴⁰ The demands of the French textile industry had risen even faster.

In 1751 the issue in Acre was not the price, but the availability of supplies.⁴¹ Early in the year prices jumped to 100 and then to 110 piasters for the quintal of raw cotton⁴² because of the merchants’ “besoins qu’ils avaient d’une prodigieuse quantité de balles.”⁴³* But Gautier, the French consul in Sidon, insisted on seeing the situation differently. It was the attitude “peu raisonnable” of Ẓāhīr al-‘Umar, the greed of the French merchants in Acre, and their attempt to destroy the nation in Sidon that had driven prices up. In order to force prices down Gautier ordered the French in Acre at the beginning of the new cotton harvest in the fall of 1751 to offer only between 60 and 70 piasters a quintal and to desist otherwise from buying altogether.⁴⁴ In response Ẓāhīr al-‘Umar forbade the peasants and the brokers from selling any cotton to the French, whether for cash or old debt receipts. Merchandise carried to Acre was confiscated at the gate, and the bazaar merchants in Acre did not even dare to pay their outstanding debts to the French. Until the fall of 1751 the French merchants in Acre had always been able to buy directly from the peasants, but they now observed with anxiety that Ẓāhīr al-‘Umar was beginning to buy up the cotton harvest himself, and they predicted that soon “il nous fera payer au prix qu’il y mettra luy même.”* Ẓāhir had become powerful, and the Acre merchants understood quite well that “il n’était plus ce qu’il était il y a dix ans, il donne des loix aujourd’huy.”⁴⁵* In the end, Gautier had to give in, as Ẓāhīr al-‘Umar insisted on 100 piasters. Gautier still blamed the “personal greed” of the merchants for the high prices, but a compromise was struck to offer Ẓāhīr al-‘Umar 90 piasters, so that cotton could be bought in time for French ships to return to Marseilles with a cargo.⁴⁶

Ẓāhīr al-‘Umar agreed to the lower price because that fall he was more than usually pressed for money. He was in the process of rebuilding the walls of Acre, symbol and material means of asserting his increasing independence. He insisted on keeping the French out of the direct cotton trade and even confiscated their merchandise. He himself bought cotton from the peasants and the brokers and tried to do business without the French: he sold 150 bales of cotton to an English merchant coming from Livorno, shipped 50 bales to Naples, and sold grain to the merchants in Naples who sold it to Venetians. In the eyes of the French he was “un homme qui peut tout ce qu’il veut, qui ne met point de bornes à sa cupidité.”⁴⁷*

The arrival in 1752 of M. Verrayon, the new French consul in Sidon, added a new dimension to the ongoing struggle between the French and Ẓāhīr al-‘Umar. Verrayon brought the long-simmering competition between the nation in Acre and the nation in Sidon to boiling point. The French merchants in Acre had already, ten years earlier, protested to the French government that the consul in Sidon was attempting to undermine and even destroy their position in Acre. The nation in Sidon, they said, was trying to reduce the merchants in Acre to agents for itself and was insisting that all cotton was to be bought in its name and shipped via Sidon. The consul sent inspectors, protected by soldiers of the pasha of Sidon, to investigate the merchants in Acre. Verrayon also tried to dictate the price at which the merchants in Acre were to purchase cotton. All this interference was highly detrimental to the French merchants in Acre, who lost business to English and Venetian merchants willing to pay higher prices for cotton.⁴⁸ Ẓāhīr al-‘Umar’s appearance on the scene had pushed the disputes between the French nations into the background, but Verrayon clearly was bent not only on challenging Ẓāhīr al-‘Umar’s ambitions but also on asserting control over the merchants in Acre. In October 1752 he came to Acre and confronted the French merchants with new regulations obliging them to buy cotton jointly at the fixed rate of 60 piasters per quintal. They could no longer offer cash advances to a seller, and they were obliged to share the cotton they purchased through the mechanism of a répartition with the merchants in Sidon. To make sure that his orders were obeyed, Verrayon also appointed an inspector from Sidon, charging his expenses to the merchants of Acre. The merchants were outraged, feeling that they had been reduced to mere agents for the merchants in Sidon and that the répartition was simply a device to let the Sidon merchants gain control over a large part of the raw cotton traded in Acre. Having to pay for the sacks in which the cotton was sent to Sidon added insult to injury. Acre’s merchants were also convinced that at the price of 60 piasters no cotton would be offered to them. Local growers and merchants would go with their merchandise to English, Dutch, or other merchants.

Probably informed of these measures by the members of the nation in Acre, Ẓāhīr al-‘Umar reacted violently. He forbade any sales for less than 120 piasters to the French, and swore he would rather burn the whole cotton crop than sell it at 60 piasters a quintal. He objected strenuously to any répartition, i.e., to any price-fixing by the French. Eventually Ẓāhīr al-‘Umar had all the brokers (censaux) who bought the cotton for the French imprisoned. Verrayon threatened that in view of Ẓāhīr al-‘Umar’s lack of cooperation he would have to withdraw all the French merchants from Acre because of insufficient business. He threatened to have the nation expelled by royal order, a threat addressed as much to Ẓāhīr al-‘Umar as to the French merchants. Verrayon argued in his dispatches to Paris that Ẓāhir al-‘Umar would give in to his demands because only the French had the transport capacities to bring the cotton to the European market and because the pressure of the peasants, brokers, and merchants who could not sell their merchandise would force him to do so.

But Ẓāhīr al-‘Umar did not budge. Despite some negotiations the two parties remained in a standoff. Eventually Verrayon was ordered by Ẓāhīr al-‘Umar to leave Acre. Upon Verrayon’s departure Ẓāhīr al-‘Umar released the imprisoned brokers and once again permitted trade with the French in Acre. The French were free to buy at any price and from anybody, as long as they were not arranging a répartition among themselves. Verrayon tried to fight back from Sidon by forcing all ships with merchandise for the French merchants in Acre to unload in Sidon. If Verrayon succeeded in diverting all shipments to Sidon, Ẓāhīr al-‘Umar would be robbed of his customs revenues from imports, and the nation in Acre would still be dependent on Sidon for its commerce.

Ẓāhīr al-‘Umar perceived clearly that this was a fight for power and control and vowed that in his realm the French consul would never be permitted to establish the law. As the merchants in Acre correctly observed, even the pasha of Sidon preferred accommodating Ẓāhīr al-‘Umar to challenging him. “Le Chek est aujourd’huy sur un tel pied qu’Il se persuade que rien ne peut lui nuire. Il gouverne ce pays en souverain quoy qu’il ne soit que fermier du Pacha de Seyde. Nous avons vu ces années dernières pour Gouverneurs de Seyde les Vizirs les plus fameux de l’Empire Ottoman auxquels il a fait la loy.”⁴⁹*

The standoff between Ẓāhīr al-‘Umar and the French merchants in Acre, on the one side, and the French consul and the nation in Sidon, on the other, continued throughout 1753. Verrayon tried to be upbeat about it, claiming that raw cotton could be bought in Jaffa and Sidon. In times of warfare between Ẓāhīr al-‘Umar and his sons, producers were particularly loath to bring their product to Acre.⁵⁰ A British agent bought cotton directly in Acre but had to absorb a loss because cotton from Izmir was selling for less.⁵¹ The French cotton exports from the Syrian coast dropped dramatically in 1753.⁵²

In the following years exports picked up again and prices rose, though neither price nor quantity reached the feverish levels of 1751/52. Quarrels between Acre and Sidon persisted for the next decade. Ẓāhīr al-‘Umar tried to impose an import tax on French merchandise that came from Cyprus. Having already paid the import tax to the Ottoman Empire in Cyprus, French merchants thus would be forced to pay twice. Ẓāhīr al-‘Umar’s intention was, of course, to attract more French maritime traffic directly to Acre and to benefit personally from the import dues.⁵³ At the same time, the French merchants in Acre became increasingly independent from Sidon and shipped cotton, on their own accounts, via Cyprus to Marseilles using—illegally—French merchants’ addresses in Cyprus as the origin of their merchandise. All this inflicted considerable harm on the nation in Sidon.⁵⁴ Ẓāhīr al-‘Umar also tried to impose a fixed price on cotton thread, one of the main commodities of French trade in Sidon. More importantly perhaps, the unrest and the misrule by the pasha of Sidon caused many spinners to retreat to the mountains and to Beirut. In this port merchants from Istanbul, Izmir, and Damascus had access to spun cotton and were willing to pay higher prices, diminishing further the trade of the nation in Sidon.⁵⁵ The earthquake of 1759, which destroyed Safed and other places in the Galilee, damaged Sidon to such an extent that the French consul did not believe it would ever recuperate. Acre had been affected badly and, although the subsequent outbreak of the plague temporarily reduced the population of Acre by perhaps a quarter, neither earthquake nor plague weakened Ẓāhīr al-‘Umar’s control over the area⁵⁶ or diminished Acre’s population in the long run. By 1761 the power of the Ottoman pasha in Sidon was so much reduced that, when asked to help the pasha of Damascus to take control over Haifa in order to counterbalance Ẓāhīr al-‘Umar’s growing might in Acre, he could offer only a handful of soldiers, but could not supply a ship on which to transport them!⁵⁷

It was only in 1768 that the Ottoman government recognized Ẓāhīr al-‘Umar as “Shaykh of Acre and Commander of Safed, Nazareth, Tiberias and the whole Galilee”—though he was still subject to the pasha of Sidon. Only in 1776 would Acre become the official residence of the pasha of Sidon, and the French would not transfer their consul from Sidon to Acre until 1786.⁵⁸ Nevertheless, it had been clear since the early 1760s that Acre under Ẓāhīr al-‘Umar had become the political and commercial center of the whole Syrian coast.⁵⁹ All trade with Europe went through Acre; at issue was only whether the French merchants or the local ruler could exert more control over the direction and the profit of this trade. Acre was to hold this dominant position until the early nineteenth century. As we shall see, it was in the second decade of the new century that Beirut began to challenge Acre’s commercial predominance. Challenges to Acre’s role as an important political power base arose repeatedly and from different quarters. Eventually, the Egyptian occupation of Syria in 1831 and the long siege of Acre put an end to its commercial as well as political role.

