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Local and Regional Markets in Ottoman Bilad al-Sham (Syria)

during the 18th and 19th Centuries

James A. Reilly

 

(Department of Near & Middle Eastern Civilizations, University of Toronto)

 

For most of its Ottoman period (1516―1918) Syria did not form an integrated market. Rather, the country was characterized by a network of overlapping local economies each of which centered around a town or a city. Within these local economies production for the market took place. People of towns, villages, and the steppe filled complementary economic niches and traded their goods locally with each other. In addition to being offered in local markets, some products were traded regionally. This regional trade met demand for specialized products from specific locales, products that could not easily be manufactured or grown elsewhere. Finally, long-distance trade in luxury goods offered elite urban merchants and their steppe allies the potential for high profits. Thus local and regional economies in Ottoman Syria displayed a significant market orientation. Such market activities supplemented (but did not replace or displace) basic subsistence-oriented production. Ottoman Syria was not, in other words, a society undergoing an indigenous commercial revolution. When Syria’s capitalist transformation began in the mid-nineteenth century, it did so in the context of the Industrial Revolution and the “imperialism of free trade” with their new demands on (or opportunities for) people depending on their class or social station. This paper explores some of these themes by offering descriptive case-studies of selected local economies in Ottoman Syria, pointing to the similarities and differences among them. Second, the paper identifies contractual arrangements _ written and unwritten _ that underlay manufacturing, agriculture, and trade. Third, where the evidence allows, it discusses the manner in which these pre-capitalist marketing and production arrangements were subsumed into, or transformed by, Syria’s integration into the capitalist world economy from the mid-nineteenth century to the eve of the First World War. The particular data of Ottoman Syria might help to illuminate a general problem in world history, namely the way in which pre-modern or pre-capitalist economic practices and arrangements facilitated or obstructed the integration of Asian and African societies into the modern world economy.