Artisan Entrepreneurs in Cairo and Early-Modern Capitalism (1600–1800)

By Nelly Hanna

Little has been written about the economic history of Egypt prior to its incorporation into the European capitalist economy. While historians have mined archives and court documents to create a picture of the commercial activities, networks, and infrastructure of merchants during this time, few have documented a similar picture of the artisans and craftspeople. Artisans outnumbered merchants, and their economic weight was considerable, yet details about their lives, the way they carried out their work, and their role or position in the economy are largely unknown. Hanna seeks to redress this gap with Artisan Entrepreneurs in Cairo and Early Modern Capitalism (1600–1800) by locating and exploring the role of artisans in the historical process.

Offering richly detailed portraits as well as an overview of the Ottoman Empire’s economic landscape, Hanna incorporates artisans into the historical development of the period, portraying them in the context of their work, their families, and their social relations. These artisans developed a variety of capitalist practices, both as individuals and collectively in their guilds. Responding to the demands of expanding commercial environments in Egypt and Europe, artisans found ways to adapt both production techniques and the organization of production. Hanna details the ways in which artisans defied the constraints of the guilds and actively engaged in the markets of Europe, demonstrating how Egyptian artisan production was able to compete and survive in a landscape of growing European trade.

Deftly synthesizing a wide range of economic and historical theory, Hanna reinvigorates the current scholarship on early Ottoman history and provides a persuasive challenge to the largely shallow perception of artisans’ role in Egypt’s economy.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Syracuse University Press
• Release date: Jun 16, 2011
• ISBN: 9780815651154

Book preview

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Copyright © 2011 by Syracuse University Press

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ISBN: 978-0-8156-3279-5 (hardcover)978-0-8156-5115-4 (ebook)

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Hanna, Nelly.

Artisan entrepreneurs in Cairo and early-modern capitalism (1600–1800) / Nelly Hanna. — 1st ed.

p. cm. — (Beyond dominant paradigms in the Middle East)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-8156-3279-5 (cloth : alk. paper)

1. Artisans—Egypt—Cairo—History.2. Entrepreneurship—Egypt—Cairo—History.3. Capitalism—Egypt—Cairo—History.4. Egypt—Economic conditions. I. Title.

HD9999.H363E343 2011

331.7'94—dc222011009263

Manufactured in the United States of America

Nelly Hanna is professor and chair of the Department of Arab and Islamic Civilizations at the American University in Cairo. She has also been professor and guest lecturer at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (1998), Harvard University (2001), and Waseda University, Tokyo (2008–2009). Her scholarly interests have focused on Ottoman Egypt (1500–1800). Making extensive use of court records, her work has examined to a large extent the social groups outside the establishment, such as artisans, traders, and merchants, with a special emphasis on the economy and its impact on culture and society. Hanna has published extensively in English, French, and Arabic. Her book publications include In Praise of Books: A Cultural History of Cairo’s Middle Class, Sixteenth to Eighteenth Centuries (Syracuse University Press, 2003); Making Big Money in 1600: The Life and Times of Isma‘il Abu Taqiyya, Egyptian Merchant (Syracuse University Press, 1998); Habiter au Caire: La maison moyenne et ses habitants aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles (1991); and An Urban History of Bulaq in the Mamluk and Ottoman Periods (1983).

Contents

Acknowledgments

1.Defining a Framework for the Economic History of Early-Modern Egypt

2.Artisan Entrepreneurs:Capitalist Practices in a Precapitalist Environment

3.A Period of Unprecedented Social Mobility for Nonelites

4.The Jalfis:Oil Pressers and Emirs

5.Competition Between Different Forms of Capitalism

6.Guilds:Moving Between Traditional and Precapitalist Structures

7.Conclusion:What Remained of Artisan Entrepreneurship a Hundred Years Later?