While he was still living in Tiberias, Ẓāhīr al-‘Umar had established commercial ties with a local merchant in Acre, Yūsuf al-Qassīs, an Arab of the Greek Catholic community that had been formed only recently in Syria. When Ẓāhīr al-‘Umar moved to Acre he made al-Qassīs his secretary and chief adviser. This administrative and political position did wonders for al-Qassīs’s commercial fortunes.⁶⁰ He, in fact, amassed such wealth that he no longer felt secure, and tried to smuggle his possessions from Acre to Europe and to flee in 1761 with his family. He was arrested and all his property was confiscated by Ẓāhīr al-‘Umar.⁶¹ The French saw “avec peine encore la ruine d’un principal débiteur de la nation,”⁶²* a clear allusion to the fact that the French were doing a great deal of business with him.

Al-Qassīs’s ignominious end only accelerated the rise of another Greek Catholic from a merchant family. Ibrāhīm al-Ṣabbāgh had been a physician in Acre when Ẓāhīr al-‘Umar made it his residence. The al-Ṣabbāgh family had moved from Shuwayr to the coast, to Beirut and Sidon. Around 1700 two brothers, Ḥabīb and ‘Abbūd, moved to Acre, and eventually Ḥabīb went to Damiette for trading purposes, where his son Ibrāhīm was born around 1715. At the age of seven he was sent to the monastery in Shuwayr, where he was educated and eventually trained as a physician. Presumably in the late 1740s he moved to Acre and began to practice medicine. He very quickly established a reputation that bordered on that of a miracle worker. With a deft measure of insight into the human psyche, a familiarity with the human physis, considerable knowledge of medicine, and a sense for the dramatic he almost appeared to make the blind see and to resurrect the dead.⁶³ With his reputation thus established, Ibrāhīm al-Ṣabbāgh’s chance for prosperity and power came in 1757, when the personal physician of Ẓāhīr al-‘Umar, a Greek Orthodox by the name of Sulaymān Suwwān, was unable to cure Ẓāhir of an illness. Ibrāhīm was summoned to Ẓāhīr al-‘Umar by his coreligionist, Yūsuf al-Qassīs. His successful treatment of Ẓāhīr al-‘Umar guaranteed him the position of court physician.⁶⁴ A year later, he appeared for the first time in the French correspondence, having bought some belongings of the late Pierre Blanc.⁶⁵ In 1759, merchants in Acre were already referring to al-Ṣabbāgh as “physician and secretary of the Shaykh” when he interceded with Ẓāhīr al-‘Umar for the French merchants in an embarrassing affair, for which he was handsomely repaid by the French.⁶⁶ Ibrāhīm also strengthened his position among his Greek Catholic coreligionists by financing the construction of a church, St. Andrew’s, in 1760.⁶⁷

In the following years, Ibrāhīm al-Ṣabbāgh’s power and wealth grew to such a point that it was not quite certain any more whether he was Ẓāhīr al-‘Umar’s man or vice versa. Ibrāhīm al-Ṣabbāgh wholeheartedly pursued the attempts of his master to establish a monopoly over trade. The French grew increasingly dependent on him and berated him as despote and tyran. In 1767 al-Ṣabbāgh was still called the “factotum du Chek Daher,” but in the same letter he was described as powerful enough to initiate the banishment of French merchants from Acre; a man who was well informed about the French and who “after controlling all of the trade in Acre, wants also to control that of the French.” He might be able to do so, the consul speculated, because some of the French in Acre were too weak to refuse collaboration, even though such a monopoly would be “contraire au bien général” [contrary to the general interest].⁶⁸ Ibrāhīm al-Ṣabbāgh was also beginning to trade for his own account, especially with the free port of Livorno. In 1767, he was still willing to pay the 2 percent duty that French captains had to charge for transporting the merchandise of non-French merchants. Two years later, however, he offered to pay only 1 percent for a shipment of 170 bales of cotton and 200 ardab of rice and in fact did not pay at all. The consul confessed his impotence vis-à-vis Ibrāhīm al-Ṣabbāgh, “ce marchand qui tient le gouvernement d’Acre et qui y est le maître absolu.”⁶⁹* In the same year, an official came from Istanbul to buy grain for the army. Ibrāhīm al-Ṣabbāgh sold him the necessary grain, stored in a warehouse until delivery. At the same time, he told the French not to let the grain be transported on a French ship. The Ottoman official was unable to find transport for the grain. After several weeks, Ibrāhīm al-Ṣabbāgh declared that the grain had started to rot, and he had to throw it all into the sea. In fact, he had sold it elsewhere a second time. The French report does not mention to whom it was sold. The reader may suspect that the French themselves were the second buyers, since only they were able to ship the grain.⁷⁰

In 1772, de Taules, the consul in Sidon, observed about the French: “Les Négociants d’Acre ne sont aujourd’huy que les facteurs ou les prêteurs nommés d’Ibrahim Sebbag, qui s’étant emparé généralement de toutes les branches utiles du commerce, ne leur laisse que la triste satisfaction de s’agiter et de paraître faire beaucoup d’Affaires, tandis qu’ils ne travaillent que pour luy.”⁷¹* At the same time de Taules knew quite well that any threat by Ibrāhīm al-Ṣabbāgh to have the French removed altogether from Acre was not very convincing. Al-Ṣabbāgh was dependent on the French for maritime transport and access to the French market.⁷² As consul in Sidon, de Taules had lost control over the merchants in Acre, hence his tendency to paint a bleak picture: the nation “forme depuis longtemps un corps d’une constitution mixte et presqu’ indépendant de l’officier du Roy. Les négociants, républicains par rapport à la France, sont de vrais esclaves envers Daher.”* He went on to describe how Ibrāhīm al-Ṣabbāgh took possession of all products, dictated prices, and dealt highhandedly with the French.⁷³

But how complete was al-Ṣabbāgh’s control over trade and how much were the French in Acre his victims? An incident that occurred in 1771 sheds some light on these questions. A peasant by the name of Ḥanna Karāmī came from Shfā ‘Amr to Acre during the wheat harvest and approached the French merchant, Bonnet, in order to do business. Bonnet spontaneously refused—probably thinking of Ibrāhīm al-Ṣabbāgh’s interdiction on such direct trade. But when his own censal, Niqūlā al-Zabūr, assured him that the peasant was trustworthy, they reached an agreement. Bonnet and al-Zabūr went to the warehouse and provided the peasant with a roll of cloth. Within the following weeks, they twice more did business with Karāmī. The story appears in the correspondence because Ibrāhīm al-Ṣabbāgh claimed that the merchandise Bonnet had sold was stolen, and he tried to confiscate Bonnet’s possessions.⁷⁴ The story illustrates the fact that even in 1772 peasants thought nothing of trying to do business with French merchants and that French merchants still were willing to risk direct deals and still employed censaux whose very task was to buy directly for the French merchants they represented. Ibrāhīm al-Ṣabbāgh’s outrage probably had more to do with his inability to control all business dealings than with the presumed theft.

The potential of Acre had been first recognized by Ẓāhir al-‘Umar. By the middle of the eighteenth century he had created a power base for himself, established law and order in the Galilee, and was attracting immigrants and encouraging cotton cultivation. Thus he was able to supply the French merchants coming to the Syrian coast in their search for ever-increasing amounts of cotton at a time when prices were rising. He was also able to establish himself as the sole middleman and to force the French merchants to deal exclusively with him; in other words he was able to create a monopoly over cotton production in the hinterland of Acre and guarantee delivery to Acre. Recurring attempts by the French to deal directly with the peasants were severely punished. The French, however, monopolized transport to and marketing in Europe. Feeble attempts to enter the transportation business and sell directly in Europe failed under Ẓāhir al-‘Umar just as under all later rulers in Acre. At a time of ever-rising cotton prices increasing profits could be made by the French as well as by Ẓāhir al-‘Umar. He became not only the biggest local merchant but the only one. With the resources at his disposal he strengthened his political might and very soon the cultivation of cotton, its delivery to Acre, its storage and eventual sale to the French became issues of government administration.

