Beirut and Damascus
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries Hajj Isma‘il Arafat, great-grandson of Shaykh Abd al-Razzaq’s brother, Muhammad, shared a number of similarities with his ancestors. Like them, he was a textile merchant who owned shops in Khan al-Tujjar and who catered primarily to the mass market. Unlike them, he bought and sold primarily Syrian and British textiles, as opposed to Egyptian ones; his regional network came to be organized differently, especially in terms of credit arrangements; and his capital-accumulation strategy was diversified when he bought a soap factory from Mahmud Hashim, thus sinking a significant proportion of the family’s resources into the burgeoning soap industry.[75]
Hajj Isma‘il first wife, Aysha Arafat, was said to be a very beautiful woman. She died young, but not before bearing her husband two sons: Ahmad and Amr. The older son, Ahmad, eventually established his own textile shop in the western end of Khan al-Tujjar, where he sold the same types of goods as did his father. The younger son, Shaykh Amr, married Wasfiyya Hashim, granddaughter of the above-mentioned Mahmud Hashim. Her father, Husayn Hashim, was a textile merchant and one-time mufti of Nablus. Shaykh Amr became a well-respected religious scholar, having studied at al-Azhar University in Cairo and in Istanbul. He worked as a judge in Nablus until 1912/1913, then built a soap factory and continued in the soap business until 1950, when he retired.
After the death of his first wife, Hajj Isma‘il remarried, this time a woman from the Sadder family of soap and textile merchants. His second wife bore him five sons. Hammad, the oldest of the five, took over his father’s textile shops and worked there along with his younger brothers. According to Najib Arafat, Hajj Isma‘il’s youngest son (b. 1901):
I worked with textiles since I opened my eyes. We bought goods from Beirut, Aleppo, Damascus, Jaffa, and Jerusalem. Aside from Syrian manufactures, most goods came from England, though we had a variety. Myfather had two shops that faced each other east to west in the Wikala al-Farrukhiyya. Each shop was two stories high. The second story was reserved mostly for tailors who rented the space from us. A peasant would come to us, and if he wanted his piece tailored, we would send it upstairs and the tailor would get his fee from the peasant directly.[76]
Najib’s recollections are supported by detailed information about the same period contained in the memoirs of Muhammad Izzat Darwaza, whose father, like Hajj Isma‘il, owned a textile shop in Khan al-Tujjar and catered primarily to the mass peasant market. During his childhood, Darwaza recalled:
The import of [textile] goods from the outside was, for the most part, through Beirut and Damascus. From Beirut came a variety of foreign clothes, whether cotton, wool, or silk. From Damascus came the domestically made [wataniyya] textiles and manufactures. These were popular to the point that almost all the clothes of peasants and middle and lower urban classes were made of it from head to toe. The exceptions were the white cotton cloth called baft and the off-white cloth that was called malti or mansuri or kham, from which shirts and baggy pants [sarawil] were made and with which Damascene textiles were lined. [Mansuri cloth] came mostly from British lands and was also used as quilts and bed covers. Some types of baft [cloth] were dyed with indigo blue in local factories and made into clothes by peasants and bedouin.[77]
In short, whereas Shaykh Abd al-Razzaq’s regional trade network was oriented primarily south, toward Egypt, that of Hajj Isma‘il and his sons pointed north, toward Damascus and Beirut. The causes and timing of this shift are familiar. By the early nineteenth century, European (primarily British) machine-produced textiles began to carve out a large market share in Greater Syria—a process enhanced by the lowering of tariffs and the abolition of monopolies after the free-trade Anglo-Ottoman Commercial Convention was signed in 1838. Most of these goods were imported through Beirut, which was fast becoming the principal port of entry for Greater Syria, or through the coastal cities of Jaffa and Haifa.
On the regional level, the direction of commercial flow was influenced by Ottoman centralization during the Tanzimat period, which tied Jabal Nablus ever closer, politically and economically, to the body politic of Greater Syria. In addition, infrastructural projects and services initiated during the second half of the nineteenth century—such as expanded ports, steamships, carriage roads, railroads, and telegraph lines—facilitated transportation and communication between Damascus, Beirut, and other cities and towns in this region. Regional and local factors also played a role. One such factor was the ability of the Damascene textile-manufacturing sector to restructure in the face of European competition.[78] As the above two accounts suggest, the Damascene textile industry survived, albeit much changed. This can be seen in the ways in which English, Damascene, and local textiles were literally woven together into a variety of finished products. Regional textile manufacturers not only were able to maintain a market share in the surrounding areas but also expanded that share as Damascene and Beiruti merchant capital extended more deeply into the Palestinian interior.
