It is customary to say that the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century prosperity of the Ottoman Empire was derived from its control of international trade routes leading toward Europe. From this perspective, the closing years of the sixteenth century are regarded as a turning point. When English merchants entered the Mediterranean and the Dutch established a monopoly over the Moluccan spice trade, the Ottoman state lost its dominant role in world commerce, particularly since Ottoman merchants rarely left the Sultan's domain, and therefore did not control the sources of their trade goods. Loss of customs revenue contributed to fiscal crisis, which in turn led to political turmoil as overtaxed peasants fled their villages (Lewis, 1968, p. 27 ff.). In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (or so it is claimed), world trade would have bypassed the Ottoman Empire entirely if it hadn't been for the transit trade in Iranian silk which continued into the 1730s, and a limited exportation of local grains and cottons, which did not become really significant until the high prices of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. From 1815 onward, the Ottoman Empire increasingly entered the orbit of industrializing Europe as a market for manufactured goods and a source of raw materials, and this state of affairs was made “official” by the signing of the Anglo-Ottoman convention of 1838.

Historiography generally has excluded the “oriental” empires from the competition for world economic power. The Chinese sailed to Africa in the early fifteenth century. Then one day the ships “just stopped coming.” The Mongols “swept” across the steppes for the love of conquest, pastures, space. The Ottoman armies marched to Yemen, Tabriz, Vienna. Yet this marching was somehow instinctual, a reaction of blood, training, temperament. One might suppose that this “oriental” failure to be an economic contender resulted from a state of mind rather than an act of will, a naiveté or an intellectual conceit rather than a lack of the power to compete. Thus, while Eurocentric historiography has not disarmed the Ottomans, it has mentally incapacitated them, thereby dispensing with the need to evaluate economies of conquest and ignoring competition with European states for markets rather than territory.

The literature on merchants and trade in the early modern Middle East is still rudimentary. Although the period witnessed basic changes in trade patterns of the region, there have been very few regional studies addressing the nature of trade and the various groups engaged in it, either from an internal or local perspective or from an international one (Masters, 1988; Raymond, 1984; Abdel-Nour, 1982). For much of the Arab world there is a gap in the literature between Goitein's and Ashtor's works on the Middle Ages on the one hand, and the eighteenth century on the other when northern European companies acquired a strong foothold in the area (Goitein, 1966, 1967; Ashtor, 1978). For Iraq there exist almost no general works on the early Ottoman period and the Iraqi archives remain inaccessible. Thus, any conclusions on trade and merchants in Iraq during this period are by necessity tentative and general. There are a number of issues that can be raised with respect to early modern Iraq, however, which are relevant to the history of early modern trade in general.

Evliya Çelebi is known to historians as an observer of public buildings, such as mosques, medreses and city walls, as a valuable source on languages and dialects and, much too rarely, as an artist of narration. Commerce was not his main area of interest, though when describing Anatolian towns, he paid due attention to covered and open-air markets, to khans and sometimes even to shops. As a member of the Ottoman upper class, he could finance his travels by minor official appointments and did not need to trade—or if he did occasionally engage in buying and selling, he did not discuss these activities in his travel book. But things were somewhat different when at the age of approximately sixty, he undertook the pilgrimage to Mecca. In the caravan from Damascus to Mecca and in the return caravan to Cairo, Evliya did not hold an official position, which means that he had to find his own mounts, equipment and supplies. In the sixteenth century, prominent (vacibûrreayet) personages had sometimes been offered mounts by the Ottoman administration, but by the year 1081/1670-71, when Evliya journeyed to Mecca, grants-in-aid of this kind only covered part of the expenses (Faroqhi, 1990, p. 60). Therefore Evliya acted in the same way as many less prominent pilgrims had done over the centuries, and engaged in trade as a sideline. After the pilgrimage had been completed, he visited Jiddah for the express purpose of buying some bales of coffee, which he proposed to resell in Cairo (Evliya, p. 796).