Ibrāhīm al-Ṣabbāgh became Ẓāhīr al-‘Umar’s chief administrator, scribe, and man of complete confidence. Eventually he controlled most matters of state and trade in the realm of his master. He himself became immensely rich, not as a merchant, but as administrator of the cotton monopoly. It seemed that nothing could go wrong. The demand for cotton kept increasing and prices kept rising. The only condition was that Ẓāhīr al-‘Umar remain able to supply the merchants from Marseilles with cotton; in other words he had to be able to guarantee political stability. This turned out to be his Achilles’ heel. As so often in Islamic history, questions of succession brought him and his sons to their downfall. Internal wars between them, as well as Ẓāhīr al-‘Umar’s alliance with ‘Alī Bey al-Kabīr from Egypt, and finally the interference of the Ottoman government led to Ẓāhīr al-‘Umar’s violent death and the expulsion of his sons. Cotton production would suffer from this strife, and French merchants began to find increasing supplies of cotton in Izmir and Salonika.

No statistical information can be found on the volume of trade from Acre during the 1760s and early 1770s, but the general impression gleaned from the French correspondence is that trade was good until 1772, when the political events in southwest Syria created havoc and wars left the area a shambles. Ẓāhīr al-‘Umar’s intention to assert his power in the region with the help of his Egyptian ally, ‘Alī Bey al-Kabīr, came to a violent end, and both he and Ibrāhīm al-Ṣabbāgh perished in 1775. The Ottoman admiral, Ḥasan Ḳapūdān Pasha, confiscated the enormous wealth of Ibrāhīm al-Ṣabbāgh.

After a short interlude, Aḥmad Pasha al-Jazzār was made governor of Sidon and took up residence in Acre. In contrast to the tenure of other Ottoman governors, al-Jazzār remained governor until his death twenty-eight years later. At various times, he also served simultaneously as the governor of Damascus, an indication of how much the center of politics and economics had gravitated toward the coast and Acre. As we have seen, Aḥmad Pasha, “the Butcher,” had throughout the nineteenth century an extremely bad press in Europe. Early French travelers used him as the outstanding example of Ottoman despotism, and cited him as personifying all that was wrong with the Ottoman Empire. Later, his life and person served to feed the need for erotic-exotic sensationalism in European travel literature, and he acquired increasingly monstrous features. The usual argument is that he was so oppressive and exploitative in his greed and irrational in his exercise of power that he killed the goose that laid the golden egg. In the end, he may indeed have done just that, but his economic activities show considerable reason and insight. During the first half of his rule at least, he invested in agriculture and was keenly interested in trade. When the French called him “tyrannique” and “pas raisonnable,” they were really referring to his determination to obtain maximum profits from the trade with the French. Yet in 1790 he banished the French from Acre, and trade with France was never resumed in any significant fashion.

When Aḥmad Pasha al-Jazzār came to power the prospects for the cotton trade were promising. After devastating war years, exports were up again and prices for cotton were good. In 1782 the demand for cotton was so great that French merchants from Aleppo, Cyprus, and Cairo came to buy directly in Palestine, offering up to 168 piasters per quintal. The merchants in Acre were only willing to offer 153. The nation in Acre complained angrily to Marseilles because the merchants considered Palestine their own turf and felt that other French merchants had driven prices up. When al-Jazzār slapped a 6 piasters per quintal export tax on the cotton from Acre, the nation protested loudly against the illegality of the measure. But al-Jazzār’s tax did not slow down business because French captains were willing to buy directly, and were more interested in full loads than in French control over trade.⁷⁵ Aḥmad Pasha al-Jazzār also seemed cooperative. After some pressure, he let the village shaykhs deal again directly with the French and seemed even willing to accept the principle of répartition. Local shortages developed, because of the strong French demand.⁷⁶ When al-Jazzār raised the export tax to 10 piasters in early 1784, the French seem not to have protested.⁷⁷

Export trade was monopolized by the French. Only one non-French trader resided in Acre, and he was not perceived as a threat.⁷⁸ Shipping was almost exclusively in French hands. Of eighteen ships reaching Palestinian ports in the first five months of 1784, only one did not fly the French flag. At the same time, cotton prices dropped by 30 percent because of the enormous quantities that had reached France the year before.⁷⁹ Still, the mood was upbeat and Renaudot, the French vice-consul in Acre, was full of plans for renovating and expanding the khan of the French, center of their commercial activities in Acre. The new cotton harvest in the fall of 1784 was abundant, and it seemed the government was not going to challenge the répartition this year.⁸⁰ The only jarring note was that while the French in Acre stood by their price of 120 livres, the French merchants in Aleppo, showing “visiblement une insatiable avidité,” were buying up cotton from Safed and Nablus via Damascus at a higher rate.⁸¹

Renaudot, who seems to have had rather friendly relations with Aḥmad Pasha al-Jazzār during these years, saw great potential for commerce in Acre. When al-Jazzār was appointed governor of Damascus in early 1785, Renaudot suggested to him that he redirect the Nablus cotton exports from Jaffa to Acre—he must have been particularly concerned with any cotton trade via Damascus reaching the French merchants in Aleppo. Renaudot also suggested to al-Jazzār that he rebuild the Bridge of Jacob’s Daughters over the Jordan to draw grain exports to Acre.⁸² The pasha heeded his advice, began to build granaries and to divert the wheat from the Ḥawrān. This apparently was also the cause of his dismissal as governor of Damascus one year later. The merchants of Damascus had complained to Istanbul about his attempt to establish a monopoly over the grain trade.⁸³

Renaudot noticed the beneficial results for trade of this “pacification” program. But at the end of 1785, he had also to concede that famine, plague, and a very mediocre harvest had reduced business in Acre.⁸⁴ And then, in 1786, Acre was devastated by the plague: probably a fifth of the population perished. Two more years of drought caused famine and destroyed the cotton crop. In the summer of 1789, al-Jazzār’s own Mamluks rebelled against him. He put down the rebellion with utter cruelty and his personality, always somewhat unstable, now acquired symptoms of paranoia. The French remained optimistic, however. It was true that Aḥmad Pasha al-Jazzār disregarded the Capitulations completely: “le pays m’appartient, dit-il, et je chasserai ceux qui me déplairont.”* But the French vice-consul argued that it might not be advantageous to insist too much on the Capitulations. In fact, the French were paying considerably lower customs on the export of cotton than the capitulationary agreement demanded.⁸⁵ Even when disagreement over cotton prices and personal antagonism between Aḥmad Pasha al-Jazzār and Renaudot were building up to a final crisis, the vice-consul hesitated to leave Acre and Sidon: “Il est pourtant bien cruel d’abandonner deux grands établissements à la veille d’une récolte abondante, la première depuis quatre ans et dans un temps ou l’importation donne des bénéfices considérables.”⁸⁶* In 1789 the cotton crop was again “abondante” and the peasants were in dire pecuniary straits after several years of bad harvests, drought, and pestilence. Aḥmad Pasha al-Jazzār tried to establish a monopoly over the sale of cotton as he had already done with grain and olive oil. That is to say, he forbade the peasants to sell to anybody but him and tried then to dictate the price for exporters. He even prohibited the sale of cotton to the local population for spinning and offered to sell to the French at 120, later 130, piasters per quintal. The French refused to buy, assuming that the abundant crop and the financial needs would make al-Jazzār give in.⁸⁷

The following year the new cotton crop promised to be huge, as did the grain harvest. The warehouses were still filled with the previous year’s crop. Yet al-Jazzār was not willing to lower the price; on the contrary, he forbade all trading with the French and prohibited the loading of French ships. Alas, prices in Marseilles had begun to drop for the first time in the century. The French refused to pay rates for cotton in Acre that were higher than those in Marseilles. Aḥmad Pasha al-Jazzār’s stubbornness was aggravated by a personal pique against Renaudot.⁸⁸ Matters reached a crisis point, and in October 1790 the French were forced to leave Sidon and Acre. Thus the sometimes unstable trade relation, which had been profitable for both, came to an end. Although Acre’s cotton trade with Europe would continue for some time, it was on a much reduced level and in a haphazard fashion until its final demise in 1831.

In order to understand this abrupt and unnecessary end to the cotton trade between Acre and Marseilles, it may help to analyze the position of the French merchants in local commerce. Until the 1740s the French were fairly free to roam the coast and the Galilee and to buy cotton directly from the producers. They would bring it to their khan in Acre and ship it from there to France. When Ẓāhīr al-‘Umar moved from the inland to the coast, he was able to reduce the reach of the French, forcing them to stay and deal in Acre. He sought to prohibit any contact between the French merchants and the local population. In this way, he tried to monopolize the trade and put conditions on French operations. Such measures led repeatedly during his rule as well as under that of Aḥmad Pasha al-Jazzār later to a boycott of the French and a standstill of trade for considerable periods. How efficient the monopoly was is questionable. Throughout the period, we hear of instances of direct dealings between French merchants and villagers, or more often village shaykhs. It appears that at all times the French merchants had censaux responsible for buying for particular merchants; and even during al-Jazzār’s time the French offered loans to producers for future cotton crops. This policy transgressed the rules the French themselves had set up, but it had the great advantage of insuring the supply of cotton to merchants. On the other hand, it also meant a continuous involvement in local affairs which made the French vulnerable. Outstanding debts were difficult to collect and could be used as a means to pressure the French. There were, however, limits to the pressure that could be exerted. The political limits were the presence of France, always reaffirming its capitulary rights in the Ottoman Empire and demanding that the government in Istanbul extend protection to the French merchants. This protection was usually only as good as the power of the central government in its own provinces.

