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

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Juan Cole

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Selma Botman

Engendering Citizenship in Egypt

ACRE

THE RISE AND FALL OF A PALESTINIAN CITY, 1730–1831

THOMAS PHILIPP

    COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS    NEW YORK

Columbia University Press

Publishers Since 1893

New York    Chichester, West Sussex

cup.columbia.edu

Copyright © 2001 Columbia University Press

All rights reserved

E-ISBN 978-0-231-50603-8

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Thomas, Philipp.

Acre : the rise and fall of a Palestinian city, 1730–1831 / Philipp Thomas.

  p. cm.—(History and society of the modern Middle East series)

Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.

ISBN 0-231-12326-4 (cloth ; alk. paper)—ISBN 0-231-12327-2 (pbk. : alk. paper)

1. Acre (Israel)—History—18th century. 2. Acre (Israel)—History—19th century. 3. Palestine—History—1799–1917. I. Title. II. Series.

DS110.A3 T44 2002

956.94'5—dc21

2001047080

A Columbia University Press E-book.

CUP would be pleased to hear about your reading experience with this e-book at cup-ebook@columbia.edu.

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

CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Introduction

1.  Southwest Syria in the Eighteenth Century: Highways, Sea Lanes, and Populations

2.  The Politics of Acre

3.  Trade: Local Rulers and the World Economy

4.  Government: The Military and Administration

5.  Society and Its Structure in Acre

Concluding Observations

APPENDIX A. The Population of Acre

APPENDIX B. Trade: Tables and Figures

APPENDIX C. Administrative Positions and Their Occupants

APPENDIX D. Maps

NOTES

TRANSLATIONS

BIBLIOGRAPHY

INDEX

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

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, André 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.

INTRODUCTION

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 Syria—after Aleppo and Damascus—and 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.¹ Although Acre plays a pivotal role in the story, it is not simply the history of a city that is to be presented here. The region in question consisted of Acre and its realm, whose limits were constantly changing but always included at least the Galilee and some of the coast north and south of the city. It was a region that for a brief time formed a political and economic entity, quite independent from the Ottoman central government, not fitting its administrative borders, and differing widely from such anachronistic categories as Palestine. Discussing the rise of Izmir some 150 years earlier, Goffman writes: The economic transformation of the Ottoman Empire had loosened administrative ties between agricultural regions and Istanbul and created other authorities to whom a foreign state could address grievances, thus enabling natural economic centers, such as Izmir, to develop without the constraints of a highly centralized administration.² Doumani discusses Nablus and its hinterland during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in similar terms: Scores of roughly similar regions filled the interior of the vast and multiethnic Ottoman Empire and surrounded each of its few large international trading cities, like a sea around an island. These discrete regions were located at one and the same time at the material core and the political periphery of the Ottoman world.³

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.⁴ It was rather like Izmir, a frontier city and society. Izmir’s 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 empire’s geographical periphery. Not only for local notables but also for representatives of the Ottoman ruling class, the option of political autonomy—if not independence—became 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 crops—first cotton, then grain—made 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.⁵ 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.⁶

After the Crusades Acre had never again been a center of political or administrative, let alone economic, power. Yet it was to become the center of the first region in the Arab provinces touched profoundly by new European demands for raw materials. During the eighteenth century cotton provided the economic base for the importance of Acre and the might of its rulers, while grain played that role in the first two decades of the nineteenth. Here the process of regional integration and political autonomy was fueled exclusively by the new opportunities for wealth that the linkage of the region to the European-dominated world economy offered. The tie to international markets could convert local cash crops into economic and political power for local rulers.

The rise of Acre and the integration of its hinterland into an autonomous region must also be seen in the context of the overall shift of the location of economic activity and political power in the Syrian region from inland to the coastal area and in the concomitant change of commercial patterns and networks.

As long ago as the end of the fifteenth century a revival of trade and a renewal of the economy had begun in the Syrian region. Aleppo became the most important emporium for merchandise from Central Asia, Iran, the Persian Gulf, and South Asia. Merchants from France, England, Venice, and Holland settled in Aleppo, and the city soon became the third largest in the Ottoman Empire. During the seventeenth century the English were the most important traders in Aleppo, mainly exchanging their wool cloths for silk. Silk, one of the major items of trade in Aleppo, was imported from Persia.

Damascus gained its commercial importance as the starting point for the annual pilgrimage caravan to Mecca. On the way back, merchandise from South Arabia, eastern Africa, and India was brought to Damascus. Probably because of the specifically religious character of the pilgrimage, Europeans and minorities played an insignificant role in this trade.