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgments

IN THE COURSE of the past six years during which this book was in the making, I have accumulated debts to a number of colleagues and friends who in various ways have helped me in the process. Suraiya Faroqhi read the manuscript and not only gave me several important suggestions but also sent me a series of her publications. Jack Guiragossian also read the manuscript at several stages to give the impressions of a general reader with an interest in history. Peter Gran was very helpful at the level of theory and methodology. To all these readers, I am very grateful. To the historians with whom I spent hours in Dar al-Watha’iq and with whom I exchanged ideas and material from the court records—Nasir Ibrahim, Magdi Guirguis, Husam Abdul-Muti, and Soha Gouda—I express my thanks here.

Two institutions have provided me with facilities. The American University in Cairo granted me a sabbatical year to do my research in Dar al-Watha’iq and course releases to finish writing the book. Dar al-Watha’iq and its director, Dr. Saber Arab, were essential to the research. I am very grateful to these institutions and their personnel as well as to Nadia Mustafa.

1

Defining a Framework for the Economic History of Early-Modern Egypt

Framework for Economic History

IN STUDIES OF THE ECONOMY, historians know in a general way much more about commerce and trade in medieval or early-modern societies (1500–1800) than they do about the agricultural or industrial sectors. This holds true for both Europe and the Ottoman Empire.¹ In various parts of the world, merchants left archives, of variable volume or importance, that allow us to observe their movements and commercial activities. We know about the way merchants in international trade carried out their business and accumulated large fortunes. The Abu Taqiyas in the seventeenth century and the Sharaybis in the eighteenth century are but two among the many merchant families in Cairo who aimed at and succeeded in maximizing their profits. Like merchants in Italy or France, they had geographically wide networks and used a complex set of local and regional relations to carry out their business along capitalist lines (merchant capitalism).² The wealth that these commercial activities engendered placed many of these merchants in the top strata of society. In this world of exchange, long-distance merchants were involved in large money-making ventures and developed tools and mechanisms to support their trade; they also forged local and regional networks of relationships upon which they relied for these commercial exchanges. They also depended on legal structures such as courts and transport structures to facilitate the movement of goods.

But if we turn to craftsmen or production, we are presented with a picture whose contours are less known. We are left with numerous unanswered questions. Even though artisans were much more numerous than merchants and their economic weight was considerable, much less is known about their lives, the way they carried out their work, or their role or position in the economy. As a consequence, even historians with a particular interest in the economy have tended to focus on merchants rather than on artisans. Merchants are considered to be the ones who took initiatives, made innovations, had some weight in the economy, and consequently had an impact on historical developments, whereas artisans are thought to have stood against innovation and were associated with centuries of unchanging traditions.

This focus on merchants can be attributed to different factors. For one thing, it is to a certain extent the result of the availability of sources. For example, Subhi Labib’s late-1960s analysis of the economy in medieval Islam explored the activities of the Karimi merchants who were very prominent in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries within the framework of merchant capitalism. The only industries he considered were the state industries. He had little to say about artisans. The Mamluk chronicles he used, however, had limited information about the artisans’ working conditions or work organization.³ He was therefore unable to link the Karimi merchants’ activities to production activities. That these productive activities were many and varied is evident. A recent study based on a survey of medieval sources identifies some three thousand crafts practiced in the medieval Islamic world.⁴ These crafts were spread out over a long period and a vast geography. Labib’s study, however, does not address the issues of the artisans’ role or of their production in the broader economy or of their relationships to other groups.

The focus on merchants and trade rather than on artisans and production can also be attributed to another factor. As Fernand Braudel puts it in his monumental study on capitalism and material life from the fifteenth to the eighteenth century, before the Industrial Revolution, industry did not have a great importance and was consequently not a leading factor in growth.⁵ By implication, neither did artisans. What Braudel misses pointing out is the link between trade and industry and consequently the impact that the one may have had on the other. Moreover, in direct or indirect ways trade might have had a social or economic impact on other sectors of the economy. James Tracy, for instance, emphasizes connections between commerce and production when he writes that in the early-modern world the lives of many ordinary people who were not directly involved in trading were nevertheless affected, for good and ill, by the increased linkages between different parts of the world that had resulted from more intensive world trade.⁶