The economic limits of pressure were perhaps more important. For a variety of reasons the option of dealing with other European merchants was never a realistic one for local shaykhs and merchants. The French had pretty much cornered the trade on the Syrian coast since the 1730s. The French merchants had exclusive access to the growing cotton market in France. All French trade with the Mediterranean went through Marseilles, and only the French were permitted to deal there. In addition, shipping was completely dominated by the French. This was not only true for overseas shipping to Marseilles, but also for coastal shipping from Damiette to Jaffa, to Acre, to Cyprus, and even to Istanbul. The coastal trade was dominated by French tramps (cabotage) which usually wintered in Tyre. French traders’ role in local shipping was so dominant that, as we have seen, the governor of Sidon had his own soldiers shipped by French captains and an Istanbul official could find no cargo space to ship grain from Acre to Istanbul when the French refused to offer him any. The few attempts to use local shipping to export to Trieste, Livorno, or Malta foundered and the ships did not return. In the early 1780s the French merchants were very worried that Arab merchants might set up their own agencies in Europe and even Marseilles and trade on their own. To the great relief of the French all such attempts came to naught.⁸⁹ In sum, we have here a situation of almost perfect mutual dependence. The French depended on the ruler to provide security in the region to make cotton cultivation possible, and to make sure the crop was delivered to Acre. The local trade depended on the French to export and market the cotton. Each needed the other for successful cotton trade. This mutual dependence also suggests why for over fifty years all tensions, boycotts, and threats to leave Acre for good were settled peacefully, and trade always resumed.

If such a balanced mutual dependence actually existed, how then do we explain the breakdown of commerce? It has been surmised that al-Jazzār suspected the French of supporting the rebellion of his Mamluks and, hence, had them expelled. But the rebellion had occurred a year and a half earlier and al-Jazzār had swiftly punished everybody he suspected of participation.⁹⁰ What triggered al-Jazzār’s rage was a firmān coming from Istanbul forcing al-Jazzār to repay the Catholic order for damages caused by him. As Renaudot pointedly remarked, it was the zeal of the religious not the actions of the merchants which threw al-Jazzār into a rage⁹¹ and led eventually to the expulsion. The underlying cause, however, was the long and bitter dispute over cotton exports and cotton prices which we have discussed earlier.

Should we turn to a more essentialist argument about the cultural differences which led eventually to basic misunderstandings? The correspondance consulaire is filled with bitter complaints about Ẓāhīr al-‘Umar, Ibrāhīm al-Ṣabbāgh, Aḥmad Pasha al-Jazzār, and others with whom business was conducted. They were accused of being “peu raisonnable,” “tyrannique,” and driven by “cupidité” and “despotisme.” But such accusations should not mislead us. In fact, the French consul in Sidon used very much the same mixture of moral and political terminology when discussing the French merchants of Acre who would not submit to his directives. Though he would describe their “rebelliousness” as being “républicain,” to his mind this was not any better than being “tyrannique.” The discussion was always over prices and the ability to determine prices by establishing control over the flow of the merchandise. The key question was how profits were going to be shared; and all participants in the business knew this.

This also may be the place to lay to rest the claim held dear by many authors that the Christian minorities rose to economic fortunes in trade since the Europeans, especially the French, preferred to deal with Christians because of cultural compatibility. As I have shown elsewhere,⁹² the French were willing to trade with anyone who could deliver and considered the zèle outré of the Catholic orders’ missionary activities to be harmful to harmonious business relations in the Ottoman Empire. If, nevertheless, most private merchants in Acre at the time were Christians, this had less to do with compatible cultural traits than with the inner history of the Greek Catholic community originating in Damascus and Aleppo.

Doing business with the culturally “other” appears to have presented no difficulties for the French merchants. Considerably greater, it seems to me, were the difficulties dealing with their own cultural tradition. Répartition and prix raisonnable seem to be key terms, especially in the internal discussion of the French and in the attempts of the consuls in Sidon to assert control over the merchants in Acre. These terms referred to a corporate past, where the merchants acted like a guild, sharing the market and establishing fixed prices. It was with such a corporate vision in mind that Colbert had organized the various nations in the échelles of the Mediterranean. The instruments of répartition and prix fixe were of little commercial relevance at a time when need for cotton on the French markets grew by leaps and bounds and prices exploded. The temptation to pay the producer more money, in order to obtain a greater share of total production and to make even greater profits in Marseilles, was too great, and corporate discipline broke down again and again. Even French captains, tempted by enormous profits, jumped into the fray at times and bought for their own account from peasants. Repeatedly the merchants from other French nations in Aleppo, Cairo, and Cyprus circumvented the répartition and bought cotton in Palestine, a region which the merchants in Acre considered their preserve. Yet the breakdown of the old, regulated system would always be attributed to the moral failing of individual merchants, i.e., it was their greed, not the demands of the market, that was blamed for driving up prices.

Problems with trade puzzled the French consuls repeatedly. Periodically other guilty figures appeared in the consular correspondence. During the final crisis between Aḥmad Pasha al-Jazzār and the French, the Sakrūj brothers were often labeled “les infâmes moteurs de tous les désordres,” [the vile originators of all the disorder] i.e., the rupture of trade and the exile of the French merchants from Acre.⁹³ This comment is interesting not only because it seems to exculpate Aḥmad Pasha al-Jazzār as the author of this rupture, but because it points to another general aspect of the whole issue: the Sakrūj brothers were in the employ of the local rulers as scribes. They were also merchants from Shfā ‘Amr dealing in cotton and grain.⁹⁴ Their careers suggest that a local commercial class, beginning to compete with the French commercial establishment, may have hoped to liberate itself from the foreign merchants. The French merchants certainly took this possibility very seriously. They warned in 1786 that some “marchands Arabes d’Acre” may get ideas and try to establish their own commercial connections in Marseilles. Only recently the Arab merchants had sent a ship on their own to Trieste to sell goods there. Fortunately for the French, their agent, having sold the cargo, had absconded with the money, and his theft discouraged any further such attempts.⁹⁵

But were French fears of local competition justified? What do we know about local merchants in Acre? Ẓāhīr al-‘Umar was, of course, a consummate merchant.⁹⁶ Starting out as a small merchant in Tiberias and Safed, he finally managed to corner all cotton production, more or less, in the Galilee. He also restricted the French merchants’ activities to Acre. In a sense, all his activities were geared to the cotton trade. Eventually, his commercial success was sustained by his military and political strength, which was, in turn, financed by the profits from trade. He was able to establish law and security in the Galilee—a precondition for any cotton to reach Acre and an incentive for peasants from neighboring regions to settle in his realm and thereby increase the amount of cotton acreage under cultivation. His military occupation of Acre assured him a great measure of control over the export trade.

Once Ẓāhīr al-‘Umar moved his residence to Acre, he seems to have left commercial affairs increasingly to his entourage. The names of Yūsuf al-Qassīs and Ibrāhīm al-Ṣabbāgh come to mind. Both became enormously wealthy, but their ability to control or to monopolize trade depended on support from the political system. When political rulers withdrew support, or when the system itself crumbled, their commercial fortunes disintegrated as well. The same holds true for the Sakrūj brothers, for the famous Ḥaim Farḥī, who, with interruptions, was at the helm of all fiscal and economic affairs of Acre for a quarter century, and finally for Catafago, who played a similar role in the 1820s. All, with the possible exception of Catafago, were government employees, all were able to enhance their wealth and commercial success in these positions, and all came to grief when the ruler withdrew his support from them.

Some more names of merchants are mentioned in the consular correspondence, but the French traders had little to do with them. Frequent mention of censaux, however, indicates how dependent the French were on go-betweens and middlemen. Perhaps we are justified in assuming that out of this group of censaux and other local traders a local commercial class began to take shape during the early years of Aḥmad Pasha al-Jazzār’s rule. The fact that even the qāḍī of Acre took a stand against the French might mean that, indeed, local merchants were beginning to voice their own interests. But al-Jazzār’s increasingly oppressive rule led to the eventual liquidation of the Sakrūj brothers along with many others of rank and position. Al-Jazzār nipped in the bud any attempt to articulate commercial interests not in line with government policies.

We should consider a final “misunderstanding” when discussing reasons for the disruption of the cotton trade: the discussion between al-Jazzār and the French was about prices.⁹⁷ As recently as 1783 cotton had fetched 150 piasters per quintal, and more. In 1789, when, after several years of drought, the cotton crop was abundant again, Aḥmad al-Jazzār offered to sell to the French at the rather raisonnable price of 120 piasters. But the French were not buying at this price. Experience had shown that in such situations pressuring the French by withholding the cotton for a few months produced the desired results. The French would cave in, collectively or individually, and pay higher prices. In 1789 Aḥmad Pasha al-Jazzār must have been convinced that he had to do with a particularly extreme case of French stubbornness and greed. Such stubbornness had to be answered by even greater pressure and insistence on the price. He raised it to 130 piasters. But the tactic did not work. Maybe he was not such a skilled merchant, after all. Aḥmad Pasha al-Jazzār had started out as a Mamluk and self-made strongman and not as a trader like his predecessor Ẓāhīr al-‘Umar.

