Space
The main arteries of local trade branched off the regional trade roads and wound through the hills and valleys to the larger villages. These, in turn, served as hubs for the surrounding clusters of smaller villages, two to three hundred in number, depending on the time period and the reach of Nabulsi merchants. Until the construction of carriage roads and railways in the late nineteenth century, movement was slow and difficult. The most prevalent means of local transport was the donkey, and two of the most familiar sights along the well-trodden paths were the pack animals of hired transporters (makaris) and the itinerant merchants (haddars). The makaris, often poor peasants with little or no land, moved goods and people back and forth for a fee. The haddars, usually from Nablus, Jenin, or one of the larger villages, hawked such things as textiles, cooking utensils, and shoes, especially during the harvest season, when they could exchange their goods for grains or olive oil.[88]
The physical network of paths etched on the limestone hills and brown valleys of Jabal Nablus also served as social, economic, and political boundaries for a multitude of local trade networks. The merchants of Nablus—especially the large textile wholesalers and the purchasers of the major agricultural products such as olive oil, cotton, and grains—literally carved the countryside into discrete spheres of influence, each merchant cultivating a thick web of relations with particular clans and villages. For example, Shaykh Abd al-Razzaq Arafat’s peasant customers primarily came from the large but geographically dispersed villages of Kafr Qaddum, Jamma‘in, Til, and Ya‘bad.[89] Those of Hajj Isma‘il Arafat a century later included Kafr Qaddum, Jaba, Tammun, and Dayr Istiya.[90] The most loyal customers of his son, Ahmad, and grandson, Tawfiq, came from Jaba, Silat al-Dhaher, Faqu‘a, and Turmus Ayya. As for Hajj Isma‘il’s five youngest sons who were partners in the textile trade, their business was concentrated in Jaba, Silat al-Dhaher, Sanur, Maythalun, and Bayt Leed.[91] The largest concentration of these villages was in the Mashariq al-Jarrar subdistrict.
A merchant’s access to these villages, as well as his ability to collect debts, depended on his relations not only with their residents but also with ruling families, both rural and urban, who dominated these villages politically and/or had substantial economic interests in them. In the case of the Arafats, this meant close relations with the once-powerful Jarrar clan that had ruled the northeastern part of Jabal Nablus for so long. Judging from letters sent by Ibrahim Khalil Jarrar to Hajj Isma‘il Arafat, it seems that the former was a regular customer around the turn of the twentieth century.[92] On December 26, 1899, for example, Ibrahim Jarrar requested that he be sent, without delay, a caftan and a scarf. After specifying the colors, pattern, and sizes, he recounted moneys sent previously in order to correct any misunderstandings in his account. To this letter, in which he addressed Hajj Isma‘il as “sir” and “our father,” he appended a note that read: “Sir, beware and take care not to hand over anything to my sons unless they have a sealed letter from me”—implying that they sometimes abused this long-standing relationship and ran up their father’s tab.[93]
The division of the hinterland into market shares, to use modern terminology, was not unique to merchants. Jabal Nablus was entangled by dozens of overlapping formal and informal networks: the political networks of urban ruling families and the rural subdistrict chiefs, the fiscal networks of sipahi officers and tax farmers, and the religious networks of Sufi leaders. These networks were not mutually exclusive, and the interaction in the shared spaces between them molded the overall political, cultural, and social landscape and determined the rhythms and dynamics of everyday life. Any major shift in the boundaries of these shared spaces reverberated through the entire social formation of Jabal Nablus, reconfiguring alliances and patterns of power and trade. Such, for example, was the effect of the Egyptian occupation in 1831.
Merchant networks were of the informal type: they neither required official sanction nor depended on the coercive power of the state. Rather, merchants and leading political families cooperated, and increasingly so during the course of the nineteenth century, in such matters as securing roads, enforcing contracts, and extracting debts. To maintain and reproduce their networks, therefore, Nabulsi merchants lent monies and made commercial opportunities available to political leaders. At the same time, they used a variety of economic and extraeconomic means to forge an intimate bond with their peasant clients.
These practices were not unique to Jabal Nablus. Merchant networks that relied on personal ties and patronage were the norm in societies characterized by a vigorous commercial life within the context of decentralized political structures. The most effective way to sustain movement and exchange across space and time in such an environment was through multiple layers of negotiation based on commonly held assumptions and on accountability between the actors. This meant that peasants were not passive actors and that their communities were not simply carved into spheres of influence, as the language above implies. On the contrary, peasants actively participated in the networking process, had choices and options as to what merchants to do business with, and possessed their own bargaining tools, such as nonpayment and relocation.
Economically, the primary link between merchants and peasants was the provision of credit services, given that payment was normally delayed until the harvest season. In addition, each merchant’s shop served as a bank of sorts: peasants could open an account by depositing goods and money, and they could draw on that account and/or ask for credit during subsequent visits. Culturally, we have already discussed the importance of religion, trustworthiness, and a sound reputation to the very meaning of “merchant.” Socially, merchants reinforced their trade networks by serving as the peasant’s “key to the city.” Textile merchants did much more than just sell goods on credit to loyal clients: they were brokers, who provided a wide range of services, as well as social acquaintances. They visited peasants in their villages, attended their weddings, and exchanged favors and gifts.[94] They also provided food and accommodations for their peasant customers visiting the city (that is why there were no boarding houses for peasants in Nablus), intervened on their behalf with other merchants, and offered their stores as a shopping headquarters for their rural clients.
In short, merchants linked culture with social practice and economic exchange to construct a resilient and flexible fiber that wove the various parts of Jabal Nablus into a single fabric and its inhabitants into a single social formation. The above generalizations are best illustrated through a discussion of weddings, because the purchase of textiles associated with this social ritual was the backbone of the textile merchant’s business in the hinterland.