This economic structure of the Syrian region, in which long-distance transit trade via Damascus and Aleppo, Alexandretta, and Anatolia was the dominant feature, changed profoundly during the eighteenth century. The silk trade with Aleppo lost its importance, not because England’s demand for silk diminished but because more convenient supply sources were found.⁷ Simultaneously, Aleppo lost its main supplier of silk with the disintegration of Safavid Iran.

During the same period we can observe a revival of French trade in the Levant. Originally this was the result of Colbert’s reorganization of the Chamber of Commerce of Marseilles, but soon the rapidly increasing French demand for silk and raw cotton became the driving force behind the revival. By the middle of the eighteenth century the French had replaced the British as the most important European commercial power in Aleppo. Earlier and more important, however, was the development of French trade with the Syrian coastal cities from Jaffa to Tripoli. In the hinterland of these port cities silk and cotton cultivation increased steadily. The crops could be sold directly to the French in the coastal towns, bypassing Aleppo. The economic center of gravity moved slowly from inland Syria to the coastal lands of the southwest. Long-distance trade lost some of its importance, and local cultivation of cash crops became a significant economic factor.

The overall framework of these distinct but related processes—the decay of central power in the Ottoman Empire, the concomitant rise of local power centers on the periphery, the early integration of some Arab regions into the European-dominated world economy, and the shift of economic activity and commercial gains from the Syrian inland area to the coastal regions—provides the context for the history of Acre and its hinterland during the period. The history of this particular region gains its meaning from this context, and only within this context can relevant questions be addressed regarding local history.

It is easy to understand that the revenue from cotton or grain exports could finance the military expenses of local rulers who thereby could obtain considerable power. But this obvious link aside, how did the new sources of wealth and new patterns of commerce mesh with traditional forms of political power and social organization? Or were these at all traditional forms of political power and social organization? When Masters, for instance, discusses the changes from a traditional to a Western-dominated economy in Aleppo,⁸ he starts out with a tradition of political rule, social formation, and commercial interaction in Aleppo. But Acre is a highly atypical case of urban history in Syria. It was a new foundation, settled by immigrants in the eighteenth century. The city came into being even as the new commercial linkage to Europe developed. Much of the hinterland, too, was settled only during this time by immigrants coming from various directions and for different reasons. In this sense we do not have to do with a traditional society, however defined. Might it be more appropriate to speak of a frontier society? Was this society subjected to traditional patterns of political rule? If so, which? Was it Mamluk households, tribal power, local alliances of important families? Did new classes develop under the circumstances of an immigrant society and new commercial needs? Why did the cotton trade with France, profitable for all participants, come to an end? How did cotton come to be such an important cash crop in the region? And finally, why did Acre, after such propitious beginnings in the eighteenth century, which made it the center of export trade on the Syrian coast and of political and military power strong enough to defy Napoleon’s army, give way to the dazzling rise of Beirut in the nineteenth century?

This last set of questions revolves largely around another salient feature of life in Acre during the period: the policy of economic monopolies. Such monopolistic interference by the government in the economy with regard to the production and/or marketing of certain goods was not entirely unknown in Islamic history, but it would be difficult to find another example where this policy became as all-pervasive and dominant as in Acre. It took another two generations before Muḥammad ‘Alī of Egypt would apply monopoly policies in an even more rigorous fashion. Then, too, the export of raw materials to world markets—especially grain and cotton—would become pivotal.

In trying to reconstruct the history of this region and to answer some of the questions raised here, we are helped by a great variety of primary sources. At the same time students and researchers are faced with considerable lacunae in our information and a dearth of scholarly work.

Fortunately we have at our disposal a host of local histories written in Arabic by eyewitnesses,⁹ among them two accounts of Ẓāhir al-‘Umar’s life¹⁰ and a most detailed history of the rule of Sulaymān Pasha.¹¹ They were, together with Aḥmad Pasha al-Jazzār, the three important rulers of Acre, controlling its fate from 1740 to 1819. But, curiously, no comparable account exists for Aḥmad Pasha al-Jazzār.¹²

These accounts abound with information on the political and administrative history of the region and the men who shaped it. They also provide some systematic reporting on sectarian history and a mass of incidental or anecdotal information on social life, families, worldviews and values, and daily life. I have argued elsewhere¹³ that the appearance at the turn of the eighteenth century of a group of regional historians—mainly, but not exclusively, Greek Catholics and typically educated sons of prosperous merchant families—was in itself an expression of the profound changes the region underwent during this time. Read with the critical eye of comparative analysis, these reports yield an enormous amount of information.