This study aims at filling in some of the blanks on this subject and exploring artisans on a number of levels. One of these levels involves the formulation of an approach to studying artisans in the context of history from below.⁷ It explores those people who have not had enough visibility in historical studies and gives them agency—in other words, it incorporates them in history. Rather than look at artisans only as part of a traditional society or traditional economy, however, the study explores alternative channels. It asks, for instance, if one can perceive them as actors within local, regional, and world history and in the context of historical processes and if they had a role in shaping these processes or were affected by them—if, in other words, they were part of the historical process. Historians writing on various regions of the Ottoman Empire have studied the relationship between the local economy and the world economy. James Reilly and Faruk Tabaq, for example, focus on nineteenth-century merchants and explore the interaction between local economies in Ottoman lands and developments in the world economy.⁸ My study uses the same frame but applies it to an earlier period and focuses on artisans rather than on merchants.

The book also addresses the relationship that artisans had to nineteenth-century developments, such as the guild relations that continued to exist inside Muhammad Ali’s factories, a theme Pascale Ghazaleh explores.⁹ It looks into the possibility that some of the features related to artisans in the seventeenth and eighteenth century might have been a source for developments in the nineteenth century. In this respect, my study was inspired by several others that have had the same objectives in relation to other themes. Among them is Rifa‘at Ali Abou-El-Haj’s The Formation of the Modern State: The Ottoman Empire, Sixteenth to Eighteenth Centuries, which looks at the sources of the social and political dynamics that emerged during the period covered for the emergence of the state.¹⁰ His book suggests internal dynamics for the change from empire to modern state. This proposal in no way denies the importance of either the French Expedition of 1798 or the rule of Muhammad Ali (1805–48) or the existence of major ruptures in the historical process of the nineteenth century, but neither does it deny the impact of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries on nineteenth-century developments. Like Barrington Moore’s book, which shows how different class structures in the early-modern period contributed to various outcomes in the modern period, Abou-El-Haj’s study searches in the early modern for explanations of developments in the modern period.¹¹ Other scholars of Ottoman history have followed suit.¹² These studies have helped to provide some historical depth to modern developments. My study is focused more on economic issues, specifically in relation to artisans.

I implicitly address the issue of Egypt’s passage to modernity and ask if artisans had a role in this process. A dominant trend in scholarship has tended to associate modernity with reforming rulers, colonialist policies, or Europeanized elites in the nineteenth century. I attempt to find some answers to this question by looking both back in time to the eighteenth century and earlier and lower down in the social strata to artisans involved in production. I do not give artisans the exclusive role or exclude any other group from this process. The members of the military ruling class and merchants were important actors in some of the transformations of the period. Rather, I ask where artisans should be placed in this process in order to find out if they may have shaped the way Egypt entered the nineteenth century or the direction it may have taken. One needs to look for the impact from below from social forces that may have either helped to bring about some of these changes or influenced the direction that they took. This kind of question aims to integrate artisans in some of the broader historical trends of the period, such as the intensification of world trade currents and the changing balance of power between the core and the periphery of the Ottoman Empire.

The book thus sheds some light on production, a subject we still know little about. The decline paradigm in Ottoman history has often been applied to artisanal production. In fact, we unfortunately have few or no sources on this topic beyond what European travelers wrote. Some of these travelers’ negative views were sometimes incorporated into historical studies. As a result, studies on production have focused on Muhammad Ali’s industrial policies, which were initiated before 1820 and ended in the late 1840s. There is no before, and there is no after. The subject of production is consequently worthy of being revisited. This can be done from a different angle, the only one that our sources shed light upon—namely, relations of production among artisans and between artisans and others in the workplace and in work organizations. In other words, the study of artisans is one of the ways by which we can understand the economy and society of the time.

