Egypt

The estates of Shaykh Abd al-Razzaq, his brother Abdullah (registered in 1805), and the former’s grandson, Sa‘id (d. 1847), contained a wide variety of textiles: dima,saya, and a host of other goods from Damascus; locally manufactured products, such as thiyab baladi; the fez (tarbush) from North Africa; silk from Beirut; alaja from Damascus and Aleppo; malti (also called mansuri and baft) from England, cashmere from India; and various items from Hama, Anatolia, Mosul, Baghdad, and Istanbul.^[61] But in terms of volume and value, their estates—like those of most other wholesale textile merchants who operated during the eighteenth century and first half of the nineteenth centuries—were dominated by the words dimyati,ziftawi,wati,ashmuni,mahallawi,sirsawi and mawaldi—all of which refer to specific regions in Egypt, such as Ashmun, Damietta (Dimyat), Mahalla, and Zifta.^[62] These were imported in large bundles (farda), consisting of long bolts of cloth that were dyed and tailored in Nablus.

The general outlines of how the textile trade networks with Egypt were organized can be gleaned from a lawsuit dated August 7, 1812.^[63] The beneficiaries of the inheritance estates of Shaykh Abd al-Razzaq Arafat and his brother, Shaykh Hajj Abdullah, were sued, along with five other textile merchants with operations in Egypt, by Sayyid Abdullah Qutub, a resident of Jaffa.^[64] The plaintiff alleged that ten years earlier his father had received goods from Egypt for the above merchants via the port of Jaffa. At that time, the city was under siege by the late Ahmad Pashaal-Jazzar, and circumstances were such that the besieged strongman, Muhammad Pasha, forced the plaintiff’s now-deceased father, SayyidMuhammad Qutub, to pay him the customs and storage costs of the goods. The plaintiff demanded that each defendant pay back his share of the costs, which amounted to 730 piasters, a sum large enough to purchase two buyut at that time.

The defendants, all present in the Nablus Islamic Court, categorically denied the charges and claimed that a letter had previously arrived from Muhammad Pasha in which he testified to having received no moneys for customs and storage from the plaintiff’s father. The judge asked the plaintiff to prove his allegations, but he could produce no witnesses. The lawsuit was dropped.

As this case illustrates, imported Egyptian textiles were usually transported by sea to Jaffa, where they were received by agents for Nabulsi merchants. These agents cleared the goods through the port authorities and arranged for overland transportation. This case also shows that Nabulsi merchants banded together into groups, ranging from full business partnerships to simple joint-shipping agreements. The chief reason for collective arrangements, aside from the need to pool capital, was to share risks, as demonstrated by this very case. Although these political uncertainties complicated regional trade, they were never a serious long-term obstacle to it. The primary reason is that the moneys generated by this trade were crucial to the political strongmen who competed, sometimes violently, for their share of the profits. This is why credit arrangements were both imperative and extensively used: it simply was not practical to move large amounts of cash back and forth across physically and politically dangerous terrain.

It is not a small matter that this lawsuit was initiated in the Nablus Islamic Court ten years after the event—and by the son of the aggrieved party, to boot. The Nablus Islamic Court, one of dozens of similar courts spread all over the vast Ottoman Empire, served as a commonly recognized arena for arbitration. That the plaintiff was able to find these merchants and pursue them after such a long time strongly suggests that his father’s business relationship with them was not a casual one, free of personal connections. In fact, the Qutub family originated from the same Egyptian city, Bilbays, as did the Balbisi and Darwish-Ahmad families—two of whose members were among the defendants.^[65] A branch of the Qutub family resided in Nablus, where they dealt in soap and had business relations with the Arafats and other textile merchants. The use of relatives and acquaintances as agents outside Nablus, in short, imparted resiliency and flexibility to regional networks and facilitated their smooth operation over long distances and under uncertain conditions. Finally, it is not surprising that the defendants did not break rank: they also shared something deeper than just a business relationship or even a common place of origin. As noted above, the defendants belonged to families that were interconnected in a complex web of mutual interests, ranging from co-ownership of shops and residential proximity to marriage ties.

Because long-distance trade with Egypt demanded large initial investments of capital, Nabulsi textile merchants usually pooled their money and sent one or more of the partners to Egypt to make arrangements for the purchase, storage, shipping, and payment.^[66] In Cairo and Damietta, Nabulsi merchants, like their counterparts in Greater Syria as a whole, maintained offices, homes, and warehouses staffed by themselves, their relatives, or local agents.^[67] According to Nimr, Nabulsi merchants preferred to send one of their own instead of depending on local agents,^[68] and the available evidence shows that many Nabulsi merchants lived in Egypt.^[69] Indeed, Nabulsi residents of Egypt sometimes went before the Islamic Court in Cairo or Damietta to transact the sale or purchase of real estate in Nablus or to appoint one of their partners as guardian for their children in case they did not come back alive.^[70] Sudden death, especially while far from Nablus, was usually followed by a number of complicated lawsuits as both family members and business partners sought to protect, if not increase, their share of the deceased’s business properties—often at the expense of vulnerable women and children.

An example is the lengthy dispute that followed the death of a very rich soap merchant, Hajj Hasan Safar. In August 1864 a guardian of one of Hajj Hasan’s sons (who was still in his minority) demanded that the son’s rightful share be paid out of the inheritance estate, which he claimed amounted to 630,000 piasters, according to documents prepared by the judge of Jerusalem.^[71] The defendants tried to lower the actual worth of the estate by outlining a long chain of events that involved the partners and agents of the deceased in Cairo, Jeddah, and Damietta. Their detailed defense confirms that the major market for Nabulsi soap at that time was the city of Cairo, where the deceased had three agents—two from Nablus and one from Egypt. Jeddah and Damietta, in contrast, had only one agent each.

This court case also shows that the agents paid customs on soap received from Nablus and stored it in warehouses. Thereafter, they were free to decide on both the buyers and the timing of the sale, and they made arrangements for the transfer of money to Nablus, as needed. Terribly important—and this was the crux of testimony—was the timing of the sale, which usually meant the difference between a loss and a large profit margin. Hoarding, it seems, was a complicated and risky practice that tested the mettle of the agents, the strength of their knowledgeof the market, and their connections to political figures and other merchants.

The Arafats, of course, were keenly aware of the importance of their agents’ role in the sale of soap in Egypt. This was because most textile merchants, including the Arafats, arranged for the sale of soap in Egypt, the profits from which were used to purchase textiles that were then imported to Nablus. It is no surprise, therefore, that the inheritance estates of Abd al-Razzaq, Abdullah, and Sa‘id Arafat all included significant amounts of soap.^[72] Soap was the critical link in the textile trade with Egypt because this commodity provided Nabulsi textile merchants with a good opportunity to avoid depletion of their liquid capital: instead of transferring cash, they shipped soap that they bought at a low price in Nablus and sold at a high price in Egypt. Soap was the preferred item in this indirect exchange, partly because it fetched a good price, had a long shelf life (which gave flexibility to the crucial timing of sales), and was easy to transport. Most important, Nabulsi soap was much esteemed in Egypt and enjoyed a consistently high demand. The Egyptian market absorbed approximately three-fifths of Palestine’s entire soap production in the 1830s,^[73] and averaged roughly about three-quarters of Nablus’s soap production throughout the Ottoman period.^[74]