But regardless of his commercial skills or the lack thereof, what al-Jazzār did not know and could not know was that the world of the cotton trade had profoundly changed since Ẓāhīr al-‘Umar had made his great profits on cotton in the 1750s. The statistics and the graphs show⁹⁸ that by mid-century raw cotton from Acre constituted roughly half the total cotton exports from the Mediterranean region to France. Imports of cotton from America hardly existed. In this situation, withholding the Acre cotton from the market could indeed have an impact on the price of cotton in France. After the middle of the century Acre’s role in the cotton trade decreased, while Izmir and Salonika entered the market with force. By 1789, the trade of Acre was but a fraction of that of the two other cities. In the meantime French cotton imports from America had grown so rapidly that they had reached double the volume of the imports from the Mediterranean region.⁹⁹ Acre’s contribution to French cotton imports had become infinitesimal and had no impact whatsoever on world cotton prices. In addition, cotton production finally began to catch up with demand, and prices began to stagnate and even drop in the 1780s. For most of the 1790s prices of raw cotton leveled off.¹⁰⁰ When Aḥmad Pasha al-Jazzār argued for 120 and 130 piasters, prices had dropped to below 100 in France. No amount of threatening and cajoling could persuade the French to buy.

Aḥmad Pasha al-Jazzār was not facing a particular case of French greed but the anonymous power of world market prices. When he banished the French from Acre in 1790, he clearly intended the expulsion to be a temporary measure. In fact, he soon tried to renegotiate a modus vivendi with the French under which they might be willing to return.¹⁰¹ At least a few individual French merchants seem to have made the attempt.¹⁰² In the meantime, however, conditions in France itself were changing rapidly and, with the dissolving of the chamber of commerce of Marseilles in 1791, trade as usual had become impossible. Aḥmad Pasha al-Jazzār did not have the know-how and the experience to find new markets for cotton and to conduct overseas trade on his own account, nor had Acre’s local merchants been in a position to develop such skills. A dozen years after the éclat with the French merchants and after the siege by Napoleon, al-Jazzār was still encouraging French merchants to settle again in Acre, but he qualified this invitation with a strong “as long as they do not meddle in my affairs.” This was not necessarily reflecting obsessive fears that his authority would be undercut. It might have been, so many years later, a very shrewd understanding of the forces of European political and economic expansion arriving in the region with merchants and military. To the European visitor with whom he was discussing these topics, he offered the following rather prescient anecdote: “A black slave found for himself and his family a fertile little corner with water somewhere in the wilderness. A traveler passed by and … greeted him with salutations. To which the slave answered ‘may all the damnation of Heaven fall upon you.’ … He was right. Had he responded with civility the traveler would have stopped, sat down, taken water and dates. He would have liked them and stayed. He would have eventually expelled the owner.”¹⁰³

Trade did continue after the departure of the French. Individual merchants came; French merchants from Aleppo and Damiette, for instance, would occasionally send orders for cotton. Very soon, al-Jazzār tried to reestablish relations with the French merchants¹⁰⁴ and began to use local Europeans and their contacts to maintain his overseas trade. In 1797 a further French emissary came to Acre to renegotiate contacts. The timing was bad, since al-Jazzār apparently had just suffered a stroke: his left side was paralyzed and he articulated with great difficulty. This is also the first time we hear of Antoine Catafago, born in Aleppo of Italian extraction, who was to exercise increasing control over the export trade. According to the French emissary, Catafago tried to block the French at every step and to keep them out of the trade of Acre. Two years earlier al-Jazzār had the two most important local merchants, Mikhā‘īl and Butrus Sakrūj, executed after he had harassed them for some time. The French had considered them, together with Yūsuf Kardāḥa, as the cause of all the disorder and misfortune that had befallen them. They apparently competed with the French for control over trade but were, after the expulsion of the French, unable to establish commercial links to Europe, hence al-Jazzār’s displeasure with them.¹⁰⁵ The French invasion of Egypt and Palestine, naval warfare between France and England, shifting alliances of the Ottoman Empire with European powers—all this was not conducive to the development of export trade to European markets.

At the same time al-Jazzār had enormous expenditures. Not only were considerable official payments and massive bribes made in Istanbul, but Aḥmad Pasha al-Jazzār maintained a costly army and had undertaken a major building program, including an aqueduct to Acre, a major mosque, commercial buildings, and the strengthening of fortifications. The only other solution for covering these expenses lay in revamping the financial system, imposing new taxes and collecting all taxes more efficiently if not ruthlessly. For this purpose he brought to Acre in the early 1790s a financial wizard, Ḥaim Farḥi, scion of a powerful Jewish family managing the finances of the province of Damascus. Ḥaim’s insight into financial administration, and also his good contacts in Istanbul, were an important help to al-Jazzār’s regime during the following ten years.

The oppressive burden of various taxes, so well analyzed in great detail by Amnon Cohen,¹⁰⁶ the general and personal brutality of al-Jazzār’s regime, which increased noticeably after 1789, together with the costs of local wars and the devastation of the French siege of Acre, exerted enormous pressures on the population. Although there are no statistics available for the period, from the estimates and anecdotal observations of travelers we can deduce a considerable drop in the number of inhabitants in Acre, the depopulation of fertile agricultural regions, and a considerable reduction in the export trade.

E. D. Clarke, who visited Palestine in 1801, made seemingly contradictory statements about the economy. He repeatedly described the devastation of the countryside, fertile land that was not cultivated. Al-Jazzār’s army camped out in tents close to cultivated fields “to seize even the semblance of a harvest which could be collected.” Clarke blamed al-Jazzār’s greed for such destruction of agriculture. But he also described Acre as the port from which “a great quantity of cotton is exported. The country abounds in cattle, corn, olives, and linseed. In almost every town of Syria there is a factory for the manufacture of soap; but everything depends upon the will of the Pacha; the produce of the land was exported, or not, as it pleased Djezzar, who cared very little for the consequences. His avarice, it is true, prompted him to increase the income of his custom-houses.” But in Clarke’s opinion it also destroyed the production. The vague description of thriving trade¹⁰⁷ in Acre contrasts starkly with that of simultaneous exhaustion of the countryside. Actually both were the result of the economic policy of monopolies which al-Jazzār continued to implement. The incentives for cultivation had disappeared, not only because the cotton market had by and large disappeared, but also because al-Jazzār tried to make up for it by higher taxation of the producer. However, whatever merchandise was indeed exported went through the port of Acre. Through politics and military control al-Jazzār could maintain Acre’s role as the sole port for exports on the Syrian coast. By the time French trade returned, after the revolutionary upheavals, the cotton cultivation in the hinterland of Acre had largely withered away. Trade between Acre and Marseilles was never again to be of any significance. When Aḥmad Pasha al-Jazzār died in 1804 a terrified, exhausted, and impoverished population breathed a sigh of relief.

If we are to believe al-‘Awra’s report, the people were justified in expecting a considerable improvement of their conditions. Upon his appointment as governor of Sidon Sulaymān Pasha al-‘Ādil gave the following speech in Acre addressing his high officials:

In my life I have suffered many hardships and overwhelming situations, shipwreck and exile, horrors, poverty and destitution, starvation, nakedness, coldness and heat; I was forced to reach the land of the Muscovites marching on foot. Now the Most High in His generosity returned me and comforted me and bestowed upon me more than I could wish for and beyond what I had hoped for. I now stipulate that, if you want to serve me, do it in sincere friendship. I do not want oppression or harm for anyone, nor the destruction of anybody’s house, nor am I eyeing anybody’s money. With all sincerity and effort I wish to close and to lock, nay to eliminate the traces of, the gates of iniquity which had been opened previously at the time of al-Jazzār. I have no wish nor need but for a good morsel of bread, a handsome stallion, a good smoke, the usual cloth and one woman. I will not allow or permit anyone of you to collect for me the money of the servants of God injustly, forcibly or fraudulently. I only want my legitimate money, allocated by order of the sultan, to be collected. I shall not be grateful to anyone who tries to bring me monies of injustice, rather, I shall be angry with him. From now on may God and his angels and the Prophet be witnesses for me and you in all this. I shall be free of guilt in this world and the next one from all your (mis)deeds.¹⁰⁸

Mishāqa evidently refers to the same speech, but also provides the reply of Ḥaim Farḥī, whom Sulaymān Pasha wanted to make his top administrator. Sulaymān Pasha explained:

I seek peace for the country and the contentment of the Sublime Empire with the payment of regular taxes yearly along with the amount that was imposed to cover al-Jazzār’s legacy. For myself I shall not ask from you more than that a thousand quarter gold funduqlīs be put in my pocket on Fridays for me to distribute among the poor when I come out from prayer. My household and personal expenses shall be turned over to you to deal with as I shall put you in charge of all works in the province. I shall issue no order without your sanction.

Mu ‘allim Ḥaim answered with a similar noble-minded statement:

The prosperity of the country depends upon having agents who are competent to administer the departments they are put in charge of, who will not covet what the subjects possess and will not be tempted into corruption. The subjects must be secure in their lives and possessions from their rulers, who are bound to maintain and protect them from miscreants.