As mentioned earlier, the study of artisans is one of the ways by which we can observe certain continuities between the period covered in this book (1600–1800) and the nineteenth century. Nevertheless, important as these continuities are for our understanding of the nineteenth century, certain major ruptures no doubt occurred in the process. Hence, in a study of artisans and the economy, it is just as essential to try to understand not only those elements that were the source of later developments, but also those aspects of society that have been lost since then—those that were subsumed by the historical ruptures occurring in the nineteenth century or that gave way to modern capitalist trends. These aspects were numerous, among them the artisans’ broad sphere of action in the seventeenth century, the possibilities of social mobility among them, the solidarity of relationships in structures such as the guilds, and the longevity of relationships among family members and work colleagues. These matters, too, are worthy of consideration. In some way or other, many of them were effaced by the expansion of power and state structures and of capitalist relations.

Some Approaches to the Economy, 1600–1800

One of the big questions in relation to economic history is what economic framework is the best to use for the period. Historians have provided various answers to this question. Among liberal historians of the 1950s and the 1960s, the world economy from 1500 to 1800 was understood within a framework of a dynamic Europe and a traditional, static, homogenous economy elsewhere. The non-European world followed a traditional economy until Western influence introduced it to modern economies. More specifically, the economy of Egypt prior to Muhammad Ali was considered either a traditional economy, one in which change was minimal except for long-distance trade, or, alternatively, a feudal economy in which surplus was directed toward the rulers and political elites, leaving everyone else at subsistence level.¹³

There have been numerous reactions to this Eurocentric approach that divides the world into two parts, Europe and everywhere else, and to the attribution of all change and dynamism to Europe. Many historians, dissatisfied with this paradigm, subsequently tried to find alternative frameworks. Peter Gran, in a landmark book published in 1979, argued that in the mid–eighteenth century, prior to exposure to European capitalist expansion, an indigenous form of capitalism based on a commercial revival was emerging.¹⁴ For a variety of reasons, this view is not universally accepted. For example, Kenneth Cuno, working more closely with empirical sources, argues that the use of money, the existence of local markets, the agriculture of cash crops—all of which we usually associate with an emerging capitalism and which, in his view, gave the eighteenth-century economy a level of dynamism—had in fact been present since Greek and Roman times. They consequently cannot be linked to world market conditions and cannot be taken as signs of nascent capitalism.¹⁵ What Cuno presumably means is that he does not see signs of a peripheral economy or a dependent economy emerging in the eighteenth century. He is probably right, and most historians would agree. However, the implicit idea that from Roman times to the eighteenth century there was no change is more a subject of debate. It does not address the basic issue of how to understand the period and what if any was the impact of world conditions on a local economy.

In the 1980s, scholars were introduced to the framework of Immanuel Wallerstein’s world systems approach. He formulated a model based on the expansion of the European capitalist economy as of the sixteenth century and its incorporation of America and the Caribbeans, which became peripheries to the European core. The expansion of the world capitalist system, when it occurred, was detrimental to production and artisans in peripheral areas. Peripheral economies were restructured in order to fulfill the core’s needs. As a result, prosperous handicrafts declined in the face of cheaper imported goods; the local raw materials necessary for these handicrafts were exported to industrial countries, thus depriving local artisans of the materials necessary for their crafts.

Many applications were made of this model in various regions of the world. Nevertheless, most historians agreed that one cannot apply it to the Ottoman Empire, Egypt included, in the period from 1600 to 1800.¹⁶ Incorporation, the creation of dependent economies, did not reach Ottoman lands until much later, in 1800 or 1850, by which time the Industrial Revolution was under way. It would be difficult to assign a single date to this trend because the history of the Ottoman Empire is not uniform. European capitalist expansion seems to have started earlier in the Balkans, for instance, than in other parts of the empire. Studies show that Balkans elites in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries had acquired ciftliks, large landed estates, where agriculture was geared for export, whereas in Anatolia this was not true. Many studies have likewise analyzed European capitalist expansion in Syria and its consequences in population unrest and in artisans’ impoverishment, but this expansion did not occur before the middle of the nineteenth century.¹⁷ Thus, whereas the expanding capitalist incorporation was taking place in the Americas, in the sugar plantations that made use of slave labor and where an economy was being restructured in such a way as to fit the needs of the core in Europe, incorporation was still a couple of centuries away in the Ottoman world. For a long time, the presence of the Ottoman Empire continued to form a barrier to this expansion of the capitalist world economy. For instance, it was able to restrict European presence from penetrating the Red Sea, and, as a result, much of the lucrative East–West trade remained in the hands of local or indigenous merchants.

