Acre by Thomas Philipp

Author:Thomas Philipp
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: HIS026000, History/Middle East/General, HIS019000, History/Middle East/Israel
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2002-03-19T16:00:00+00:00

To conclude, differences in geographic and physical conditions do not adequately answer the question: Why Beirut rather than the Acre/Haifa bay? The causes for the development of Beirut in the nineteenth century, even as Acre had been the dominant port in the eighteenth century, are to be found in the politics of economy. They were Acre’s great fortune but also its limitation, and can be summarized in one word: monopoly. As we have observed earlier, government monopolies over certain branches of production or over certain goods were not unknown in Islamic history. But while governments were interested in collecting custom fees on commerce and tax on agrarian production they were rarely willing to control directly and manage themselves any branch of the economy. In the Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire no economic monopolies had existed. The policies in Acre constituted an innovation. Not only were government monopolies reintroduced after a very long hiatus, but they also were applied to an extent previously unknown in Islamic history.

It would be no exaggeration to claim that in Acre and its realm a political regime developed out of an economic opportunity, which it appropriated to sustain its power. The almost insatiable European demand for cotton in the eighteenth century and British demands for grain during the Continental System constituted the wealth upon which Acre’s position rested. It might have been advantageous for profits when the shrewd merchant Ẓāhīr al-‘Umar tried to monopolize the sale of cotton to the French. It apparently still seemed advantageous when the succeeding or later Mamluk rulers followed the same pattern of doing business. But their very success in establishing monopolistic control over all branches of trade—import as well as export, and with it their successful prevention of the development of any indigenous merchant class—reduced Acre to a one-cash-crop export harbor managed by a government administration. When that particular crop was no longer in high demand in Europe or could not be delivered because of internal turbulence in Acre’s hinterland, commerce in Acre came to a halt and so did the flow of revenues of the rulers. An indigenous merchant class might have looked for new markets and goods. The typical reaction of the Mamluk rulers at that point was, however, to tighten the fiscal screws on the primary producers to the point of counterproductivity and thus to throw the whole economy into a downward spiral.

It was precisely the somewhat undefined political situation of Beirut at the beginning of the nineteenth century, a certain vagueness as to political authority, that provided the conditions if not for a “république des négociants” then certainly those for a merchant class to flourish and to do business. The merchants could not, as the rulers of Acre did for a time, dictate prices to the producers or the European merchants. They had to orient themselves to the markets and were therefore much more competitive in the long run. The merchants of Beirut were a loosely cooperating group and the fate of commerce in Beirut did not depend on any single individual or any single decision as it did in Acre.

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