BECOMING A MERCHANT: THE TUJJĀR IN THE OTTOMAN PERIOD

Throughout the Ottoman Empire until the early years of the 19th century, tujjār were more than just businessmen: they often enjoyed close relations with political and military rulers, serving as diplomats, administrators, and suppliers of essential resources. Because of this privileged position, they have occupied a central place in scholarship on Ottoman economic history. In a study focused on the first two centuries of the empire, Halil Inalcık argues that the state granted tujjār a margin of freedom in business while providing them with access to resources, markets, and means of coercion. Merchants were spared the stringent control recommended by Islamic treatises on good government because of the services they offered the ruler: they worked as agents and ambassadors, delivered news from far-off places, provided goods needed by society (especially the administrative elite), and extended loans to the state. In addition, they served as tax-collecting intermediaries between the state and its subjects and ensured a continual inflow of customs duties.Footnote ⁶

In Ottoman Egypt, merchants often held state office, though they did not depend solely on state endorsement for their social position and influence.Footnote ⁷ Rather, merchants often provided the state's representatives with the material goods they needed to govern, thus ensuring continuity during times of political instability or military conflict. Ahmad al-Mahruqi, who was shāhbandar or head of the Cairo merchants until just before Muhammad ʿAli's accession to power, lent vast sums of money, collected taxes, and organized ceremonies of investiture for the governors sent to Egypt by the Sublime Porte during this turbulent period. He supplied officials and their soldiers with horses and ceremonial robes as well as food and tents.Footnote ⁸

Al-Mahruqi and other prominent tujjār could obtain and redistribute resources in large part because of their reputation, which was based in turn on the standing and character of senior colleagues to whom they had been apprenticed at an early stage of their careers. In the long term, reputation was maintained through the cumulative effects of personal trustworthiness, requiring in particular that merchants exercise personal control over the extension and supervision of credit—a term that must be understood in its broadest sense, as being made up of both material possibilities (access to merchandise or funds, which might be repaid only upon the debtor's death)Footnote ⁹ and the trust placed in prominent social actors who could regulate business transactions and settle conflicts.Footnote ¹⁰

Merchants in late 18th-century Egypt maintained their professional identity and boundaries with other social groups by upholding specific criteria of inclusion and distinction, which allowed them to assert control over material and symbolic goods. By examining the modes of legitimization and endorsement that restricted access to the world of the tujjār, we will be able to assess certain changes that occurred in Egypt in the early decades of the 19th century.

While many have noted the intimate relationships between commerce and politics in Egypt during this period, few have studied how these relationships actually functioned, which is the focus of the first section of this article. Although chroniclers were not as interested in merchants as they were in members of the political, military, and intellectual elite—only the wealthiest and most powerful merchants appear in the chronicles, usually on the occasion of their deaths—the available biographies do allow us to understand how an aspiring merchant might have risen to prominence. The chronicle of ʿAbd al-Rahman al-Jabarti, an important source for the historiography of Egypt in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, suggests that the most successful merchants started out as apprentices to an influential colleague. They owed their careers first to this patronage and then to their ability to build a solid reputation, obtain accumulated capital (usually from their sponsor), and secure the protection of the political and military authorities.Footnote ¹¹

In most cases, apprenticeship with a successful patron seems to have been essential to forming one's personal reputation as a merchant in Ottoman Egypt, until the 19th century ushered in political, economic, and legal changes that made this mode of transferring power obsolete. Ahmad al-Mahruqi, shāhbandar of the Cairo merchants until his death in 1804, is a good example of a merchant who followed such a path to success. Al-Jabarti's chronicle does not say much about al-Mahruqi's childhood and formative years, but it devotes considerable space to discussing the relation between al-Mahruqi and Ahmad ibn ʿAbd al-Salam, an influential North African merchant who served as his sponsor.Footnote ¹² The wedding al-Mahruqi organized for his son, Muhammad, is one of several examples indicating that a marriage allianceFootnote ¹³ announcing an aspiring merchant's transition to adulthood constituted another key career moment. Finally, the allocation of a large sum of capital by a patron was a crucial stage in the apprentice merchant's transition to autonomy.Footnote ¹⁴ To reinvest this capital, support from the political and military authorities was essential, whether a merchant wanted to preserve it in its original form (state office, real estate, or tax farm) or liquidate it without fear of confiscation.Footnote ¹⁵