A second set of sources is useful precisely on issues that the local histories gloss over or provide only incidental glimpses into; the economy and, in particular, agriculture and commerce with Europe. Here the French consular correspondence from Acre and Sidon,¹⁴ and also from Tripoli, Aleppo, and Rosetta, are of great value. Commerce was the main topic. Here we find detailed reports on the interaction of French merchants with local potentates, powerful administrators, Arab traders, and the peasants of the hinterland. Considerable, but never complete, statistical evidence for the economy and international export commerce can be reconstructed from the consular reports, though there was hardly any direct reporting on the state of agriculture. Depending on the individual consul and the circumstances, we also find detailed memos on political events, which are usefully juxtaposed with the accounts from other sources.

The copious travel literature to the Holy Land and Syria must be looked at cautiously. It shares all the weaknesses of general travel literature—exaggerations, search for the exotic, superficial impressions, copying of other travelers’ writings, strictly personal viewpoints, etc. Yet there are the occasional superb reports by travelers, lending an outsider’s keen eye to the observation of local circumstances. Critical analysis of the travelers’ texts can provide insights on a large variety of issues.

The Ottoman archives concerning the region have been extensively used in A. Cohen’s work on Palestine in the eighteenth century. They concern mainly fiscal, tax, and administrative affairs and relations to the central government.

Sorely missing from the list of archives are any local archives in Acre: the sijillāt of the courts, for instance, or private materials. Intensive search for the sijillāt of the period has not provided any clue to their possible whereabouts. If they were not destroyed during the Israeli conquest of Acre in 1948, they are likely to have been destroyed during the British bombardment in 1840, or that of the Egyptians in 1831, or the French siege in 1799, or perhaps during an earthquake.

Secondary and scholarly literature on the topic yields very uneven results. There has been a considerable outpouring of research on Ottoman Palestine,¹⁵ almost all of which is concerned with nineteenth-century history. A recent boom of research on urban history in Syria, from Damascus and Aleppo to Beirut, Jerusalem, and Jaffa,¹⁶ has been most helpful in formulating some of the questions raised in the present study, though not yielding any concrete materials for the history of Acre and its hinterland. Very little scholarly work exists on the region itself during the eighteenth century. An early attempt was Uriel Heyd’s small study on Ẓāhīr al-‘Umar, and Doumani’s study of the Nablus region has now been added. But Doumani’s period is much more the nineteenth century and his focus Nablus, with Acre appearing at the periphery. Also of recent date is a history of Acre by N. Shūr. It is a narrative account of Acre through the ages until the present, relying heavily on European histories and travel accounts. The only extensive work on the topic of the present study is A. Cohen’s Palestine in the Eighteenth Century, by now a classic. As mentioned before, Cohen has made extensive use of the Ottoman archives; administrative and fiscal affairs and relations to the central government were his main concern, and he succeeded in providing a wealth of material and analysis. The conceptual framework Palestine sits awkwardly, since it is neither an administrative nor a fiscal entity and Cohen has to move around, treating the two vilayets of Damascus and Sidon in addition to the sancaḳ of Jerusalem. I have relied on his very thorough research wherever appropriate.

The main focus of the present study is on Acre and its hinterland as a political and economic entity, regardless of Ottoman administrative borders. The development of the regional history during the period is seen in close relation to its economic links with Europe. The goal is to provide a more meaningful framework and one that is more relevant.

Note: Throughout this volume we have provided English translations to passages in a foreign language. Short translations appear in brackets in the text. Longer passages are identified with an asterisk indicating that the translation appears at the back of the book (pp. 267 ff.).

CHAPTER 1

SOUTHWEST SYRIA IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY: HIGHWAYS, SEA LANES, AND POPULATIONS

The Arab lands of the eastern Mediterranean region had first been incorporated into the Ottoman Empire at the beginning of the sixteenth century. The Syrian region between the Taurus Mountains and the Sinai Peninsula—known to its inhabitants and neighbors as Bilād al-Shām, usually translated as the Geographic Syria or the Land of Syria—fulfilled an essential function in the imperial strategy of Istanbul. The region insured the overland link to the rich province of Egypt for an empire in which the use of maritime connections always remained of secondary importance. With the city of Damascus, Syria also provided the base for the annual pilgrimage to Mecca, the successful management of which added legitimacy to Ottoman rule. Aleppo became the third largest city of the empire as the entrepôt of commerce from all points east and, of course, as the conduit of trade from Arabia and Egypt via Damascus to the north. Finally, considerable importance was attached to Jerusalem as the third holiest city of Islam. The spinal cord holding these centers of economic and cultural activity together was the great north-south axis, the highway coming from the north via Aleppo, connecting to Damascus and eventually to Mecca in the south. A branch-off from Damascus to the southwest provided links to Jerusalem and Egypt. The coastal towns, on the other hand, had lost their importance, and, as far as we can judge, the coastal regions were only very thinly populated. Links between the coast and the hinterland were rare and precarious. Some of these features of infrastructure and demography began to change in the eighteenth century. A short introductory description of the main characteristics of these conditions and an interpretation of the trends and direction of changes in these patterns, especially as they pertained to the situation in southwest Syria, follows.

