Expansion
The Yusufiyya is one of the oldest extant soap factories in Nablus, and it was still being operated in 1994. Located in the Habala quarter next to the Nimr family compound, it was named after Yusuf son of Abdullah Pasha Nimr (d. A.H.1097/A.D.1685–1686), the founding member of the Nimr clan in Nablus. Yusuf was a sipahi officer, a government official, and, later on, an active trader and soap manufacturer.[19] In January 18, 1729, his grandson, Hajj Umar Agha (d. A.H.1182/A.D.1768–1769), endowed one-fourth of the factory as a waqfahli (family endowment). He also endowed one-half of another factory, the Sawwariyya,[20] as well as the Yusufiyya’s copper vat (due to their expense, the large copper vats merited mention as items distinct from each soap factory).[21] As mentioned in Chapter 2, endowing the family’s major residential and revenue-producing properties in perpetuity for the future descendants usually signaled the consolidation of a substantial leap in that family’s fortunes. It also helped protect these properties from arbitrary confiscation, sudden economic downturn in the family’s fortunes, and fragmentation due to inheritance and marriage.
In endowing his share of this property as waqf,Hajj Umar made a choice typical of both previous and future soap-factory owners during the Ottoman period: all, without exception, used this legal mechanism to protect this important form of property from the vicissitudes of political and economic upheavals. Among Hajj Umar’s conditions in the waqf endowment was one which stated that only his sons and their male offspring could benefit from the waqf. His clear intention was to prevent the fragmentation of this property due to inheritance laws and to make sure that other families would not be able to gain shares through marriage to his female descendants. The immediate timing, however, was triggered by an attempt to assassinate him shortly before he endowed the waqf. No doubt he felt an urgent need to protect the Yusufiyya from possible confiscation or internal bickering after his death.[22]
Hajj Umar was the mutasallim of Nablus at the time. He also served as the mutasallim of Jerusalem and Ramla.[23] The other partners in the Yusufiyya were his father, who owned one-half, and his brother Muhammad, who owned the remaining quarter.[24] The copper vat he owned outright. Most soap-factory owners during the seventeenth, eighteenth, and early nineteenth centuries were like the Nimrs: ruling families that could afford the substantial capital investment and that could forge the necessary political and social connections to bring together the various forces and factors of production.
Over the next century the Yusufiyya was consolidated in a single waqf, but we are told that it had fallen into disrepair. In August 1825 Hajj Umar’s grandson, Ahmad Agha, now the superintendent (mutawwali) of the waqf, went to court to ask for permission to renovate the soap factory. He testified that due to lack of maintenance and the ravages of time, the roof of the al-mafrash (the second floor, where the liquid soap was spread to dry) had collapsed, the copper vat was useless, and the building was so full of dirt that it had become “a refuge for dogs.”[25] As standard legal procedure for waqfs dictated, this account was verified through a field visit by the judge, head of the builder’s guild, and other experts. Then, after a formal court hearing, permission was granted for renovation and for the conversion of the expenses into a right-of-use deposit (khuluw mursad), from which the usual rent payment of 15 piasters to the waqf was to be deducted annually.
The application for permission to renovate as well as the inspection were, in reality, only formalities. A detailed work-expense report in the Nimr family papers shows that the repair work actually began two months before the request was put before the court,[26] and the “repairs” included the costly construction of two new storage wells for olive oil.[27] The application, therefore, was a technical step designed to facilitate the legal deduction of the renovation costs from future rent and a political move designed to reaffirm Ahmad Agha’s status as superintendent of the waqf. The primary motivation behind the renovations, however, was an economic one: the desire to expand production through a capital investment.
The investment was substantial. According to the expense report, renovation costs reached approximately 20,000 piasters, many times the average price of an entire soap factory just two decades earlier. The investment was also efficient and profitable: renovations were finished by late January 1825, just in time for the end of the olive-harvest season.[28] By April of 1826 the factory had already made 10,000 piasters in profit from the commission of 21 cooked tabkhas of soap.[29] To put the Yusufiyya’s production during these three short months into perspective, 21 tabkhas amounted to 20 percent more than what had been produced in all of Damascus, a city many times the size of Nablus, ten years later (see Appendix 3, Table 12).