Alliances with members of the ruling class could be turned to profit more effectively when a merchant combined commercial acumen with other skills (such as administrative or military service) and with a network of business partners, slaves, and secretaries. These resources were important because economic, military, and administrative tasks were inseparable from trade. Mahmud Muharram, for example, who served as shāhbandar in the late 18th century, gained the esteem of the amirs who ruled Cairo as he built up his business networks and established a reputation that spread to the Hijaz, the Levant, and Anatolia.Footnote ¹⁶ Ahmad ibn ʿAbd al-Salam inherited from his father a network of connections with the most powerful amirs.Footnote ¹⁷ After Ibn ʿAbd al-Salam died in 1791, it was a member of Egypt's political and military elite who confirmed Ahmad al-Mahruqi as shāhbandar.Footnote ¹⁸ While support from the political and military authorities was thus important for merchants seeking to launch their careers, this support resulted from the influence that prosperous merchants had already accrued and was one of many elements contributing to their success.

In contrast, by the mid-19th century, state support was the single most important factor in the success of an aspiring merchant. By that time, the state had involved itself in commerce, opening up new opportunities and creating demand for certain goods. Legislation passed in Egypt during this period supported the state's growing role in trade and conferred financial benefits upon merchants who obtained state licenses to engage in specific commercial activities. The Siyāsatnāme of 1837, a legal code intended to regulate the Egyptian state apparatus, established the conditions for structured competition among merchants registered with the state, offering advantages to merchants who had obtained government approval.Footnote ¹⁹ Merchants authorized by the state participated in a controlled auction system, thereby creating supply and demand within set price parameters.Footnote ²⁰ Those authorized to sell a given product were summoned to the auction house and established a price list.Footnote ²¹ It was clearly a privilege to belong to the group of merchants authorized to trade in a particular good, and state permits (tadhkara) were granted only to those who were known by the authorities, not to “passersby” (ʿābir ṭarīq). Goods that the state purchased from authorized import merchants were also registered on lists in which each type of merchandise was associated with the name of an individual merchant.Footnote ²²

By the 1830s, then, the burgeoning Egyptian bureaucracy had begun to regulate certain sectors of trade, creating favorable conditions for merchants who obtained government authorization to engage in commerce. This formal government approval is in sharp contrast with the earlier, more fluid process of accreditation that merchants obtained by apprenticing themselves to a successful and well-established colleague before securing the patronage of Egypt's political authorities.

During the same period, affiliation to the viceroy was becoming an important criterion in the selection of the bureaucracy's chief administrators. This further undermined the influence that merchants acquired through their reputation, social networks, and ability to mobilize resources. As Muhammad ʿAli began to consolidate his power, he was able to select a group of loyal allies who drew their authority mainly from their association with him. Those who entered the viceroy's inner circle and found employment as high-ranking administrators did so thanks to their geographical origin, family relations, or marriage ties rather than their experience, reputation, or skill.Footnote ²³ Thus, on 16 April 1820, the overseer of the viceroy's orchards, who, like Muhammad ʿAli, was from Kavala, was named market inspector.Footnote ²⁴ The five administrative divisions created when the provinces were reorganized (1813–26) were placed under the supervision of the viceroy's sons and sons-in-law: “in general . . . all the offices in this new hierarchy (around a hundred) were given to members of his immediate entourage or his client base (essentially veteran officers of the Albanian militia or Mamluks who had gone over to his side at an early stage).”Footnote ²⁵ Until the 1830s, the high-ranking officials of Muhammad ʿAli's government were individuals who shared a lack of rootedness in local society; as outsiders, their loyalty was to the viceroy, whom it was their privilege to serve.

Thus, there were both ruptures and continuities in how administrative reform was initiated and managed. The viceroy surrounded himself with loyal administrators, just as former Ottoman governors and Mamluk military commanders had done; but while his predecessors had competed among themselves for power, and vied for the support of the ʿulamaʾ, tax farmers, and merchants, he was largely able to free himself from these counterweights to his authority. The fledgling bureaucracy relied on influential local actors who could provide knowledge and expertise essential to the extraction of surplus wealth, but such reliance enabled the construction of an increasingly complex and intrusive state apparatus, ultimately making it possible to dispense with the local notables. By the 1860s, statesmen were once again being drawn from the indigenous political milieu, and many members of the Consultative Council, created in 1866 to assist the sovereign in administrative matters, were Egyptian notables.Footnote ²⁶ By this time, however, the officials’ geographical origin was secondary to the state apparatus as the primary frame of reference. The social groups to which individuals belonged, which determined the social networks they could mobilize and were thus valuable capital in contests for authority, were now subsumed by a more intrusive, hegemonic state.