HIGHWAYS AND SEA LANES

The changes in the physical web of communications in southwest Syria during the eighteenth century and until the Egyptian invasion of 1831 closely reflected the changes in political conditions and economic circumstances of the area. New technical needs or technological and material improvements, however, hardly played a role.

At the beginning of the century there existed a fairly simple set of long-distance highways, which fulfilled two main functions, religious and commercial, as carriers of pilgrimage and trade. Coming from the north, a major road, traveled by merchants as well as pilgrims, connected Aleppo to Damascus. After Damascus the highway bifurcated, one branch going directly south to the Hejaz carrying the same sort of traffic, and the other one turning southwest, crossing the Jordan at the Bridge of Jacob’s Daughters, continuing to Janīn and from there to Ramla and Jaffa, and finally overland via Gaza to Egypt or, occasionally, by sea to Damiette. The route from Damascus to Egypt served mainly commercial interests. A minor route branched off at Nablus to Jerusalem and via Hebron to Gaza. No major traffic went through the western Galilee. Along the coast local shipping—not roads—carried the traffic.¹

Over the century the infrastructure of the area was to become more complex in pattern, reflecting the growth of new political and commercial centers. The routes of the pilgrimage were perhaps least influenced by such changes, as their functions and destination remained the same.²

The two Ḥajj routes of interest to us here are well established and documented and need no more discussion. As routes with a specialized function, they had such specific features as well-spaced rest stations and fortifications to insure the safety of the pilgrims.³ For our general discussion about the infrastructure and integration of Bilād al-Shām it is of interest to note how the sancaḳ of Gaza and Ramla were integrated into the Syrian province: although closer to ‘Aqaba, which the Egyptian pilgrimage caravan regularly passed, the sancaḳ had to send financial contributions to the pilgrimage caravan starting from Damascus and even provide men to guard it.⁴

Although the major purpose of the pilgrimage route was religious, it always played an important role for international trade. But only once, with the Wahhabi advances toward Syria at the beginning of the nineteenth century, was the pilgrimage route south of Damascus used as a major military avenue.

A certain curiosity value can be attached to the attempt of the Copts to establish a regular pilgrimage to Jerusalem in 1753. Since they hired Bedouins, they presumably wanted to cross the Sinai to Gaza. But the pilgrimage that started with much pomp was interdicted by the ‘ulamā’ for fear that the Copts would want to compete with the Ḥajj.⁵

A more regular feature was the pilgrimage of European Christians who would usually arrive by ship in Jaffa and continue from there to Jerusalem. From Jerusalem they would venture on short excursions to such sites as Bethlehem or Jericho, security conditions permitting.⁶

Trade routes⁷ overlapped to a certain degree with pilgrimage routes or military highways. Merchandise was transported either by beasts of burden or by ship. Sea lanes played a much more important role for trade than they did for military purposes. Throughout the period there existed a very active coastal shipping connecting all the ports from Damiette to Jaffa, Acre, Tyre, Sidon, Beirut, Tripoli, and Cyprus. The shipping business was in the hands of individual entrepreneurs of various religious and ethnic backgrounds.⁸ As long as Maltese pirates constituted a threat along the coast, French tramps had an edge over others in the business as did shippers of the Greek Catholic Arabic-speaking community, as their certified Catholicism secured a certain measure of protection from Maltese piracy.⁹ The coastal trade was one of the major north-south trade links in the area. Wood from Mount Lebanon was shipped via Beirut and Jaffa to Jerusalem; silk went via Beirut to Sidon or Acre, from where it was exported to Marseilles. Wood and soap went to Egypt via Jaffa and Damiette, while rice from the latter port was shipped to Acre.

