Acre: The Rise and Fall of a Palestinian City, 1730

The city of Acre on the Syrian coast was once a famous Crusader stronghold. In the centuries following the Crusades the city had slipped into oblivion, and by the time of the Ottoman conquest, Acre was a collection of ruins in which only a few Arab fishermen found shelter. But in the eighteenth century Acre witnessed a dramatic rise in its fortunes, making it in 1785 the third largest city in Syria—after Aleppo and Damascus—and the largest port on the Syrian coast. By that time it had become the capital of a major politically integrated area in southwest Syria. Acre was the key to the first region in the eastern Mediterranean that was tied into the modern world economy.

The rise of Acre from a fishing village to an important fortified port city of perhaps 25,000 inhabitants was closely connected with the ever-rising demand for cotton in Europe. Although at the end of the eighteenth century the first signs of decline could be seen in Acre and its hinterland, another boom phase followed with highly profitable grain exports to Britain during the Napoleonic Wars. Thereafter the political and economic decline continued despite the persisting European demand for cotton and grain.

One aim of this study is to reconstruct the history of a region. This region does not fit easily into the history of any one of the provinces of the Ottoman administration. It is not the history of either the vilayet of Sidon or that of Damascus, though both provinces provide the context for this region. Minorities of all sorts play a considerable role in this region, but it is not a history of sects that is to be told here. Most certainly this regional history cannot be described in retrospectively superimposed terms such as “Syria” or “Palestine.”¹ Although Acre plays a pivotal role in the story, it is not simply the history of a city that is to be presented here. The region in question consisted of Acre and its realm, whose limits were constantly changing but always included at least the Galilee and some of the coast north and south of the city. It was a region that for a brief time formed a political and economic entity, quite independent from the Ottoman central government, not fitting its administrative borders, and differing widely from such anachronistic categories as “Palestine.” Discussing the rise of Izmir some 150 years earlier, Goffman writes: “The economic transformation of the Ottoman Empire had loosened administrative ties between agricultural regions and Istanbul and created other authorities to whom a foreign state could address grievances, thus enabling natural economic centers, such as Izmir, to develop without the constraints of a highly centralized administration.”² Doumani discusses Nablus and its hinterland during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in similar terms: “Scores of roughly similar regions filled the interior of the vast and multiethnic Ottoman Empire and surrounded each of its few large international trading cities, like a sea around an island. These discrete regions were located at one and the same time at the material core and the political periphery of the Ottoman world.”³

Perhaps it can help us in our understanding to visualize the internal situation of the Ottoman Empire since the seventeenth century as a loose arrangement of a great number of more or less autonomous cities, each with its hinterland. It certainly would be going too far to speak of “city-states.” This would be to gravely understate the legitimacy and authority, both ideological and physical, that the empire enjoyed even at its weakest moments in the eighteenth century. Acre became one of the “economic centers.” Unlike Nablus, Damascus, and other inland cities, it was not a “discrete region known for centuries.”⁴ It was rather like Izmir, a frontier city and society. Izmir’s economic rise occurred close to the political center of a still relatively well-integrated empire, and although it enjoyed great economic autonomy there was no talk of political autonomy. Acre, developing 150 years later, did so in the context of a dramatically and visibly weakened empire and very much on what was then the empire’s geographical periphery. Not only for local notables but also for representatives of the Ottoman ruling class, the option of political autonomy—if not independence—became a very real and tempting one, especially since during the last quarter of the eighteenth century Acre also began to play a role in international politics.

This is a local history of the first region in the Arab East to be inextricably linked to the modern European world economy. Only the highly profitable export of cash crops—first cotton, then grain—made it possible for Acre to become, for a short century, from 1730 to 1831, the largest center of trade and political power on the Syrian coast and the third largest city in geographic Syria.

During the eighteenth century the weakness of the empire and the central government became apparent to all. Not only did the European powers witness the disastrous defeats of the Ottoman armies, but the people in the provinces of the empire sensed the growing inability of the central government to project its power. By the middle of the eighteenth century, in Damascus, the end of the Ottoman dynasty was at least imaginable, if not thought of as likely.⁵ Foreign powers would soon interfere directly in the politics of the Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire. During this period of political decline the ever-growing demands of European markets linked the economy of the empire to Europe in new ways. Under political and economic pressure the geographic structure of commerce shifted; the merchandise changed as new agricultural products were exported to new markets; and the social structure of commerce changed as new groups of merchants engaged in trade. This twofold process of political decay at the center and increasing European economic penetration was accompanied by a third process. Local power centers sprang up, and limited regional integration, political and/or economic, took place.