During the first half of the 19th century, a distinction thus emerged between merchants, engaged in a wide range of activities through their local and regional networks, and state officials, who were selected on the basis of their affiliation to Muhammad ʿAli, as opposed to their ties with local society. In this respect, Egypt may be contrasted with Syria, where traditional local notables were integrated within the new administrative apparatus created by Ibrahim Pasha after 1830. There, merchants were among those who reached positions of authority within the official bureaucratic hierarchy, which had previously been reserved for agents of the Sublime Porte. The policies instituted by Ibrahim Pasha—centralized control, support for commercial agriculture, and the creation of consultative assemblies—offered new opportunities for well-established merchants.Footnote ²⁷ In Egypt, by contrast, it would seem that most of the powerful local merchants did not benefit from the replacement of Ottoman envoys, whose former positions went first to the viceroy's allies and then to native graduates of the new palace schools. Merchants were increasingly restricted to the domain of commerce and seem to have been excluded from the political and military domains by the 1830s.

TAKING OVER THE RED SEA TRADE

As we have seen, the patronage networks on which merchants had relied, and in which state officials and other political and military leaders were only one element, were replaced during the first half of the 19th century by an increasingly complex and intrusive state apparatus, which sought to regulate merchants’ activity and subject it to government control. Another area in which Egyptian merchants’ authority was eroded during this period was that of Red Sea commerce.Footnote ²⁸ At the end of the 18th century, Cairo was the crossroads of regional trade routes that led east, via the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean, and northeast, toward the Fertile Crescent and Anatolia. Connections to the Red Sea trade seem to have been crucial in ensuring a merchant's ascent to the pinnacle of the profession. Import-export merchants were most likely to begin expanding their business by establishing a base of operations in the Hijaz, a relatively accessible stop on the path to riches. When Portuguese power began to decline in the Red Sea region during the 17th century, merchants native to the Ottoman Empire began to build or reestablish networks that brought luxury goods—Indian textiles and spices as well as increasing quantities of Yemeni coffee—to Jeddah and Suez. The merchandise was then sent on to Cairo, Rosetta, or Alexandria, to be sold at local markets or shipped to Anatolia and Europe.Footnote ²⁹ As André Raymond notes, the Red Sea luxury-goods trade was “entirely concentrated in Cairo” and remained, until the end of the 18th century, “a domain restricted to the activity of Egyptian and Muslim merchants.”Footnote ³⁰ Their monopoly on the Red Sea trade was particularly strong between 1786 and 1798, years in which power struggles between Istanbul and the beys who ruled Egypt over the right of European ships to enter the Red Sea, among other points of contention, had been won temporarily by the Sublime Porte, and thus Muslim merchants did not have to deal with European competition over goods and markets.Footnote ³¹

Egypt's Red Sea/Indian Ocean trade remained of great importance during the first decades of the 19th century. In 1817, French merchants ranked goods imported from India via the Red Sea and re-exported to Anatolia and Europe (including “spices, drugs, Cashmere shawls, etc.”) third among Egypt's exports. Domestically produced items held first place, while products from Africa and Yemen came second.Footnote ³²Tujjār in late 18th-century Egypt had close commercial ties with the Indian Ocean region, as shown by the goods tallied in their estate inventories. Muhammad ʿAli al-ʿArayshi, an immensely wealthy merchant (who at his death in 1788 left possessions valued at over eighteen million paras), was an importer of Indian textiles, coffee, gum, and spices.Footnote ³³ When he died, al-ʿArayshi was expecting shipments of coffee, sugar, textiles, and coin from the Hijaz, Surat, and India. Coffee and similar goods allowed merchants like al-ʿArayshi to make huge fortunes.Footnote ³⁴ At the end of the 18th century, a qinṭār of coffee sold for approximately fifteen piasters in Arabia and between twenty-five and fifty piasters in Cairo.Footnote ³⁵ Coffee merchants could thus make profits of around one-third of invested capital, as André Raymond suggests.Footnote ³⁶