Present-day Iskenderun (Alexandrette) is a purely modern city. Throughout the pre-Tanzimat period, settlement in this locality was insignificant, and the name of Iskenderun denoted a landing stage (iskele), rather than a town or city. When the traveller Evliya Çelebi passed through Iskenderun in the middle of the seventeenth century, he noted the fact that there was no business district or even shop-lined street, no khan and no public bath (Evliya Çelebi, 1314/1896-97 to 1938, Vol. 3, pp. 46-47; Vol. 9, p. 367 ff.). Moreover, since the few inhabitants were all non-Muslims, there was no mosque, but Evliya did not notice any churches either. Thus seventeenth-century Iskenderun belonged to a very specific category of settlement found in other parts of the Ottoman Empire as well as in medieval northern Europe or seventeenth-century Mexico: very few people lived there permanently, but during the seasonal arrival of ships, the settlements came to life, only to empty again during the “dead season.” In the present study, we will attempt to sketch the commercial activity that went on in Iskenderun during the second half of the seventeenth century and explain why the place, in spite of an advantageous geographical location, did not develop into a town.

In the present paper, we deal with traders who crossed the border between the Ottoman Empire and Iran during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. These merchants are at once a topic of much scholarly debate and virtually unknown. Little trace has survived of their everyday activities, but they are repeatedly mentioned in Niels Steensgaard's well-known work on pedlars and European companies, in which he has analyzed the activities of merchants who confronted two great “protection-producing” and “redistributive” empires, namely the Ottoman and the Safavid, and who also needed to cope with competition from the European regulated companies (Steensgaard, 1974, pp. 22-59). Larger capital resources, advance knowledge of markets, and a commercial organization which enabled traders to take advantage of seasonally low prices were the companies’ advantages, while peddling merchants had but limited resources and were therefore vulnerable.

Anyone who watched the televison coverage of, or read about the African famine some years ago could not help but be appalled by the many obstacles erected to impede the progress of getting food to the starving millions in Ethiopia, Somalia and the Sudan. While it is true that the difficult terrain, an inhospitable climate and the lack of rain were partly responsible for the large-scale spread of famine and dearth in the African sub-continent, it is also true that local governments were responsible for creating impediments to the alleviation of mass hunger and starvation. Governments waging war against secessionist regimes and rebel armies used political means—primarily blockades of grain and other foodstuffs—to starve the enemy forces, creating misery among the military as well as civilian populations in the rebel areas.

Can we see any evidence that the so-called “Great Depression” (c. 1873-1896) had an impact on Syria? This paper investigates the problem by focusing on the Hawran, an important grain-producing area south of the Ottoman provincial capital, Damascus. The Hawran is an open plain, sloping upwards towards the east and nearly enclosed by protecting ravines, valleys and highlands. To the north lies the valley of Wadi ‘Ajam and the well-settled and ostensibly well-controlled Damascene oasis (al-Ghuta). To the west stands Mount Hermon (Jabal al-Shaikh), while the slopes and valleys of the Anti-Lebanese mountains (Jawlan, ‘Ajlun), the Lake of Tiberias (Bahr al-Tabariyya) and the tributaries of the Jordan River and its gorge (Baisan, al-Ghur) present further barriers. To the northeast and east lies a volcanic badlands region of heavily eroded gullies and redoubts (al-Safa, al-Laja') and the hills, known then as Jabal Hawran, now as Jabal al-Druz or Jabal al-'Arab, together with a lava rock field to their east (al-Harra) form a buffer between the plain and the Syrian steppe. To the south the Hawran opens out into the Trans-Jordanian plateau and the Syrian steppe, though gullies and ravines also provide some protection here.

In the second half of the nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries, British entrepreneurs were prominent in all the major sectors of the Izmir economy, forming one of the most important western communities in the city. They played an active role in the city's large commercial sector, not only in imports and exports, but also in complementary sectors such as insurance and maritime transportation. They also participated in money-lending and tax-farming. As the light-industrial sector of Izmir's economy grew, British entrepreneurs took advantage of the new opportunities offered there. They were particularly prominent in sectors that needed large capital resources and technological expertise, such as mining or infrastructure projects. Despite their strong economic presence, at no time did they monopolize any sector. Their dominance in various sectors was constantly challenged and at times checked by strong competition from other capital, both western and local. Nevertheless, the larger British houses attempted to dominate the sector in which they specialized, and constantly diversified their economic activities and patterns of investment. Despite intense competition, the British maintained a primary position in Izmir's economy throughout this period.