A second important difference was that whereas Shaykh Abd al-Razzaq and his brothers usually formed joint business ventures with a number of other textile merchant families and employed agents in Cairo, Damietta, and Jaffa, Hajj Isma‘il and his sons, like most other textile merchants in Nablus, operated individually for the most part. One reason for this change, aside from better and safer communication, was the greater accumulation and concentration of merchant capital over the course of the nineteenth century (see Chapter 5).[79] This allowed well-to-do textile merchants in Nablus to raise the necessary initial capital without recourse to partners. A third difference was that textile merchants no longer invested as much capital in the finishing stages of production, such as dyeing and weaving. Imported fabrics were sold as is, and tailoring either was done by the merchant and his family or was contracted out.
The fourth difference was that the textile merchants of Nablus found it more and more difficult to compete with the few but much richer Beiruti and Damascene families who came to dominate regional trade in Greater Syria. Eventually they were subordinated to the position of middlemen between the large trade houses in Beirut and Damascus and the peasantry in Jabal Nablus. Thus, instead of employing agents, each merchant had his private account with these trade houses. Largely due to a more favorable legal and political climate and to more rapid and more efficient transportation by the late nineteenth century, both Beiruti and Damascene merchants acquired the confidence and ability to extend numerous credit lines to smaller merchants in the interior cities and towns. Over time, Beiruti merchants—as well as those of other port cities, such as Jaffa and Haifa—succeeded in establishing themselves as the indispensable go-betweens for the import/export trade with Europe. Large Damascene textile merchants, meanwhile, doubled as manufacturers of textiles geared for the mass regional market and developed their own trademarks.
The following account of what probably was a typical business trip by Nabulsi textile merchants to Beirut and Damascus, also culled from Darwaza’s memoirs, best illustrates the general points made above.[80] At least once a year, Nabulsi merchants went personally to choose the types of goods they needed to stock their shops and to negotiate prices. The trip to Jaffa, Beirut, and Damascus, and back became easier and quicker with time. To Jaffa, the trip took only a few hours by carriage, compared to a day and a half on a mule before roads for wheeled transport were paved. From this ancient port city, Nabulsi merchants traveled on ships to Beirut. The first morning in that bustling city—after eating breakfast, drinking coffee, and smoking water pipes at Hajj Dawud’s cafe, one of their favorite haunts in al-Burj Square—they trekked to Suq al-Tawila, the heart of the textile commercial sector in Beirut, especially for foreign-manufactured goods. There, Nabulsi merchants visited one warehouse after another, chose fabrics, and bargained over prices.
Those who had sufficient capital paid on the spot and received a discount as a bonus. The majority, however, depended on loans from Beiruti merchants, who advanced the capital with interest. At the conclusion of each deal the materials were sent to one or another of the warehouses owned by these merchants who were called jarrida (from the verb jarada: to take stock or to make an inventory). In Beirut, Nabulsi merchants usually relied on people such as Musbah Qraytim and on others from the Zu‘ni, Sharif, and Ghandur families.
In addition to advancing loans and providing storage facilities, the jarrida arranged for packaging and shipping—for a fee, of course. Specialized workers (akkamin) packed the cloth into bundles (farda or hazma), secured them with a thin rope (massis), and sent the goods via boat to Jaffa, where they were received by employees of the Beirut merchants, not agents of Nabulsi ones. From Jaffa, camel transporters—often the group called harafisha[81]—moved the goods to Nablus.
After finishing their business in Beirut, Nabulsi textile merchants traveled to Damascus, where they repeated the pattern, but with some important differences. First, there is no doubt that Nabulsi merchants felt much more at home in the conservative, traditional atmosphere of a sister interior city and that they established close personal relations with the merchants who supplied them with the goods. This was especially true for the Damascene Haffar family, who were friends with Hajj Isma‘il Arafat and his children and grandchildren, as well as with the Darwaza and Masri families, among others.[82]
The jarrida of Damascus differed from their Beirut counterparts in that they doubled as manufacturers who operated their own production facilities, each with a distinct trademark that became well known in Nablus.[83] For example, in a letter to Isma‘il Arafat, a villager named Uthman Abd al-Wahhab requested dima cloth of the “Haffari” kind, in reference to the Haffar family.[84] It was also in Damascus that Nabulsi merchants were most likely to find cloth made in Aleppo, Mosul, Baghdad, and India. The majority of Damascene textiles exported to Nablus consisted of a large variety of cotton and cotton/silk materials—especially dima cloth—all of which were used to make the most common male outergarment, the qunbaz. Otherwise, Damascene agents fulfilled the same basic economic function: they advanced credit with interest and arranged for storage, packaging, and shipping. From Damascus, textile goods were shipped overland by camel transporters, usually by residents of the Hauran region.
To collect their credit advances, the jarrida of Beirut and Damascus employed agents in Nablus who kept abreast of the retail market and collected on a weekly basis. The Haffars’ office, for example, was conveniently located in Khan al-Tujjar. The length of the repayment period depended on how fast the Nablus textile merchants were able to sell their goods. Payment, according to Darwaza, was usually made in the form of gold coins, which were sent to Damascus and Beirut through the postal service. Occasionally there were disputes, and the jarrida had to visit Nablus personally and collect their debt through lawsuits.