In the Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire the effects of these changes took two different forms. On the one hand, traditional power centers, long submerged under central imperial rule, resurfaced again during the eighteenth century. Examples include the consolidation of dynastic power of the local al-‘Azm family in Damascus and the rise to power of the Neo-Mamluks in Cairo, ruling over an Egypt independent in all but name. In both cases, the political weakness of the central government was a decisive factor in letting old political structures reemerge. On the other hand, new centers of gravity developed, integrating economically whole regions in new configurations and linking them to European markets. Developments in the Mount Lebanon region point in this direction; silk became an important cash crop here during the eighteenth century, and the process of political consolidation and regional integration started in the early nineteenth century. The Mount Nablus region in Palestine was integrated into the world economy in a similar fashion during the nineteenth century.⁶

After the Crusades Acre had never again been a center of political or administrative, let alone economic, power. Yet it was to become the center of the first region in the Arab provinces touched profoundly by new European demands for raw materials. During the eighteenth century cotton provided the economic base for the importance of Acre and the might of its rulers, while grain played that role in the first two decades of the nineteenth. Here the process of regional integration and political autonomy was fueled exclusively by the new opportunities for wealth that the linkage of the region to the European-dominated world economy offered. The tie to international markets could convert local cash crops into economic and political power for local rulers.

The rise of Acre and the integration of its hinterland into an autonomous region must also be seen in the context of the overall shift of the location of economic activity and political power in the Syrian region from inland to the coastal area and in the concomitant change of commercial patterns and networks.

As long ago as the end of the fifteenth century a revival of trade and a renewal of the economy had begun in the Syrian region. Aleppo became the most important emporium for merchandise from Central Asia, Iran, the Persian Gulf, and South Asia. Merchants from France, England, Venice, and Holland settled in Aleppo, and the city soon became the third largest in the Ottoman Empire. During the seventeenth century the English were the most important traders in Aleppo, mainly exchanging their wool cloths for silk. Silk, one of the major items of trade in Aleppo, was imported from Persia.

Damascus gained its commercial importance as the starting point for the annual pilgrimage caravan to Mecca. On the way back, merchandise from South Arabia, eastern Africa, and India was brought to Damascus. Probably because of the specifically religious character of the pilgrimage, Europeans and minorities played an insignificant role in this trade.

This economic structure of the Syrian region, in which long-distance transit trade via Damascus and Aleppo, Alexandretta, and Anatolia was the dominant feature, changed profoundly during the eighteenth century. The silk trade with Aleppo lost its importance, not because England’s demand for silk diminished but because more convenient supply sources were found.⁷ Simultaneously, Aleppo lost its main supplier of silk with the disintegration of Safavid Iran.

During the same period we can observe a revival of French trade in the Levant. Originally this was the result of Colbert’s reorganization of the Chamber of Commerce of Marseilles, but soon the rapidly increasing French demand for silk and raw cotton became the driving force behind the revival. By the middle of the eighteenth century the French had replaced the British as the most important European commercial power in Aleppo. Earlier and more important, however, was the development of French trade with the Syrian coastal cities from Jaffa to Tripoli. In the hinterland of these port cities silk and cotton cultivation increased steadily. The crops could be sold directly to the French in the coastal towns, bypassing Aleppo. The economic center of gravity moved slowly from inland Syria to the coastal lands of the southwest. Long-distance trade lost some of its importance, and local cultivation of cash crops became a significant economic factor.

The overall framework of these distinct but related processes—the decay of central power in the Ottoman Empire, the concomitant rise of local power centers on the periphery, the early integration of some Arab regions into the European-dominated world economy, and the shift of economic activity and commercial gains from the Syrian inland area to the coastal regions—provides the context for the history of Acre and its hinterland during the period. The history of this particular region gains its meaning from this context, and only within this context can relevant questions be addressed regarding local history.

It is easy to understand that the revenue from cotton or grain exports could finance the military expenses of local rulers who thereby could obtain considerable power. But this obvious link aside, how did the new sources of wealth and new patterns of commerce mesh with traditional forms of political power and social organization? Or were these at all “traditional forms of political power and social organization”? When Masters, for instance, discusses the changes from a traditional to a Western-dominated economy in Aleppo,⁸ he starts out with a tradition of political rule, social formation, and commercial interaction in Aleppo. But Acre is a highly atypical case of urban history in Syria. It was a new foundation, settled by immigrants in the eighteenth century. The city came into being even as the new commercial linkage to Europe developed. Much of the hinterland, too, was settled only during this time by immigrants coming from various directions and for different reasons. In this sense we do not have to do with a traditional society, however defined. Might it be more appropriate to speak of a “frontier society”? Was this society subjected to traditional patterns of political rule? If so, which? Was it Mamluk households, tribal power, local alliances of important families? Did new classes develop under the circumstances of an immigrant society and new commercial needs? Why did the cotton trade with France, profitable for all participants, come to an end? How did cotton come to be such an important cash crop in the region? And finally, why did Acre, after such propitious beginnings in the eighteenth century, which made it the center of export trade on the Syrian coast and of political and military power strong enough to defy Napoleon’s army, give way to the dazzling rise of Beirut in the nineteenth century?