Until the early 19th century, the wealthiest and most influential merchants continued to invest heavily in Red Sea/Indian Ocean trade, maintaining extensive networks of business partners in Suez, Jiddah, and India. This market depended on the security of the trade routes and on political relations between the rulers of Egypt and the ashrāf who governed the Hijaz in the Ottoman sultan's name. Merchants based in Cairo typically sent large quantities of cereals to Arabia on ships that departed from Suez, selling these goods to finance their purchases of coffee and Indian products in the ports of the Hijaz.Footnote ³⁷

On both shores of the Red Sea, merchandise followed the circuits established by the pilgrimage,Footnote ³⁸ a major yearly commercial event, and by the tribute sent to Arabia (ghilāl al-ḥaramayn, or the grains sent to provision the two sanctuaries, as well as the purse sent annually from Egypt).Footnote ³⁹ The authors of Description de l'Égypte noted that the merchandise imported with the pilgrimage caravan every year was exempted from customs duties.Footnote ⁴⁰ To support their business, some merchants also sought to take on administrative and military functions related to the caravan or to forge alliances with the individuals who held these positions.Footnote ⁴¹

On the strategically vital Red Sea route, commerce could not be dissociated from political and military interests. In particular, merchants had to protect their goods against Bedouin attacks, whether by pressuring the rulers to provide security or by maintaining private armies. Even the campaigns Muhammad ʿAli sent to break the Wahhabi movement in the Hijaz starting in 1811 relied on the big merchants’ diplomatic abilities, resources, and networks of relations: Muhammad ʿAli chose Ahmad al-Mahruqi's son Muhammad to lead the first campaigns against the Wahhabis and went so far as to place his own son Tusun under al-Mahruqi's protection.Footnote ⁴² These very campaigns, however, would transform links between Egypt and Arabia, with important consequences for the Red Sea trade and the role that independent tujjār played in it.Footnote ⁴³ This transformation, combined with the growing stability of the regime in Cairo, turned the merchants’ diverse abilities (formerly a valuable resource for the ruler) into a potential threat. Muhammad al-Mahruqi's participation in the Hijaz campaigns helped bring the region under Cairo's control and subsequently enabled the Egyptian administration to dispense with the tājir's services as a supplier and a negotiator.

At the turn of the century, then, being a tājir meant being able to mobilize men and merchandise, sometimes to assist rulers who did not have the means to do so. In the following decades, merchants lost many of their diplomatic, judicial, and military functions. The wars Muhammad ʿAli's troops waged in Arabia, which established the Egyptian administration's direct control over the Hijaz by 1820,Footnote ⁴⁴ were among the factors contributing to the merchants’ loss of power, because they lessened the state's dependence on merchants as intermediaries and as purveyors of supplies. The merchants’ versatility was gradually eroded, as a new and rapidly expanding state bureaucracy took on many of their former roles. In addition, the viceroy was involving himself personally in the Red Sea trade, which remained lucrative during the first decades of the century. Muhammad ʿAli's commercial representative at Jiddah reported profits of over 10.2 million paras in 1820. These included trade with India and shipping revenues.Footnote ⁴⁵ By this time, traders in Jiddah had to obtain the state's authorization before sending their coffee shipments on to Cairo or elsewhere.Footnote ⁴⁶ In imposing this surveillance, Muhammad ʿAli benefited from the administrative apparatus and the military power he commanded as viceroy while ostensibly engaging in trade as a merchant among others. He compounded his structural advantages by placing his supporters in key positions: by the early 1830s, for example, the commander of the pilgrimage (amīr al-ḥājj) was an ally of the viceroy.Footnote ⁴⁷

While Indian Ocean trade remained vibrant, adapting to the transport and communications revolution, throughout much of the 19th century the Egyptian government's increasing focus on exporting cotton to Europe shifted attention toward the Mediterranean. During the early phase of this transition, in the 1820s and 1830s, merchants seeking prosperity had to associate with Muhammad ʿAli, who had accrued enough administrative, military, and political power to dictate the terms of the partnerships. Later, especially after the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, the region was rapidly incorporated into an international economy dominated by Europe.Footnote ⁴⁸ In the second half of the 19th century, merchants in Egypt could make fortunes as intermediaries between European traders and an expanding domestic market,Footnote ⁴⁹ but they no longer served as diplomats and kingmakers.