Trade with Europe shifted during the eighteenth century. Originally most trade went via Alexandretta or Tripoli to Aleppo and fed directly into long-distance trade routes connecting to Iran, the Hejaz, and beyond. Though the trade with the Hejaz continued to play an important role, by the early eighteenth century Iran had sunk into political chaos, and the important trade in silk and silk textiles from Iran to Aleppo ceased. The French silk industry had to look for new sources of silk supplies. By mid-century Acre became the focal point of European—that is to say, almost exclusively French—trade in the eastern Mediterranean. Increasing trade with raw materials linked Marseilles directly with Acre and the immediate hinterland in the Galilee and Mount Lebanon, from where locally cultivated cotton and silk were brought to Acre for export. With the limited exception of rice shipped from Damiette, no other trade routes fed into this overseas trade.

East-west links, albeit rather weak ones, between the inland trade routes and the coastal shipping lanes existed at several points: from Damascus a road went via the Biqā‘a to Sidon and also to Beirut. Damascus was also linked to the coast via Tiberias, and Nazareth to Acre. Ẓāhīr al-‘Umar, who was to become the founder of Acre as the new center for export trade, had started his career as a trader between Tiberias and Damascus. Further south, Nablus was connected via Nazareth to Acre and via Ramla to Jaffa. There is hardly any evidence that commercial traffic ran directly between Jerusalem and the coast; the link between Hebron and Gaza also seems to have been a tenuous one. Worth mentioning, too, is the fact that all trade from Palestine went—via the Bridge of Jacob’s Daughters, north of Lake Tiberias—to Damascus. No commercial connections existed with other points east of the Jordan, unless we count the occasional plundering of pilgrim caravans by Bedouins and the sale of that merchandise smuggled into the Galilee as commercial activities.¹⁰

From the middle of the eighteenth century there existed three major trading networks: the traditional one linking long-distance international trade from the Indian Ocean via the Hejaz to Damascus and Aleppo, the latter being also the entrepôt for merchandise from Iran; a local trade connecting the Syrian coast with Egypt and trading traditional items such as wood, soap, and tobacco from southwest Syria for rice, skins, and wheat from Egypt, and the newly developed export trade of raw materials from the immediate coastal region via Acre to France. Apart from some items such as alkali from the Balqā’, or rice from Damiette, neither the traditional local trade nor the traditional long-distance trade meshed with this new export trade of cotton and silk from the coastal hinterland. Silk and cotton were brought directly from the villages to Acre, Sidon, or Beirut and shipped from there. Thus the above-mentioned east-west trading links from inland were not significantly strengthened. This disconnectedness of the trading networks might also explain, at least partially, why connecting highways between Damascus and Acre, Nablus, Jerusalem, and Jaffa, etc. remained in such bad repair. The flow of trade depended on markets and producers, and also shifted with the political circumstances. When, for instance, Iran sank into chaos with the end of Safavid rule in the eighteenth century, silk exports to Aleppo ceased. This led to the decay of British trade in Aleppo, but also to an expansion of silk production in Lebanon, bought mainly by the French. The coffee trade from Yemen to the Syrian coast had lost its importance and had been replaced by imports from the British or French colonies. When, late in the eighteenth century, the Wahhabis began to attack the pilgrimage caravan, the trade of Damascus suffered. On the other hand, periods of unrest in Aleppo caused many merchants residing there to relocate to Damascus. In this sense, politics of course played a major role in the economics and the trade of the region. But what is conspicuously absent is any conscious, comprehensive economic policy of the government, not to mention any attempt to introduce government monopolies on all or any goods. Neither did the Ottoman government take any measures to direct the flow of trade or the production of goods by maintaining, let alone developing, the infrastructure of the region—the only exception being the route of the pilgrimage caravan to Mecca.

The rise of Acre, its fortification as a seaport, and the systematic attempt of its rulers to impose an all-pervasive economic monopoly policy was a radical break with the existing patterns. As we shall see, this policy had far-reaching implications for the geographic stretch of Acre and its realm, for the structure of society in Acre, and for the fate of other port cities such as Jaffa, Sidon and, most important, Beirut.

Soldiers, pilgrims, and merchants usually travel along known highways. Their movements follow certain recurring patterns, well defined by the purpose and destination of their journeys. In some ways the movements of individual travelers, be they tourists, government agents, individual pilgrims, or all of the above, are more difficult to summarize in patterns. Individual traveling adapts rapidly to changing circumstances and road conditions. Factors such as safety, expenditure, and road quality are quickly responded to. Fortunately for our period a considerable number of European travelers arrived in what was usually called Syria and the Holy Land. Most often they were tourists and pilgrims at the same time and were keen to put down their experiences in writing. Their reports—together with those of traveling scholars from Egypt or Damascus, or of government representatives and messengers from Istanbul—tell us a great deal about the changing conditions of the road network.

The first observation we can make is that even for the purpose of tourism travel was not as individual as all that.