He went on to demand promotion by merit alone, suggested a peaceful settlement with the Metuali shaykhs, and developed an economic policy to cope with the exceedingly high demands from the Sublime Porte:

If we want to impose it (the payments demanded by Istanbul) on the subjects in whatever way, it will be difficult for them to bear, and instead of carrying out our intention of giving them peace, we will bring down upon them numerous hardships. We must then reduce the taxation of our subjects and impose it on the foreigners. That is possible if the sale of grain, oil and cotton to foreigners is limited exclusively to Acre; the people can get what they need directly from the peasants without imposts. Trustworthy agents should be appointed for this purpose, and at the end of every day the surplus of these three commodities taken in, over and above the needs of the local people, should be taken from the owners and they should be paid the price at which it was sold during the day. That which is obtained should be deposited in storehouses and sold by the government to the ships of the foreign merchants at the highest possible price.¹⁰⁹

Justice had, of course, always been an integral element of good government in Islamic political thought. The elevation of a state monopoly on (export) trade to a basic principle of just government was new. In the following years the first principle was to be realized in the sense that the willful liquidations, torture, and mutilations that characterized the latter part of Aḥmad Pasha al-Jazzār’s rule were absent. Beyond that it is, as we shall see, doubtful how far Sulaymān Pasha deserved his epithet al-‘Ādil (“the Just”). The second principle, monopolization of trade—well established by Ẓāhir al-‘Umar and continued by al-Jazzār—was to be developed in the following years to new levels of refinement under the active management of Ḥaim Farḥī and Antoine Catafago, and it was to lead to considerable suffering among the population.

Several factors promised, especially in the early years of Sulaymān Pasha’s rule, to make monopolization of trade successful: he early on established his control over Tyre, Sidon, Tripoli, and, to a degree, Beirut after having effected a reconciliation with the Metualis and the Druze. At the same time he succeeded with the help of Muḥammad Agha Abū Nabūt in extending his control over Jaffa and all of southern Palestine. In fact he wielded far greater control over the coast of Syria than Aḥmad Pasha al-Jazzār had ever been able to. In particular he was able, with control over Jaffa, to force the people of Nablus to sell their cotton, grain, and oil via Acre. In addition, when Sulaymān Pasha was also appointed governor of Damascus, from 1809 until December 1811, he was in a position to order the Ḥawrān grain to be brought directly to Acre. Only after “the needs of Acre”¹¹⁰ were served was grain to be shipped to Damascus. The “needs of Acre” were, of course, fairly unlimited because the grain was exported to Europe. To these local political conditions was added for Sulaymān the fortuitous circumstance of the Napoleonic Wars in Europe and in particular the Continental System, which forced the British to look for new suppliers of grain at practically any place and price. The massive exports of grain via Acre drained the whole region, and by the end of 1811 there were fears that bread riots might break out in Damascus “though Sulaymān Pasha’s granaries [in Acre] are full to capacity.”¹¹¹ At the same time starving peasants in the Nablus region attacked the filled granaries of the Ṭūqāns.¹¹²

It must be added that all this occurred in the context of a seriously reduced tax basis of an exhausted region, where a process of depopulation was visible in the city and in the countryside. Wisely, Sulaymān Pasha did not entertain any great military ambitions, and always preferred diplomacy to war. Where al-Jazzār’s troops had been in the thousands, his were in the hundreds. This certainly also helped the financial situation of the government.

In 1806 France again sent diplomatic representatives to Sidon and Acre, and, after a hiatus of over fifteen years, we are once more provided with regular French reports from the area. Upon their return the French found vastly changed conditions in the eastern Levant. Hardly any French merchants had remained on the Syrian coast. The one or two in Acre were flunkies of Catafago. Rarely did French ships reach the Syrian coast, and the French cabotage, after having monopolized all trade in the eastern Levant before the Revolution, had been replaced by Greek and Maltese merchant ships. Any illusion of reestablishing a monopoly of transport and marketing of cotton, as had still existed fifteen years earlier, quickly vanished. In fact, the only thing that had not changed was that from the day of their appointment the French representatives in Acre and Sidon fell into interminable bickering over who had precedence over the other. Yet there is a new tone in the reports which was by no means justified by the actual local circumstances or the French position there and perhaps reflected rather a new postrevolutionary consciousness and announced the coming age of imperialism. The reports of the French consul in Sidon were full of plans for improving agriculture, proposing the introduction of coffee trees, sugar cane, and new irrigation methods: “Il faut créer de nouvelles branches de commerce, qui, enrichissant la France, offrent le double avantage de lui rendre les coeurs et les voeux du peuple.”* Sidon could be a French colony.¹¹³ The French invasion of Egypt a few years earlier had demonstrated a whole new potential for projecting European power into the eastern Levant, and the reports of the French scientists who had accompanied Napoleon had provided an example of how to research the conditions of a country scientifically in the self-confident attitude that such conditions could also be systematically changed. Of course, the French consul in Sidon also tried with such suggestions to boost the importance of his own consular position. In fact, the French impact remained minimal while British trade via Malta, mainly on Greek Ottoman vessels, flourished. For as long as the Continental System lasted British demand for grain rose and so did prices.

The statistical information¹¹⁴ reflects clearly the rise in volume and prices of exported wheat during the time of the Continental System: 50,000 to 60,000 hl and more went annually to Malta. Additional shipments went to the Greek islands. The Ottoman government had strictly forbidden food exports from the empire to Europe and tried to fix prices in an attempt to keep grain available and affordable for the local population. But the records of shipments from Acre show that it was only rarely and only when it was politically opportune or no other buyers could be found that grain would reach Istanbul. With the end of the Continental System no European takers could be found in 1814. Istanbul was again supplied, at its fixed low prices. Massive sales in the next few years came mainly from earlier harvests stored in granaries, while grain production was reduced in favor of cotton. The table shows a four-tiered price structure. The price at which the government sold grain in Acre (and sometimes Damascus) was determined by the need to prevent bread riots and starvation—a danger that was not always avoided. Export prices were set by what the market would bear. Shipments to Istanbul were priced permanently at 12 piasters per hl but were only rarely forthcoming. The price paid to the producer reflected Sulaymān Pasha’s estimate of what the peasant would be willing to tolerate before rioting or, more likely, fleeing the land.

The monopoly system, alluded to in Ḥaim Farḥī’s policy statement when joining Sulaymān Pasha’s administration, had been implemented with full force and had become much more exploitative than Farḥī’s speech may have suggested. Peasants were driven to destitution, and independent merchants—local or foreign—ceased to exist. All profits, and these were not negligible, went to those in power. The French seemingly never quite decided who was the driving force behind this monopoly policy and who profited most from this arrangement. The French would often blame Farḥī. The consul, Pillavoine, was adamant in insisting “qu’un Juif est ici, sous le nom de Soliman Pasha, seul propriétaire, seul vendeur, seul acheteur; qu’il ne fait le moindre cas des capitulations; que Naplouse et les pays qui en dépendent ne cultivent plus le Coton. Parce que le Juif qui commande ici despotiquement empêche qu’il ne vienne aux marchés, pour vendre le sien plus cher.”¹¹⁵* According to Mishāqa, it was Ḥaim Farḥī himself who designed the monopoly policy. On the other hand, Sulaymān Pasha was also blamed for his destructive policies or at least his weakness in relying totally on Ḥaim Farḥī. Frequently, Sulaymān Pasha was depicted as being full of goodwill and sincere but also naive and credulous. Thus he genuinely wanted to attract merchants to Acre, but did not realize that the monopoly policies kept them away.¹¹⁶ Finally, a great deal of blame was put on Antoine Catafago, who, at least since 1796, played a role in the trade of Acre and tried to resist any attempt to reintroduce French merchants and French trade to Acre.¹¹⁷ Catafago had survived Aḥmad Pasha al-Jazzār, and under the reign of Sulaymān Pasha “he began to secure his social and economic standing in Acre.”¹¹⁸ He was in the cotton trade, bought European merchandise, and buttressed his position in commerce by obtaining a variety of consular titles representing at one time or the other countries such as France, Russia, Tuscany, Naples, Spain, Denmark, and the Netherlands.¹¹⁹ He also enjoyed the confidence of Sulaymān Pasha, who appointed him tax-farmer for land in the Nazareth area. He had apparently come from Aleppo to Acre about the same time as Ḥaim Farḥī had come from Damascus, and the two must have collaborated closely as far as commercial matters were concerned. According to one comment Catafago was the “ami intime du ministre Juif.”¹²⁰ Curiously, the main Arab witness for the period, al-‘Awra, has hardly anything to say about Catafago in his extensive history of Sulaymān Pasha. The French sources never discuss in any detail the relationship between Catafago and Farḥī.

Here we are not so much concerned with the allocation of blame as with the results of the monopoly policy. For the French the first result was, of course, that they were excluded from doing business at Acre. Though the French government had filled the consular positions in Acre and Sidon again, this did not boost French commercial interests in the area. Only a few adventurous individuals, often with a dubious claim to French citizenship, attempted their luck in trade. Nothing resembling the nation in pre-revolutionary times could be established either in Acre or Sidon. The French consuls could only observe how—to their chagrin—the English, with the help of Maltese and Greek shipping and business, could circumvent the Continental System established by Napoleon, while local pashas cheerfully disregarded all regulations emanating from Istanbul intended to prevent grain exports to Europe.¹²¹ The same held true for shipping, where the French had played a decisive role even in coastal shipping and certainly held a monopoly on overseas shipping.