OVERLAPPING JURISDICTIONS: RESOLVING MERCHANT DISPUTES FROM 1798 TO THE 1820S

During the first half of the 19th century, then, merchants began to lose their autonomy and versatility in interactions with the rulers of Egypt. This was due partly to the viceroy's ability to co-opt or dispense with their social and professional networks and partly to his attempts to assert himself in the Red Sea trade by deploying troops and administrators in the region. It was also related to a legal process through which new institutions were created that deprived merchants of their functions as judges and arbitrators over commercial affairs, just as their military and diplomatic abilities were also being undermined. This section examines ways in which merchants in Egypt up to the turn of the 19th century worked with the Ottoman legal system but were not subordinate to the jurisdiction of the state-appointed qadi of the shariʿa courts. It will show how increased centralization and specialization of commercial dispute resolution and other judicial functions affected merchants from 1798 to the 1820s.

The legal reforms were part of a wider process involving shifts in Egyptian–Ottoman relations and balance of power. After Muhammad ʿAli's accession to power in 1805, and especially after 1811 when he was no longer engaged in an all-consuming struggle against contenders for authority, he and his entourage began to develop legislation to address matters of security and public order and to regulate administrative functions.Footnote ⁵⁰ The viceroy was intervening in domains (such as justice, provisioning, public works, diplomacy, and protocol) that had previously been Istanbul's prerogative. The provincial government of Egypt, rather than the imperial center, thus began to constitute an authoritative legal and administrative reference.Footnote ⁵¹

The new legal and administrative institutions, whether devoted to criminal justice or dealing with economic management and the regulation of professional conflicts, reflected an increasing move toward specialization. In 1818, the first edict defining Muhammad ʿAli's bureaucracy and its functions was promulgated. The viceroy's cabinet was reorganized into specialized bureaus.Footnote ⁵² Tribunals were established to hear litigation between private individuals and the administration or to judge errors committed by state employees in the course of their work; starting in 1824, civil and military administrative councils were created to oversee these tribunals.Footnote ⁵³ The majālis al-tujjār, the specialized commercial courts that Muhammad ʿAli revived in the mid-1820s, were part of this process of specialization, taking over disputes involving merchants and commercial affairs from the shariʿa courts and from the merchants themselves.

Before these legal reforms came into effect, the shāhbandar was a particularly important figure in the adjudication of disputes among merchants. Throughout the Ottoman period, the shāhbandar does not seem to have been nominated by the political and military authorities nor have I found any mention of the office being up for sale. Rather, the shāhbandar was recognized by both his peers and the authorities as the most eminent and influential of the tujjār. The authors of Description de l'Égypte remarked upon the “immense” commercial relations of Cairo's preeminent merchant.Footnote ⁵⁴ The shāhbandar wielded such influence that the French chargé d'affaires to Istanbul described him, around 1805, as “more powerful than the Pasha in public opinion.”Footnote ⁵⁵ Although it is difficult to trace the transformation in the shāhbandar's role back to one specific date or event, several factors combined during the first years of the 19th century to give the office an increasingly state-sanctioned character. Apart from the processes mentioned earlier that reduced the influence of the large merchants as a group, the creation of the majālis al-tujjār struck a blow against the shāhbandar's autonomy, particularly in the legal field.

These specialized commercial courts were introduced in Egypt at the time of the French expedition. On 10 September 1798, the French commander Napoleon Bonaparte proclaimed the establishment of such courts in Cairo, Alexandria, Rosetta, and Damietta, Egypt's principal transit points for trade with Anatolia and Europe. The French then began removing litigation involving commerce from the qadis’ jurisdiction and submitting it to the new tribunals.Footnote ⁵⁶ As president of his city's tribunal, the shāhbandar continued to exert a degree of influence over artisans and tradesmen, but his authority was now exercised only within the framework of the majlis. As for the qadis appointed by Istanbul who presided over the shariʿa courts, their authority was diminished, since some of the cases that had been submitted to them in the past were now transferred to the commercial courts.

Bonaparte also made the shāhbandar responsible for endorsing the laws elaborated by the French administration, particularly the separation of commercial from other types of litigation. As shāhbandar, Ahmad al-Mahruqi was one of two merchants appointed to a permanent council (dīwān) that the French convened in December 1798. The occupiers intended for this council to convey the commander's orders to the city's inhabitants (and, in theory at least, to pass the inhabitants’ complaints on to the occupation authorities).Footnote ⁵⁷ It was likewise through al-Mahruqi that the French communicated with other merchants and with the sharīf of Mecca, a key player in the lucrative Red Sea/Indian Ocean trade. The French, then, continued the practice followed by Ottoman governors of Egypt, using the merchants’ connections and influence to secure their position. By creating the majlis and the dīwān, however, they also began to institutionalize, and ultimately make it possible to dispense with, the shāhbandar's importance and influence.

