Conclusion

The stories of cotton and textiles shed light on the process of Palestine’s integration into the world economy as well as on the role of local merchants in the changing relationship between politics and trade. The cotton connection shows that the qualitative leap in trade relations with Europe during the 1856–1882 period, which Schölch meticulously documented, was not a sudden development nor solely an outcome of European “penetration,” as he phrased it. Palestinian society was more than ripe for accelerated trade relations with Europe, in large measure because Palestinian merchants and peasants, especially those in the interior, played an active role in preparing the basic social, economic, and political structures that made this leap possible in the first place. The question, therefore, is not one of the emergence of commercial agricultural production as a result of the encounter with Europe. These features were not new, and, in any case, regional trade remained paramount until the last decades of Ottoman rule, at least for interior regions such as Jabal Nablus. Rather, it is one of orientation and acceleration as the Ottoman Empire as a whole became slowly enmeshed in the European economic orbit.

During the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, control of cotton production and trade shifted from Acre to Nablus, but Jabal Nablus’s integration into the world capitalist system was a slow process. Nablus’s location in the interior, its influential merchant community, and its long tradition of jealously guarded autonomy all meant that external political and economic forces were incrementally absorbed and locally reproduced. Also, cotton production was geared to meet the demands of local and regional markets, not just those of French and British merchants. Jabal Nablus, therefore, was not totally vulnerable to shifting European demand. The process of integration was also uneven: cotton was only grown in the coastal areas and the plains. The villages in these areas were more involved in trade with Europe than were the primarily olive-producing villages of the central highlands and the eastern subdistricts.

The political ramifications of the process of integration were similarly uneven. In northern Palestine the cotton trade was subject to monopoly until the early nineteenth century, unlike Jabal Nablus, where merchants competed with each other. Indeed, Nabulsi merchants came to control the organization of production and trade, and they were able to make Nablus the center of cotton processing in Palestine even though the cotton-producing villages were closer to the coastal cities. Firmly anchored by the dense networks of a strong merchant community, Nablus did not experience the radical fluctuations in its economic and demographic structures that Acre did.

Starting in the 1830s, the Egyptian occupation and the Ottoman reforms that followed introduced new administrative and fiscal practices which greatly enhanced state control of the movement of people and commodities. This, combined with greater European economic involvement in the area, especially after the 1838 commercial convention, laid the groundwork for the politics of “free” trade which pitted the merchants of the interior against regional merchants in Beirut and Damascus, European businessmen and their local agents, and an increasingly intrusive Ottoman government that was eager to enhance its access and control of the rural surplus.

Within the context of this new political environment, the politics of “free” trade was analyzed from the perspective of Nabulsi merchants, especially the ways they acted on the new opportunities and constraints. What immediately became clear were the tensions and uncertainties created by the sometimes clashing and other times mutually reinforcing local, regional, and international dynamics. Through their deeply rooted local and regional networks and the Advisory Council, Nabulsi merchants struggled to adjust the new political environment to their favor. Judging from the correspondence of the Advisory Council, the prevailing goals of the merchant community during this period were preserving their control of the movement of commodities, meeting the needs of local manufacturing and regional trade, minimizing state interference while utilizing the legitimacy and protection it afforded them, and keeping out the prying hands of foreign and regional merchants who were willing to offer higher prices and resort to political pressures. In short, the council’s actions sought to take advantage of changing political and economic realities while defending those aspects of the status quo that underpinned their material base.

Although the members of the Advisory Council, in their correspondence, consistently presented this institution as the representative, interpreter, and arbitrator of the larger population, there was, in fact, no clear internal consensus on the place and role of Jabal Nablus during this transitional yet formative period (1840–1860). Some resisted and others embraced the impersonal external forces that pushed and pulled Nablus into the wheel of international commerce. The main beneficiaries were Nabulsis who had capital to spare and who were not so concerned about maintaining the status quo; that is, those who sought quick profits from speculation on the availability and fluctuating prices of agricultural commodities, as well as from serving as agents for foreign and regional traders.

This process of adaptation and restructuring could also been seen clearly in the history of the textile industry, which, though the most vulnerable to foreign competition, showed great resilience and managed to survive well into the twentieth century, albeit much changed. The weaving together, so to speak, of local dynamics with regional and European ones could literally be seen in the ways in which artisans created new textile items using a combination of local and imported materials, as well as in their ability to successfully cater to changing consumer demands. This is not to say that all remained well with the textile industry, nor that the effects of its restructuring were spread evenly throughout Nabulsi society. The stagnation of the textile sector led some to change their investment options and others to encourage their children to seek other types of work. Over time, the accumulation of daily decisions made two commodities the primary focus of merchant capital: olive oil and soap, which, as will be seen in the next two chapters, have a great deal to tell us about the changing political economy and social history of Jabal Nablus.