In the last analysis it was fairly irrelevant for Sulaymān Pasha and the well-being of his realm which foreigners did the buying and shipping of the grain. Of greater importance was the question of the exploitation of the peasants. The gap between the price paid to the peasant for the wheat and the price for which it was exported is glaring. At the height of the Continental System the export price was more than seven times that paid the producer. The French consuls were quick to point out this tyrannical and exploitative aspect of the grain monopoly of Sulaymān Pasha, though we may suspect that their concern was primarily for the missed opportunities for French trade and not so much the misery of the peasants. Yet their argument about the negative consequences of pauperization of the rural population was well founded. In 1808 the French compared Aḥmad Pasha al-Jazzār favorably to Sulaymān Pasha. While the former mutilated the peasants noses he left them the means to make a living. Under Sulaymān Pasha they were left with nothing to eat.¹²² People became so poor that they could no longer buy any merchandise. The market for French goods in the region disappeared. The producer lacked any incentive to increase cultivation. Estimates suggest that twice as much grain could have been cultivated than actually was. Eventually the destitution became so severe that peasants fled the land. The disastrous effects of depopulation of fertile lands could be observed in 1810: “C’est que les récoltes étaient plus abondantes, le pays avait à cette époque un excédent considérable, quoique la population fut plus nombreuse, mais les terres étaient alors cultivées, et la grande partie est aujourd’hui en friche à cause de défaut de bras qui se réduit journellement par les vexations que le paysan éprouve, on ne lui laisse pas de quoi vivre, il fuit en Egypte.”¹²³* Later travelers confirm the impression of fertile but deserted plains.¹²⁴

Monopolizing export trade was not a new policy. Ẓāhīr al-‘Umar, with the help of Ibrāhīm al-Ṣabbāgh, had largely succeeded in that. Aḥmad Pasha al-Jazzār had reestablished it and Ḥaim Farḥī had made it government policy in 1806. Shortly thereafter Sulaymān Pasha’s neighbor to the south, Muḥammad ‘Alī, began to establish the same policy.¹²⁵ For both rulers the initial opportunity was the high demand for grain in England during the second decade of the nineteenth century. But while Muḥammad ‘Alī proceeded to use monopoly policies for another twenty-five years to build up the economic strength of Egypt, Acre’s exports and economy fell quickly apart, once grain prices and demand dropped back to normal, though the symptoms of the weakness of Acre’s economic position could already be noticed at the very time of booming grain exports. One may say that Sulaymān Pasha, and even more so his successor ‘Abdallāh Pasha, overlooked the basic rule of monopoly policy: to make it work total control is required. Muḥammad ‘Alī was indeed able until 1840 to maintain his control over all of Egypt and its frontiers. Sulaymān Pasha’s control over the Syrian coast was much more precarious, though more complete than Aḥmad Pasha al-Jazzār’s ever had been. In Jaffa a loyal multazim exercised firm control and was able to prevent the merchants from Nablus from trading on their own, forcing them to deal either with Acre or to attempt to do business via Damascus and Aleppo.

Officially Sulaymān Pasha’s rule stretched from Gaza to Tripoli in the north. But after the enormous exhaustion of the land and the people during the years of al-Jazzār’s rule and the French siege of Acre, Sulaymān Pasha had, wisely, reduced his military capability to an affordable level and relied mainly on negotiations to achieve political settlements, as for instance in the case of the Metualis. This meant also that at times there were hardly a thousand troops available to patrol the whole coast of Syria.¹²⁶ Only in Jaffa and Acre did the garrisons number in the hundreds.¹²⁷ To the north only the coast up to Sidon was under Sulaymān Pasha’s effective control, and though he appointed the multazim of Beirut it appears that from early in his rule Beirut’s merchants were increasingly able to resist attempts to extend his monopoly policy. The lack of control over Beirut turned out to be the weak spot in his monopoly system, and this in combination with effective and complete monopoly control over Acre caused the latter’s downfall.

In 1808 we read a first report mentioning Beirut as the port of Damascus replacing Sidon in this function and attracting trade because of monopoly control in Jaffa and Acre.¹²⁸ In 1811 an English captain refused to buy grain at Acre prices. He turned his ship to Beirut, sold his own merchandise very well there, and proceeded then to Alexandria, where he picked up a load of grain at more reasonable prices.¹²⁹ Sulaymān Pasha and his collaborators were aware of the danger the trade in Beirut constituted for the monopoly in Acre. Attempts were made to prevent the merchants of Damascus and Beirut from making a profit. After forcing the merchants of Beirut to buy coffee from him at fixed rates, Sulaymān Pasha took a further step in December 1811 when he imposed an avania of 400,000 piasters on the merchants of Beirut. They refused collectively, and successfully, to pay.¹³⁰ If one looks for turning points in history this act of successful open resistance by the merchants of Beirut could be considered the beginning of Beirut’s rise. British trade in Beirut continued to increase. In the fall of 1812 seven major Damascene merchants had branches in Beirut and were keenly interested in dealing with a certain Yūsuf Karam who had established himself as a merchant in Malta.¹³¹ In the summer of 1813 a British captain could not get a fair price for his cargo of paper and other European merchandise in Acre and turned to Beirut, where he sold everything: “le commerce de cette ville augmente journellement” [the trade in this town is increasing daily].¹³² It was the British trade in particular that helped this free-dealing port city to its rise.

In the fall of 1813 Pillavoine, French consul in Acre, visited Beirut and was very impressed by its vitality. In his report to the French ministry he observed that the wealth of Beirut was caused by its overseas trade, its silk cultivation, and the countless caravans from and to the Syrian hinterland. Pillavoine was quick to add that “le Pacha d’Acre est sans autorité. Son Douanier, qu’est un de ses esclaves, est chassé s’il se permet la moindre vexation. Le Lieutenant du Pacha n’est rien, le Mufti est tout.”¹³³* Discussing the politics of Beirut, Pillavoine observed that the muftī, scion of an important old family, was all-powerful and made a point of cultivating good relations with the local Christians, especially the Maronites. His authority was not founded on his religious rank and function alone: he was also “le chef du commerce.” From 1794 until 1824 (perhaps 1827) ‘Abd al-Laṭīf Fatḥ Allāh was the muftī of Beirut. He came indeed from a renowned family which for 200 years had supplied qāḍīs and muftīs for Beirut. His position provided him with public authority and influence. Nevertheless, it is difficult to accept Pillavoine’s description of him as the mover and shaker of Beirut’s economic activities. ‘Abd al-Laṭīf apparently detested his job as muftī, which he had inherited from his father. When ‘Abdallāh Pasha finally relieved him of his task he left for Damascus in 1827, where he lived until shortly before his death in 1844. His true interest and vocation had always been poetry. He wrote hundreds of lengthy poems in the classical form of the qaṣīda, many of them panegyrics. Some of them bear testimony to his close and friendly relations with the rulers of Acre and its realm.¹³⁴ All this does not give the impression of a man actively involved in the commerce and politics of Beirut, offering resistance to the governor of Sidon. It is more than likely that Pillavoine confused the muftī with Fatḥ Allāhs from another family that was indeed deeply involved in the commerce of the city.¹³⁵ But there was more to the position of Beirut than the supposedly strong hand of its muftī.

Beirut was officially part of Sulaymān Pasha’s realm. Some thirty-five years earlier al-Jazzār had wrested it from the Druze and claimed it in the name of the Ottoman government. The Druze had never given up hope that one day they might be able to reclaim it. For that reason they seem to have backed any attempt of the Beirutis to preserve their independence from the pasha in Acre—as, for instance, their successful refusal to let troops of the pasha enter the city. Through a series of circumstances Beirut found itself in a vague, ill-defined political space which permitted a maximum of independence. Pillavoine was not wrong when he described it as “une République de négociants qui ont leur force et leur loix”¹³⁶ [a republic of merchants who have their power and their law]. This observation stands in stark contrast to the remarks made a year later about Acre, where, due to the monopoly control of the pasha, “il n’y a point de négociants arabes”¹³⁷ [there exist no Arab merchants whatsoever] and, one might add, no foreign merchants either. No wonder, then, that Pillavoine suggested after his visit to Beirut that the French consular office should be transferred from Acre to Beirut.