It seems plausible that Napoleon introduced the practice of confirming the head merchant's authority, a practice that continued after the expedition's departure. Before his death in November 1804, Ahmad al-Mahruqi had invited Ahmad Khurshid Pasha, one of the main contenders in the struggle for power then unfolding in Egypt, to dine at his home. When al-Mahruqi died the following week,Footnote ⁵⁸ the event was kept secret for a few days, until his son Muhammad had conveyed the news to the Citadel and the qadi had sealed Ahmad's storehouses. Muhammad then took up the functions of shāhbandar. Muhammad ʿAli did not confirm his authority until nine years later, on 9 April 1813, when town criers announced that Muhammad al-Mahruqi was the shāhbandar of Cairo's merchants and had authority over all merchants and artisans in their disputes and laws.Footnote ⁵⁹ This indicates that, while the political and military authorities were attempting to extend their control over the merchants, they did not manage to do so immediately or thoroughly. In addition, at this time, influential merchants still exercised some autonomy in the legal sphere: a court document from 1819 indicates that “judgment sessions” (jalasāt ḥukm) were held in al-Mahruqi's house to settle disputes between merchants.Footnote ⁶⁰ In other words, although some steps had been taken toward instituting specialized commercial courts, these were not yet functioning systematically. The head of the merchants continued to exercise a measure of autonomous authority through the second decade of the 19th century.

Moreover, even the shāhbandar did not hold exclusive authority among merchants during this time; other individuals were still exercising similar functions at the marketplace or neighborhood level. For instance, two men took it upon themselves to inspect the markets and settle disputes in the neighborhood of al-Azhar. It seems that they were neither authorized to do so by the governor nor formally recognized as arbitrators by the local traders: rather, “they [imposed] their decisions on the merchants, vegetable sellers, and butchers of the area.”Footnote ⁶¹ On questions related to the weights and measures used in the markets, which the state repeatedly endeavored to standardize, or concerning the sale of defective merchandise or the use of counterfeit money in commercial transactions, the muḥtasib or market inspector served as both policy authority and dispenser of justice.

Until the second decade of the 19th century, therefore, it seems that merchants moved in overlapping, contested spheres of authority, some of which were coming under increased control by the state. Various agents of justice—whether self-declared and recognized after the fact, elected by their peers, or nominated by the political and military authorities—fought to define their respective spheres of authority, at times giving rise to violent rivalries. For example, the headman of al-Ghuriyya neighborhood, where the local distribution of coffee, spices, and textiles was concentrated, and where the biggest merchants lived and worked, challenged the shāhbandar's influence over the city's merchants. Indeed, André Raymond has argued that “it is only by an entirely exorbitant extension of his influence, due of course to the personal influence he enjoyed” over the viceroy, that the head of the merchants was able to impose his decisions over Cairo's artisans and tradesmen. In 1817, this extension of the shāhbandar's power provoked an extremely sharp clash with the market inspector, or muḥtasib, “who had the contrary, albeit equally unfounded, pretension to exercise his jurisdiction over the tujjār.”Footnote ⁶²

Such conflicts may have arisen over the definition of spheres of authority: the market inspector could assume that he was responsible for all the city's marketplaces, with no geographical distinction, while the shāhbandar, a notable of al-Ghuriyya, might consider that the entire neighborhood, or, alternatively, all the merchants in Cairo, came under his authority.Footnote ⁶³ Their rivalry may have expressed several embedded notions of legal jurisdiction founded on local identity: one, based on the economic and spatial limits of the markets, was subject to the muḥtasib's power; another, based on residence within a neighborhood, was organized around an urban notable's household; finally, another, based on professional affiliation, depended on a hierarchy of skill and experience. At the same time, an opposition existed between, on the one hand, producers and distributors, whose work exposed them to the intervention of state agents responsible for maintaining standards of cleanliness and public order and, on the other hand, wealthy and influential merchants whose status authorized them to resort to the shāhbandar's mediation, with no distinction related to religious and ethnic identity or to their place of work and residence. By the beginning of the 1820s, these categories of jurisdiction were becoming anachronistic. Several processes were changing the role of tujjār in regulating production and distribution, mediating relations in the marketplace, and settling commercial disputes. Among these were the increased centralization and specialization of judicial activities, a process in which some tujjār participated.