The world systems approach, if used alone, is therefore not a useful framework for the period from 1600 to 1800. Quite the contrary, the early seventeenth century shows evidence that artisans, owing to a coincidence of several favorable factors, could assert themselves in the economic sphere as well as in the social and cultural spheres more than they could at a later date. If we date European capitalist expansion to 1800 or 1850 in the Ottoman Empire, when industrial goods started flowing in to the detriment of local production and artisan activity, the questions that arise are: How do we understand the period preceding this expansion, and was there any early evidence of the structural changes that eventually facilitated capitalist penetration? To place the Ottoman Empire or the eastern Mediterranean region in 1600 outside the arena of the capitalist world system does not help us to advance our knowledge of their economy in this period. Nor does the fact of their being outside of the capitalist world system, which was the case for most countries in the world, constitute a convincing approach.

Moreover, by studying this region before its incorporation into the capitalist world economy, one confronts some of the problems related to the core–periphery model elaborated by Wallerstein. Scholars have raised several objections to the concept of periphery. For one thing, the periphery is portrayed as passively responding to core interests and as being shaped by the core’s needs. For another, an implicit perception is given of the periphery as constituting a single model both before and after its incorporation into the European capitalist system, with little differentiation between one region and another and consequently between different lines of historical development. The present study aims at contributing to this debate by examining one of the forms of this development prior to incorporation.

Precapitalist, with Some Reservations

One way to address some of these issues is to use the framework of precapitalism developed by Marxist historians, with certain reservations, adaptations, and elaborations as well as in combination with other elements.

In fact, precapitalist economy is not a well-defined term. It refers to that period that preceded capitalism, but it does not describe any particular form of economy. It can be distinguished from the classical definition of capitalism as a mode of production in which the producer is separated from his tools; he is himself a wage laborer, whereas the equipment or the tools that he uses, the raw material that goes into his product, and the finished product are owned by his employer, the capitalist. As Irfan Habib points out, this definition restricts capitalism to the economic organization that became dominant after the Industrial Revolution,¹⁸ but it does not have much relevance for the periods prior to that.

Precapitalism, rather, is associated with numerous forms and practices that coexisted with and that were subsequently more or less taken over by capitalism. Whereas one of the features of modern industrial capitalism was its tendency to encroach on other modes and to make them disappear or disintegrate, precapitalist formations did not have this feature. One advantage of using this framework is precisely that it allows for diverse modes; it can be adapted to various situations.¹⁹ In many parts of the world in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, different economic modes coexisted, and there were different forms of capitalist practices, such as wealth accumulation, the existence of relatively large workshops that employed wage labor, businesslike practices used to run small enterprises or to establish certain forms of work relations. My study offers a chance to see one of these forms as it evolved in a particular time and place.

What I hope to show is that prior to incorporation, regions such as Egypt that eventually became part of the capitalist world system had rich and complex economic histories and societies. Incorporation did not take place in a vacuum. The fact that Egypt eventually became colonized like many other countries should not be an indication that all peripheries were homogeneous. The way that capitalism penetrated the Egyptian economy and the type of capitalism that came to prevail there are a subject of controversy. I explore the forms that came prior to modern industrial capitalism.

Accommodating Ottoman Conditions

To study Egypt in the period 1600–1800, one can start by placing it in the context of the Ottoman economy. Therefore, one of the first questions to address is how precapitalist conditions could function in the Ottoman economy given that this economy is often thought to be state centered. In fact, the framework of precapitalism is flexible enough to accommodate or integrate the various features of the Ottoman economy over which historians argue in their attempts to pin down that economy: the traditional mode that craftsmen followed; the tributary mode that allowed ruling classes to tax the working population; a command economy that the Ottoman state followed in relation to some sectors of the economy; and the commercial capitalism of long-distance trade.

