Thomas Philipp - Acre. The Rise and Fall of a Palestinian City, 1730-1831

ACRE

THE HISTORY AND SOCIETY OF THE MODERN MIDDLE EAST

THE HISTORY AND SOCIETY OF THE MODERN MIDDLE EAST SERIES

Leila Fawaz, General Editor

Janet Afary

The Iranian Constitution, 19061911: Grassroots Democracy, Social Democracy, and the Origins of Feminism

Andrea B. Rugh

Within the Circle: Parents and Children in an Arab Village

Juan Cole

Modernity and the Millennium: The Genesis of the Bahai Faith in the Nineteenth-Century Middle East

Selma Botman

Engendering Citizenship in Egypt

ACRE

THE RISE AND FALL OF A PALESTINIAN CITY, 17301831

THOMAS PHILIPP

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS NEW YORK

To the memory of my father, whose conversations I still miss

CONTENTS

This study has been longer in the making than I care to think of. A grant from the Social Science Research Council supported my research in the archives of the Chamber of Commerce in Marseilles. I am grateful to the Gerda Henkel Stiftung for enabling me to carry out research in Damascus. Many people were at various stages willing to listen to my queries and to give me advice. My special thanks go to Butrus Abu Manneh, Andr Raymond, and Eugene Rogan, who all commented on the project or read parts of the work in progress and gave me much encouragement. Thanks also to the anonymous readers whose recommendations and advice helped me to improve the structure of the book. I am indebted to Mary Starkey and Robert Hemenway for their painstaking efforts to put my English into a readable form and to catch my inconsistencies and errors.

The city of Acre on the Syrian coast was once a famous Crusader stronghold. In the centuries following the Crusades the city had slipped into oblivion, and by the time of the Ottoman conquest, Acre was a collection of ruins in which only a few Arab fishermen found shelter. But in the eighteenth century Acre witnessed a dramatic rise in its fortunes, making it in 1785 the third largest city in Syriaafter Aleppo and Damascusand the largest port on the Syrian coast. By that time it had become the capital of a major politically integrated area in southwest Syria. Acre was the key to the first region in the eastern Mediterranean that was tied into the modern world economy.

The rise of Acre from a fishing village to an important fortified port city of perhaps 25,000 inhabitants was closely connected with the ever-rising demand for cotton in Europe. Although at the end of the eighteenth century the first signs of decline could be seen in Acre and its hinterland, another boom phase followed with highly profitable grain exports to Britain during the Napoleonic Wars. Thereafter the political and economic decline continued despite the persisting European demand for cotton and grain.

One aim of this study is to reconstruct the history of a region. This region does not fit easily into the history of any one of the provinces of the Ottoman administration. It is not the history of either the vilayet of Sidon or that of Damascus, though both provinces provide the context for this region. Minorities of all sorts play a considerable role in this region, but it is not a history of sects that is to be told here. Most certainly this regional history cannot be described in retrospectively superimposed terms such as Syria or Palestine.

Perhaps it can help us in our understanding to visualize the internal situation of the Ottoman Empire since the seventeenth century as a loose arrangement of a great number of more or less autonomous cities, each with its hinterland. It certainly would be going too far to speak of city-states. This would be to gravely understate the legitimacy and authority, both ideological and physical, that the empire enjoyed even at its weakest moments in the eighteenth century. Acre became one of the economic centers. Unlike Nablus, Damascus, and other inland cities, it was not a discrete region known for centuries. It was rather like Izmir, a frontier city and society. Izmirs economic rise occurred close to the political center of a still relatively well-integrated empire, and although it enjoyed great economic autonomy there was no talk of political autonomy. Acre, developing 150 years later, did so in the context of a dramatically and visibly weakened empire and very much on what was then the empires geographical periphery. Not only for local notables but also for representatives of the Ottoman ruling class, the option of political autonomyif not independencebecame a very real and tempting one, especially since during the last quarter of the eighteenth century Acre also began to play a role in international politics.

This is a local history of the first region in the Arab East to be inextricably linked to the modern European world economy. Only the highly profitable export of cash cropsfirst cotton, then grainmade it possible for Acre to become, for a short century, from 1730 to 1831, the largest center of trade and political power on the Syrian coast and the third largest city in geographic Syria.

The rise and fall of Acre in early modern times must be seen against the background of two major processes touching the Ottoman Empire at the time and two further developments emanating largely from the first two.

During the eighteenth century the weakness of the empire and the central government became apparent to all. Not only did the European powers witness the disastrous defeats of the Ottoman armies, but the people in the provinces of the empire sensed the growing inability of the central government to project its power. By the middle of the eighteenth century, in Damascus, the end of the Ottoman dynasty was at least imaginable, if not thought of as likely. Foreign powers would soon interfere directly in the politics of the Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire. During this period of political decline the ever-growing demands of European markets linked the economy of the empire to Europe in new ways. Under political and economic pressure the geographic structure of commerce shifted; the merchandise changed as new agricultural products were exported to new markets; and the social structure of commerce changed as new groups of merchants engaged in trade. This twofold process of political decay at the center and increasing European economic penetration was accompanied by a third process. Local power centers sprang up, and limited regional integration, political and/or economic, took place.

In the Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire the effects of these changes took two different forms. On the one hand, traditional power centers, long submerged under central imperial rule, resurfaced again during the eighteenth century. Examples include the consolidation of dynastic power of the local al-Azm family in Damascus and the rise to power of the Neo-Mamluks in Cairo, ruling over an Egypt independent in all but name. In both cases, the political weakness of the central government was a decisive factor in letting old political structures reemerge. On the other hand, new centers of gravity developed, integrating economically whole regions in new configurations and linking them to European markets. Developments in the Mount Lebanon region point in this direction; silk became an important cash crop here during the eighteenth century, and the process of political consolidation and regional integration started in the early nineteenth century. The Mount Nablus region in Palestine was integrated into the world economy in a similar fashion during the nineteenth century.