Although the viceroy had endeavored to limit access to the political sphere to his allies and relatives, and although the state was expanding into new domains, thereby eroding the merchants’ multiple spheres of authority, at least a few of those who participated in the elaboration of regulations and the implementation of rulings concerning merchants were local actors who had long been active in commerce. In 1827, for example, the viceroy made Ahmad al-Gharbi, head of the merchants of Alexandria, responsible for judging cases (daʿāwī wa-munāzaʿāt) presented by merchants.Footnote ⁶⁴ In 1833, al-Gharbi became president of the commercial court in Cairo. His brother, a Cairo merchant who maintained close ties with North Africa,Footnote ⁶⁵ was the first director of the fez manufactory at FuwwaFootnote ⁶⁶ and was later commissioned to set up a dye works for military uniforms. In 1836, the agent of Sharif Agha, then head of the merchants, was an individual of Tunisian origin named ʿAbd al-Rahman al-Tuwayyar,Footnote ⁶⁷ who had been a major merchant in his own right and a member of a cartel that imported coffee and spices through Suez.Footnote ⁶⁸ These traces indicate that a few merchants who had established themselves in Cairo's trading community during the first two decades of the 19th century were able to enter the new institutions that were established by the viceroy to regulate commerce and that were staffed largely by his men. The local merchants did so, however, not on their own terms but on those of the state, which defined the jurisdiction of bodies such as majlis al-tujjār and granted them legitimacy, thereby replacing the merchants’ personal influence and professional reputation with state endorsement as the only acceptable form of authorization to resolve disputes. In other words, a new structure, run according to new rules, was supported in part by “old” merchants who had long-standing experience in Cairo's import–export activities. Yet as these experienced merchants were incorporated into the new system—a process that was profitable for them and perhaps even necessary to their short-term professional survival—they collaborated in the gradual loss of their autonomy.

The reforms of the 19th century, then, were not imposed unilaterally, according to the viceroy's autonomous will, nor did they follow a univocal, uniform logic subjecting lucrative economic activities and legal affairs completely to the imperatives of military development. We are tracing processes that were uneven, halting, and shaped by the actions and reactions of different players. Yet even though legal specialization was not decisive in transforming the merchants’ status and undermining the autonomy of the tujjār and their ability to negotiate as equals with the political and military authorities, it contributed to redefining and restricting their social, economic, and political roles.Footnote ⁶⁹

MAJLIS AL-TUJJĀR: REDEFINING MERCHANTS

In the previous sections, I have shown that the creation of specialized commercial courts, as part of a wider process of legal centralization, was a process in which the state and some merchants participated. I have argued that specialized commercial courts were not created (only) because existing judicial bodies and norms were inadequate or obsolescent: more important, they allowed the state to define and establish control over the commercial sphere while co-opting and rewarding selected merchants from among the traditional tujjār. In addition, they served the interests of increasing numbers of merchants from outside the Ottoman domains whom Muhammad ʿAli had invited to trade in and with Egypt. The presence of these merchants was instrumental to the introduction of radically new ways of classifying merchants, trade, and commercial litigation.

In addition to the role the tujjār had played in arbitrating commercial disputes autonomously until the end of the 18th century, there had been other institutions that heard commercial litigation. But these did so either because (in the case of the shariʿa courts) they were a clearinghouse for most litigation or because (in the case of institutions such as the Supreme Council, or dīwān ʿāl)Footnote ⁷⁰ because of the status of the litigants rather than the nature of the case in question. Thus, commercial conflicts involving state officials or important merchants were resolved through reconciliation or a ruling from the dīwān ʿāl, while matters involving peddlers or retailers were referred to the shariʿa courts. The majālis al-tujjār created in the early 1820s under Muhammad ʿAli's authority took all commercial litigation under their jurisdiction: they excluded such litigation from the jurisdiction of other institutions and individuals and excluded all other types of litigation from their purview, purely on the basis of cases’ classification as commercial matters. For a case to be submitted before majlis al-tujjār, at least one of the parties had to be an Ottoman subject; cases in which all parties were foreigners were referred to the jurisdiction of the relevant foreign consulates.Footnote ⁷¹

In addition to selecting the cases it was qualified to hear according to the subject matter, and not the litigants’ status, the majlis al-tujjār applied its own set of criteria with regard to the selection of its members; collectively, they had to represent a cross-section of ethnic and religious groups. These criteria were different from the selection and appointment principles that shaped the Ottoman legal hierarchy, which was headed in Egypt by a qadi sent from Istanbul. They were also distinct from the constitutive elements of the tujjār's reputation from the 17th to the early 19th centuries: effective sponsorship, extensive social networks, and accumulated experience. In these two respects, then, the reforms that took place in the administration and adjudication of commercial disputes were groundbreaking.