How much the trade had shifted to the north was not necessarily visible in Acre as long as the Continental System worked. Having the primary producers and trade under tight control, the pasha could make enormous profits in the illegal export trade of grain. Even after the Continental System had collapsed Sulaymān Pasha was able to turn the vast supplies in his granaries into handsome profit by shipments to Istanbul and then nearby in 1816, when famine struck all of Syria. In contrast to Aḥmad Pasha al-Jazzār, and reflecting the greater integration of the region into the European world system, Sulaymān Pasha was well informed about events and markets in Europe. With the end of the Continental System he realized that grain was no longer going to be profitable. He shifted back to cotton, which had been the major cash crop before the grain boom. In order to catch the season he even, when necessary, sent soldiers to the villages, forcing the peasants to plow the grain under and plant cotton.¹³⁸

But cotton from the Syrian coast was not in demand any more. Harvests could be good, but often no buyers could be found, partially because the prices demanded by the pasha were often higher than those for American cotton.¹³⁹ Eventually less cotton was grown and by 1821 the trade in Acre was described as dead, although the monopolies persisted.¹⁴⁰ Sulaymān Pasha’s successor was the protégé of Ḥaim Farhī, ‘Abdallāh Pasha. A rash young man with little interest in the economics of his realm, he continued the policy of monopolies, later selling off monopoly rights when he was in financial straits. His appointment had cost huge sums for buying influence in Istanbul. ‘Abdallāh Pasha proceeded to have his patron and benefactor liquidated and thus lost his most brilliant administrator and financial wizard. The subsequent lengthy siege of Acre by the pashas of Damascus and Aleppo brought trade to a standstill. The pasha of Acre was able to survive this assault on his power. Catafago became more powerful than ever as the sole manager of the monopoly system. How difficult it is to be more precise about the actual role of Catafago can be shown with the statistical material we have at our disposal concerning exports: the French records show for 1819 total exports of 4,000 quintaux of cotton from Acre.¹⁴¹ Rogan has found in Catafago’s records that in 1819 he exported 85,000 rotes, or 850 quintaux, of raw cotton and in 1821, a year for which no French records exist, 320 quintaux.¹⁴² Apart from the extremely complicated question which rotes and which quintaux are meant, connotating what particular and comparable weight,¹⁴³ we are not certain whether Catafago’s export dealings were included in the French records or whether they were additional transactions. Neither can we actually document what role he played in the other export activities. What the Catafago records seem to confirm is that trade was highly irregular, which is not surprising given the political events and the siege of Acre in 1822. Trade seems to have significantly diminished in the 1820s. Eventually ‘Abdallāh Pasha was forced to raise cash by breaking with his collaborator Catafago and demanding all the jewelry of the latter’s wife and daughters plus gold coins.¹⁴⁴ ‘Abdallāh Pasha, unable to control Beirut, even tried to buy his way into its commerce by pressuring the ten richest merchants in Beirut, five Christians and five Muslims, to form a commercial society with him in which he invested 250,000 francs. The society was soon swindled out of considerable amounts and collapsed.¹⁴⁵ After the French consul had already once withdrawn from Acre to Cyprus during the siege in the early 1820s, the consular office was moved from Acre to Beirut following the death of the consul Regnault in 1827, a step which Pillavoine had suggested fourteen years earlier¹⁴⁶ and which actually had been imminent for twenty years.

A look at the imports to Damascus during the second half of 1824 sheds light from a different angle on the relative positions of Acre and Beirut.¹⁴⁷ In that year the value of merchandise imported from Beirut was already more than ten times that from Acre; and while every two months a caravan from Acre reached Damascus, one came every week from Beirut. The statistics confirm what anecdotal observations had yielded ten and fifteen years earlier: Beirut had become the major port of imports for the markets of Syria. The statistics also hint at a future development: some 40 percent of all imports to Damascus, consisting almost completely of European merchandise, came overland from Izmir and Istanbul. With the introduction of steamships all this traffic would go by sea to Beirut, by then already established as the predominant port on the Syrian coast. But even before the arrival of steamships some twenty rich merchants from Damascus doing trade with Cairo, Istanbul, and Izmir had, by 1828, established agencies in Beirut to cut down transportation costs.¹⁴⁸

Thanks to the work of Fawaz, Abu Manneh, Khairallah, and others we have today a fairly good idea about the process of Beirut’s dramatic rise from a village to the largest port on the Syrian coast.¹⁴⁹ The population growth, alone, was unparalleled on the Syrian coast in the nineteenth century. From some 6,000 inhabitants around 1820 the population increased twenty-fivefold to 150,000 in 1905.¹⁵⁰ While Haifa grew in approximately the same period from 2,000 to only 20,000,¹⁵¹ Acre, with approximately 10,000 to 15,000 inhabitants in 1820, dipped to about 2,000 in 1849 and regained in 1887 a level of only around 10,000 inhabitants.¹⁵² We are familiar with the introduction of the steamship traffic and its effect on the permanent linkage of Beirut to the European economy; we know of the implications of road building between Damascus and Beirut and of their later linkage by railway, of the construction and enlarging of the harbor, of recurring waves of immigrants, of the added role of Beirut as a provincial administrative center in the Ottoman Empire and as a center of education. All these were factors causing or contributing to the growth of Beirut and mutually reinforcing their own development.

The various aspects analyzed in these studies answer well to the typical question of the historian. It is the ex post factum question to answer the factum. With hindsight we know that Beirut experienced dramatic development in the nineteenth century, and as historians we will study and analyze all those factors that contributed to this development until we can finally present a chain of events linking cause and consequence logically and providing the result which we already knew beforehand: Beirut’s development. For the observer in the early nineteenth century the question would have posed itself very differently. All experience of the then recent past, all experience of the first two decades of the nineteenth century seemed to promise the continued importance of Acre as the predominant port city on the Syrian coast. For the contemporary observer it would have been unexpected, even illogical, that Acre should lose this role. The real question at the time would have been: Why then did Beirut grow in the nineteenth century and not Acre or Haifa?

A brief glance at the map tells us that on the whole length of the Syrian coast only the bay of Haifa and the bay of Beirut provided the natural conditions for a safe harbor, protecting ships, especially in the winter, from Mediterranean storms. Both bays were a reasonable distance from the all-important markets of Damascus. It is true that, as the crow flies, Beirut is closer to Damascus than Haifa, but for beasts of burden to move in caravan through the valleys of Galilee and the plains south of Damascus was arguably swifter and easier than scaling the mountain passes of the Lebanon and Anti-Lebanon. The geographical argument for the advantages of a link between Damascus and the bay of Haifa is reinforced by political considerations: while the route via Mount Lebanon passed through the region of the indomitable and unpredictable Druze, the route through the Galilee had been secured since the middle of the eighteenth century by Ẓāhīr al-‘Umar. The successive rulers of Acre, Aḥmad Pasha al-Jazzār, Sulaymān al-‘Ādil, and ‘Abdallāh Pasha, were certainly more oppressive than Ẓāhīr al-‘Umar, but this did not diminish the safety of travelers and transport of goods in their ever-expanding realm. Apart from short outbursts of warfare the safety of travelers and caravans was maintained in the area until the Egyptian occupation. Moreover, at the turn of the century the pashaliks of Sidon and Damascus were repeatedly held by the same pasha and thus politically united.¹⁵³ Finally, and perhaps most important, is the fact that throughout the eighteenth century Acre, at the northern tip of the Haifa bay, had already developed into the most important port and commercial center on the Syrian coast and the third largest city of Syria after Damascus and Aleppo. Admittedly, the port of Acre itself was rather small and unprotected but it is easily conceivable that the southern end of the bay where ships sought protection from winter storms could have developed into the major port facility. Given these geographical, political, and commercial conditions, what would have been more likely than the development of Haifa and/or Acre into the main port for Damascus and the Syrian hinterland? But this did not happen and, in fact, Acre withered away, never again to regain the role it had played in the eighteenth century.

To conclude, differences in geographic and physical conditions do not adequately answer the question: Why Beirut rather than the Acre/Haifa bay? The causes for the development of Beirut in the nineteenth century, even as Acre had been the dominant port in the eighteenth century, are to be found in the politics of economy. They were Acre’s great fortune but also its limitation, and can be summarized in one word: monopoly. As we have observed earlier, government monopolies over certain branches of production or over certain goods were not unknown in Islamic history. But while governments were interested in collecting custom fees on commerce and tax on agrarian production they were rarely willing to control directly and manage themselves any branch of the economy. In the Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire no economic monopolies had existed. The policies in Acre constituted an innovation. Not only were government monopolies reintroduced after a very long hiatus, but they also were applied to an extent previously unknown in Islamic history.

It would be no exaggeration to claim that in Acre and its realm a political regime developed out of an economic opportunity, which it appropriated to sustain its power. The almost insatiable European demand for cotton in the eighteenth century and British demands for grain during the Continental System constituted the wealth upon which Acre’s position rested. It might have been advantageous for profits when the shrewd merchant Ẓāhīr al-‘Umar tried to monopolize the sale of cotton to the French. It apparently still seemed advantageous when the succeeding or later Mamluk rulers followed the same pattern of doing business. But their very success in establishing monopolistic control over all branches of trade—import as well as export, and with it their successful prevention of the development of any indigenous merchant class—reduced Acre to a one-cash-crop export harbor managed by a government administration. When that particular crop was no longer in high demand in Europe or could not be delivered because of internal turbulence in Acre’s hinterland, commerce in Acre came to a halt and so did the flow of revenues of the rulers. An indigenous merchant class might have looked for new markets and goods. The typical reaction of the Mamluk rulers at that point was, however, to tighten the fiscal screws on the primary producers to the point of counterproductivity and thus to throw the whole economy into a downward spiral.

It was precisely the somewhat undefined political situation of Beirut at the beginning of the nineteenth century, a certain vagueness as to political authority, that provided the conditions if not for a “république des négociants” then certainly those for a merchant class to flourish and to do business. The merchants could not, as the rulers of Acre did for a time, dictate prices to the producers or the European merchants. They had to orient themselves to the markets and were therefore much more competitive in the long run. The merchants of Beirut were a loosely cooperating group and the fate of commerce in Beirut did not depend on any single individual or any single decision as it did in Acre. This enhanced not only their competitiveness but also their flexibility to adapt to changing trade patterns, merchandise, and markets.

Acre’s apparent political might never had a chance against this “republic of merchants” that emerged during the first two decades of the nineteenth century in Beirut.