In the seventeenth century, there doubtless were certain aspects of a command economy in which the Ottoman state intervened directly in the economy. The state was involved in the pricing of basic goods (such as grain) to ensure that bread reached the urban population. This practice was part of what is termed the moral economy that aimed at providing subsistence to wide sectors of the population. This state policy has also been referred to as provisionism, a term coined by the Turkish historian Mehmet Genc. He considers provisionism to be one of the basic principles of the Ottoman economy rather than one of several economic modes that coexisted. Thus, to a large extent, Genc, like many others, describes the economy in terms of state policies.²⁰ Likewise, the command economy, which Traian Stoianovich analyzes in relation to the Balkans, sought to ensure that certain goods and sometimes labor reached the imperial palace.²¹

Elements of this command economy existed in Egypt, too, but to a lesser extent than in the empire’s central lands. Egypt, for example, was required to send rice, wheat, coffee, sugar, spices, and other products on a yearly basis to the imperial palace in Istanbul. Several artisan guilds were obligated to provide some of these products. Sugar producers, for example, had to send a certain amount of sugar to Istanbul every year. An agent of the state made sure that these quantities were gathered before the sugar could be sold in the local market; oil pressers likewise were obligated to send a certain amount of oil (zayt al-saltana) that the guild members produced.²² These obligations were fairly constant over a long period, as Stanford Shaw’s work has clearly demonstrated.²³ The state, moreover, through the muhtasib, or market inspector, tried to set prices for basic commodities to ensure that they reached the urban population. Price lists were proclaimed for the sale of these basic foodstuffs. These state rules restricted the free market in one way or another. The price lists, however, tended to appear only in times of crisis. We know little about price controls at other times and less about their impact on artisans and production. It appears that such controls were stronger earlier in the period than later. Artisans and merchants later in the period had more flexibility to set their own prices, a trend that can be observed in various parts of the Ottoman Empire.

But there were limits to this command economy, in Cairo as well as in other regions of the empire.²⁴ It was only one of several modes of production that existed at the same time, and it would be misleading to use the term command economy to describe the economy as a whole over a period of two or three centuries. The command economy described by Genc and Stoianovich can be said to have touched only certain aspects of the economy rather than circumscribing its totality; it did not do so with equal strength all over the Ottoman Empire. The questions to be asked, therefore, are not whether the command economy existed or not, but rather how pervasive it was, whether it was the dominant force in the economy or a marginal one, and what its relation was to other economic modes, such as the growing market economy and commercialization.

Closely related to the concept of the command economy is the issue of taxation. Mehmet Genc has coined the term fiscalism to describe the Ottoman state’s policy in relation to taxation;²⁵ it implies a maximization of Imperial Treasury income by taxation. Samir Amin considers the same issue in broader terms that include states or ruling classes that extracted the bulk of the surplus produced by the economically active classes such as peasants and artisans, leaving them with nothing more than bare subsistence once they paid their taxes.²⁶ The system of taxation could thus have a strong negative impact on trade, production, and consequently on merchants and artisans’ activities. This state-centered model of the Ottoman economy, however, does not give social groups such as merchants and artisans any agency in the historical process, and it assumes that the strength of the state’s overriding presence in the economy remained unchanged over the centuries. This view is open to question.

André Raymond takes a somewhat different approach to this subject and studies taxation in relation to a changing context. His work has shown that this taxation has a history in the dynamic relation among the state, the tax collector, the power structure, and the economy and that it was subject to the balance between these various factors. There were periods during which taxation was a tool for abuse and pressure and others when it was not. His book traces over a long period the conflicts between the Ottoman state and the local emirs as well as the struggles among the local emirs themselves over who would control these tax resources. For my study, I have relied heavily on Raymond’s research on this subject.²⁷

Therefore, even if the system of tax grants was