For example, on December 27, 1862, the following lawsuit by a Damascene against two Nabulsi merchants was registered in the Nablus Islamic Court:
On August 20, 1862, the honorable Rashid Agha Jabri the Damascene proved that he was owed the sum of 34,530 piasters by Ahmad Masri and his brother, Muhammad Masri.…Yet, since that date, they have stubbornly refused to pay the rest of the debt they owed.…Rashid Agha appeared before the court and testified that [the defendants] had commercial inventories and requested that the court order these inventories to be sold in order to pay back the debt. The aforementioned were brought to court and ordered to pay back the debt and to sell the inventories.[85]
Debt-collection cases of this kind began to appear in the Nablus Islamic Court registers only after the mid-nineteenth century. The same can be said about cases in which Nabulsi merchants brought peasants into the city to appear before the court on debt charges. Both developments stand in stark contrast to the period before Ottoman troops regained direct control of the region. Then, Nabulsi merchants in general and foreign merchants in particular would have found it extremely difficult to approach these matters directly, much less to enforce the collection of debts through the urban administrative and legal apparatus. Instead, they found it more convenient to rely on the leading political families of Nablus to for leverage. An example is a receipt, dated April 20, 1837, found among the private papers of the Nimr family. Signed by Sayyid Abd al-Ghani son of Sayyid Ali al-Sawwaf (wool dealer), this receipt was sent from Damascus to Ahmad Agha Nimr, scion of the Nimr family at the time and head of the local sipahis:
I…testify that in the month of February 1837 I turned over promissory notes, owed to me by debtors, to Ahmad Agha Nimr to cash the full amount [5,500 piasters] and to buy us soap with it. The above-mentioned…sent us the soap, and it arrived in…Damascus by way of his agent, Shaykh Sulayman al-Banna.…Ahmad Agha Nimr owes us nothing whatsoever [whether it be] in account, safekeeping, or debt.[86]
Unlike the Haffar family, this Damascene merchant, who probably supplied woolens to Nablus textile traders, had neither agents to collect his money in gold nor even, perhaps, the expectation that he could collect his debt personally. Rather, he depended on the services of one of the locally powerful political families. The latter’s payment was not in cash but in soap. Part of the reason for this arrangement was that soap was akin to liquid capital because of the high demand for it in Damascus and the opportunity it afforded the Damascene merchant to resell at a profit.[87] Payment in soap also benefited Ahmad Agha Nimr. First, he owned a soap factory, and this arrangement included a hidden profit in that it assured a sale for his own products. Second, he did not have to actually wait for the debtors to pay what they owed before shipping the soap. Instead, he could reschedule the debts and collect further interest or reach a variety of other arrangements with the debtors, most of whom were no doubt familiar to him.
Of course, it is very possible that the Masri brothers simply ignored the court order. Nevertheless, the very recourse of that merchant to the Nablus court implies that the contrary could also be expected. Thus, whereas earlier a local politically powerful person had been indispensable for the circulation of merchant capital, the new political climate allowed merchants to bypass these families, at least in the first stages of the debt-collection process. This development might not have been beneficial to all merchants, especially the smaller ones, because even though the previous debt-collection arrangements were informal and were precariously dependent on personal contacts, they had the advantage of being more flexible: money, as it were, was mediated through a number of cultural/political filters that refracted the cold and impersonal letter of the law.The establishment of an enforceable administrative/legal framework—such as the Advisory Council, commercial courts, and a more centralized Ottoman bureaucracy—significantly raised the power of large merchants over retailers and peasants. The power of money was now less fettered with personal ties, boding ill for the weak, the poor, and the unlucky, who could not avoid the debt traps or seek protection from their former patrons.
The changing patterns of regional trade in textiles and credit-collection arrangements are important indicators of how the integration of Jabal Nablus into the world and regional economies was actually experienced during the nineteenth century. True, the Arafats continued their work as textile merchants generation after generation, but the content of what it meant to be such a merchant changed perceptibly after the mid-nineteenth century. The environment of trade was slowly transformed, the bulk of connections shifted northward from Egypt to Syria, and even the products themselves became different as foreign manufactures established a foothold in the local markets. Nabulsi textile merchants, in general, became less important players in the regional trade in textiles, as indicated by the declining significance of soap to imports and by the growing domination of this market by merchant families from the port cities and from Damascus.
Urban-rural relations, not the wider world of regional networks, were the center of consciousness for most of the people in Jabal Nablus, though they were all affected to varying degrees by forces beyond their control. To dig more deeply into the culture of trade and the systems of meanings it helped create, therefore, we must examine the other side of the coin: how the Arafats and other textile merchants constructed and reproduced the local trade networks through which they marketed their goods among the peasantry in the surrounding hinterland. Here continuity, tradition, and personal connections were of even greater importance. Consequently, local networks were more deeply rooted than regional ones and less vulnerable to the winds of change.