If the Revolution of Persia has been so astonishing, when taken only in a general View, and according to the very imperfect Ideas we can form of it from the Gazettes and other publick News Papers, we may affirm, it will appear still more amazing, when we come to give a particular Account of the remote Causes and Events that prepar'd the Way to it for above twenty Years…

The history of the mountain hinterland of Sidon and Beirut—the area often referred to as the Druze Mountain—has hitherto been treated mainly as parochial Lebanese history, with inadequate reference to the Ottoman administrative context. Now that Ottoman archival material has become generally accessible, the subject needs to be revised in its light. In so doing one must keep in mind that most Ottoman chancery documents are normally orders issued in Istanbul for the governors of the provinces—in this particular case, the Syrian provinces—which were not necessarily acted upon, but which can serve to indicate the sort of problem that the Ottoman administration faced in a given province, whether or not they tell us what action was actually taken.This means that to attempt a reconstruction of the administrative history of a given Syrian region—or of any region of the far—flung Ottoman realm—purely on the basis of the Ottoman chancery documents, without taking into account what the local chronicles have to say, is bound to leave major parts—sometimes, perhaps, the most significant parts of the story in question—untold. On the other hand, to reconstruct such a history purely from what the chronicles relate, without reference to the official documents of the Ottoman chancery would leave much of the story unexplained or inexplicable. It is only by combining the two that one can gain a full historical picture of the subject under investigation. From this combination, what transpires, in the case of the sanjak of Sidon—Beirut, is an account of repeated Ottoman accommodations to local realities, made at the expense of administrative norms which existed in theory, but whose application in the different parts of the Ottoman world was far from uniform.

As a result of the oil price shocks, the 1979 revolution, and the eight-year war with Iraq, fundamental changes have taken place in Iran's foreign exchange position as well as in its exchange rate policy. The viable data over the period 1979–1980 to 1988–1989 clearly show that, despite the revolutionary rhetoric, very little has been done to reduce the country's dependence on oil exports as a source of foreign exchange and government revenues. Instead, in the face of falling oil revenues and the country's increasing international isolation, coupled with the regime's unwillingness to incur foreign debt, the government has adopted a severe ‘import compression’ policy through selective tariffs and quotas, strict control of private and government imports by means of import licenses, and the imposition of foreign exchange allocations on government agencies. The result has been an ever-rising premium on the U.S. dollar in the ‘black’ market, a highly overvalued official exchange rate, a substantial increase in rent-seeking activities at the expense of production, a severe misallocation of resources, and loss of output and industrial capacity.

Subsidies are a widespread economic practice in most developing countries and in centrally planned economies such as those of Eastern Europe. In the United States and Western Europe, they are generally associated with price support for producers, especially in agriculture. In the less-developed countries (LDCs), subsidies usually support consumers. When extended to producers, the benefit is passed on to consumers through official price controls. The question is whether such price support is the best means available to meet the basic needs strategy of development.

Subsidies in LDCs often begin as measures to help the poor, but they usually expand beyond the target population and constitute by and large a wage supplement for almost all salaried workers.