Members of the merchants’ tribunals in the early 1820s were selected according to two sets of criteria: first, they had to provide “international” representation; and, second, they had to be (state-approved) merchants. In other words, these tribunals were designed to fulfill the dual criteria of ethnic/religious (or “national” in the French diplomatic parlance of the time) heterogeneity and professional homogeneity. Judging from the make-up of the tribunals and their governing statutes, these essential characteristics of majlis al-tujjār in its successive incarnations were enforced in an explicit, deliberate manner. In 1798, the commercial tribunal established by the French in Cairo had six Muslim and six Coptic Christian members. In 1799, the Rosetta tribunal was made up of three Muslims, three Christians, two Levantines, and one Greek subject. In 1826, the commercial courts in Cairo and Alexandria were made up of two Turkish merchants, three Egyptians, two North Africans, two Levantine Greek Catholics, two “schismatic” Greeks, two Armenians, and two “Israelites.” In 1827, conflicts among merchants were heard by four Muslim merchants; two Greeks; and two Europeans, apparently Italian Jewish merchants,Footnote ⁷² representing protégés of the European consulates (mustaʾminīn).Footnote ⁷³ Again, the names of the individuals who convened in 1845 to lay down the statute of the commercial tribunal suggest diverse origins and positions: Artin Bey; Salus Bey; Tossizza and Gabbara;Footnote ⁷⁴ Hajj Ibrahim Agha Bakir; and Sayyid Muhammad Badr al-Din.Footnote ⁷⁵ Artin, of Armenian origin, had become head of commercial affairs and sales for the government in 1844.Footnote ⁷⁶ Tossizza was a Greek merchant who had come to Egypt to serve the viceroy and was later appointed Greek consul.Footnote ⁷⁷ The consuls’ charter, established by vice-regal decree on 18 April 1856, required that the merchants’ tribunal be made up of three Ottoman subjects (raʿāyā al-ḥukūma) and three Europeans, designated, respectively, by the municipal administration (dīwān al-muḥāfaẓa) and the European consuls.Footnote ⁷⁸ The diversity that was a constitutive element of these new assemblies imposed a multilingual procedure: one of the articles in the consuls’ charter stipulated that the tribunal's secretary be fluent in both Arabic and Italian.Footnote ⁷⁹

A few of the individuals who served as members of the commercial tribunals seem to have been selected because they were the viceroy's allies. Others may have qualified for membership due to their knowledge of local business practices, which could serve to inform new legal statutes. Such statutes were usually prompted by specific incidents and were marked first and foremost by the desire to prevent merchants from exploiting the stateFootnote ⁸⁰ and secondarily by a concern for preventing conflicts among merchants or at least for resolving them as quickly as possible. These were not new goals, but their centralized management by state appointees was a new mechanism designed to achieve them.Footnote ⁸¹

One aim of the commercial courts was clearly to diminish the privileges associated with extraterritoriality under the capitulations, which required providing non-Muslim Ottoman subjects with an alternative to the protection of the European powers.Footnote ⁸² As Jan Goldberg remarks, the commercial courts were designed to remove some commercial litigation from the authority of European consulates and thereby from the sphere of the capitulations; they constituted a precursor to the mixed courts in this regard.Footnote ⁸³ In a similar vein, in Istanbul, the Ottoman sultans established Avrupa tüccari and Hayriye tüccari programs, taking as their model the organization of the European consulates. In this way, they “created an association for their non-Muslim merchants, providing them with similar channels for redress that were afforded the Europeans and their protégés.”Footnote ⁸⁴ Yet the commercial tribunals, as we have seen, also diminished the effectiveness of the Ottoman shariʿa courts. Although commercial courts and codes in some of the empire's cities took as long as a decade to begin operating after they had been legally established, once they did (in the early 1860s in Aleppo, for instance), “commercial litigation largely vanished from the Islamic court registers.”Footnote ