Conclusion

Nabulsi soap factories have been transforming oil into soap for hundreds of years, but the nineteenth century stands out as an exceptional period of dynamic growth and expansion. Precisely at a time when the interior regions of the Ottoman domains were falling prey to a new pattern of trade that used coastal cities to suck out raw materials and to heave back imported goods, an ancient manufacturing sector in a small interior city managed to grow and prosper without the introduction of new technology, the development of new techniques, the opening of new markets, or dependence on foreign investment capital. This expansion was organized by interior merchants who secured enormous and ever-increasing amounts of olive oil, who operated far-flung networks, especially with Egypt, Anatolia, and the Arabian Peninsula, and who managed relations with bedouin tribes, peasants, and townsmen on the east bank of the River Jordan, an area the Ottoman government itself did not even minimally control until the last quarter of the nineteenth century.

Just as the expansion of the soap industry was paralleled by a concentration of wealth and by integration of the various factors of production, the boundaries between political power, wealth, and social status were also melting away, turning these once-discrete roads to social mobility into a single avenue in which wealth came to predominate. The infiltration of merchants into the exclusive club of soap-factory owners began before the Egyptian occupation, as did the first sustained phase in the expansion of soap production. The new political atmosphere created in the 1830s and then sustained by a centralizing Ottoman government and its program of reforms helped to crystallize a new composite elite in Jabal Nablus anchored by the merchant community and to shape its world view.

From this perspective, perhaps the most important aspect of the tax strike and the battle over bids for oil collected as taxes-in-kind is that the soap merchants and factory owners of Nablus, despite the heterogeneity of their social backgrounds and their numerous political grudges, put up a united and stubborn political front over an extended period of time. In so doing, they acted remarkably, to borrow Marx’s famous phrase, like a class in itself and for itself.

The exclusive club of soap-factory owners constituted the social core of this composite elite, and the Advisory Council served as its primary political vehicle. Drawing both on Nablus’s long tradition of autonomy and on the exigencies of new economic and political realities, the council members engaged the Ottoman authorities in a discourse which actively sought to contest, filter, and direct the impact of Ottoman reforms in ways that best suited their interests. Both they and the Ottoman government displayed an enviable degree of patience and determination, at least on paper. In many ways this give-and-take process was to continue until 1917, when the British Empire replaced the Ottoman Empire as the ruler of Jabal Nablus.