This last set of questions revolves largely around another salient feature of life in Acre during the period: the policy of economic monopolies. Such monopolistic interference by the government in the economy with regard to the production and/or marketing of certain goods was not entirely unknown in Islamic history, but it would be difficult to find another example where this policy became as all-pervasive and dominant as in Acre. It took another two generations before Muḥammad ‘Alī of Egypt would apply monopoly policies in an even more rigorous fashion. Then, too, the export of raw materials to world markets—especially grain and cotton—would become pivotal.

In trying to reconstruct the history of this region and to answer some of the questions raised here, we are helped by a great variety of primary sources. At the same time students and researchers are faced with considerable lacunae in our information and a dearth of scholarly work.

Fortunately we have at our disposal a host of local histories written in Arabic by eyewitnesses,⁹ among them two accounts of Ẓāhir al-‘Umar’s life¹⁰ and a most detailed history of the rule of Sulaymān Pasha.¹¹ They were, together with Aḥmad Pasha al-Jazzār, the three important rulers of Acre, controlling its fate from 1740 to 1819. But, curiously, no comparable account exists for Aḥmad Pasha al-Jazzār.¹²

These accounts abound with information on the political and administrative history of the region and the men who shaped it. They also provide some systematic reporting on sectarian history and a mass of incidental or anecdotal information on social life, families, worldviews and values, and daily life. I have argued elsewhere¹³ that the appearance at the turn of the eighteenth century of a group of regional historians—mainly, but not exclusively, Greek Catholics and typically educated sons of prosperous merchant families—was in itself an expression of the profound changes the region underwent during this time. Read with the critical eye of comparative analysis, these reports yield an enormous amount of information.

A second set of sources is useful precisely on issues that the local histories gloss over or provide only incidental glimpses into; the economy and, in particular, agriculture and commerce with Europe. Here the French consular correspondence from Acre and Sidon,¹⁴ and also from Tripoli, Aleppo, and Rosetta, are of great value. Commerce was the main topic. Here we find detailed reports on the interaction of French merchants with local potentates, powerful administrators, Arab traders, and the peasants of the hinterland. Considerable, but never complete, statistical evidence for the economy and international export commerce can be reconstructed from the consular reports, though there was hardly any direct reporting on the state of agriculture. Depending on the individual consul and the circumstances, we also find detailed memos on political events, which are usefully juxtaposed with the accounts from other sources.

The copious travel literature to the Holy Land and Syria must be looked at cautiously. It shares all the weaknesses of general travel literature—exaggerations, search for the exotic, superficial impressions, copying of other travelers’ writings, strictly personal viewpoints, etc. Yet there are the occasional superb reports by travelers, lending an outsider’s keen eye to the observation of local circumstances. Critical analysis of the travelers’ texts can provide insights on a large variety of issues.

The Ottoman archives concerning the region have been extensively used in A. Cohen’s work on Palestine in the eighteenth century. They concern mainly fiscal, tax, and administrative affairs and relations to the central government.

Sorely missing from the list of archives are any local archives in Acre: the sijillāt of the courts, for instance, or private materials. Intensive search for the sijillāt of the period has not provided any clue to their possible whereabouts. If they were not destroyed during the Israeli conquest of Acre in 1948, they are likely to have been destroyed during the British bombardment in 1840, or that of the Egyptians in 1831, or the French siege in 1799, or perhaps during an earthquake.

Secondary and scholarly literature on the topic yields very uneven results. There has been a considerable outpouring of research on Ottoman Palestine,¹⁵ almost all of which is concerned with nineteenth-century history. A recent boom of research on urban history in Syria, from Damascus and Aleppo to Beirut, Jerusalem, and Jaffa,¹⁶ has been most helpful in formulating some of the questions raised in the present study, though not yielding any concrete materials for the history of Acre and its hinterland. Very little scholarly work exists on the region itself during the eighteenth century. An early attempt was Uriel Heyd’s small study on Ẓāhīr al-‘Umar, and Doumani’s study of the Nablus region has now been added. But Doumani’s period is much more the nineteenth century and his focus Nablus, with Acre appearing at the periphery. Also of recent date is a history of Acre by N. Shūr. It is a narrative account of Acre through the ages until the present, relying heavily on European histories and travel accounts. The only extensive work on the topic of the present study is A. Cohen’s Palestine in the Eighteenth Century, by now a classic. As mentioned before, Cohen has made extensive use of the Ottoman archives; administrative and fiscal affairs and relations to the central government were his main concern, and he succeeded in providing a wealth of material and analysis. The conceptual framework “Palestine” sits awkwardly, since it is neither an administrative nor a fiscal entity and Cohen has to move around, treating the two vilayets of Damascus and Sidon in addition to the sancaḳ of Jerusalem. I have relied on his very thorough research wherever appropriate.