How did Ahmad Agha finance this expansion? Where did he raise the capital to pay for the labor and raw materials necessary to cook so many batches of soap, and why did he decide to expand his production facilities at this time, not before or after? In part the expansion took advantage of a changed political environment. Just two years before Ahmad Agha made his investment, Musa Beik Tuqan had been poisoned, and his long reign finally came to an end.[30] The Nimrs had opposed Musa Tuqan’s centralizing efforts for most of this period and suffered greatly as a result (they were evicted from the city in the early 1820s, though not for very long). Only after Musa Tuqan’s death in 1823, therefore, could the Nimrs (and others) divert their capital to more productive projects. Also, Ahmad Agha’s political position was strengthened in 1825, when he was appointed deputy (wakil) to the mutasallim of Nablus and elected by the local sipahis and za‘ims as their chief (mir’alay).[31]
Economic factors were also at work. Ahmad Agha was neither alone nor a visionary: roughly half of Nablus’s soap factories were renovated by leading families during the 1820s. Their endeavors suggest that in addition to the improved political atmosphere, the market for Nablus soap was expanding and large profits were to be made. In most cases the capital for this investment drive was raised through multiple partnerships. For example, three soap manufacturers from the Akhrami, Amr, and Qaddumi families applied for permission to renovate the Bashawiyya factory (Habala quarter) in exactly the same month and year (August 1825) as Ahmad Agha Nimr’s application.[32] Not as rich or as powerful as the Nimr ruling family, they shared the costs equally, as is apparent from an expense report they submitted five months later (February 1826).[33]
The system of multiple ownerships and partnerships in most soap factories was reproduced here in one of its many forms. On the one hand, the Bashawiyya factory was, as per the usual pattern, completely endowed as waqf. Half of this waqf was part of a larger charitable endowment (waqfkhayri), which supported the Prophet Abraham (nabi Ibrahim ) mosque in Hebron. Two of the partners, Shaykh Amr son of Ahmad Amr and Shaykh Hamid son of Hajj Ahmad Qaddumi, had rented this half in 1820–1821.[34] The other half of the Bashawiyya was part of a family waqf controlled by Sayyid Ahmad Fakhr al-Din Akhrami, a member of the old elite of Nablus. Sayyid Ahmad Fakhr al-Din had also applied for permission to renovate his share of this factory. In fact, three months before this application, in May 1825, he had bought out his brother’s share in the Bashawiyya—that is, the entire matter was planned beforehand to coincide with the efforts of his partners.[35] In addition, he controlled shares in the Uthmaniyya factory (Qaryun quarter), in which he was partners with the Tuqan family.[36] Half of this factory was part of his family’s waqf, and in January 1826 he submitted another application for renovation in his capacity as superintendent.[37]
Another example of expansion at this time, and of how it was financed by multilayered ownership and access rights, is the case of the Sawwariyya factory. In December 1825 Isma‘il son of Muhammad Beik Sawwar, the superintendent of the family’s waqf properties, received permission from the judge to exchange part of these properties (one-third of a garden and a water pool) for 600 piasters in cash for the express purpose of renovating this factory.[38] His partners included Sayyid Ahmad Fakhr al-Din, whose family’s waqf encompassed a share of this factory, and members of the Nimr family who also had a share in their waqf portfolio.[39] Each one of these activities, it remains to be mentioned, was timed to coincide with the olive harvest of that year.
From this first vigorous revival beginning in the latter half of the 1820s, investment in soap factories gathered steam at a steady pace until the early twentieth century. Above-average growth could be detected during the late 1830s/early 1840s and during the 1860s. The first witnessed a strong push by the Abd al-Hadi family and its allies into soap production as they gained control of some factories and rebuilt others. The second period was notable for the building of new factories and the expansion of existing ones by merchants (see below).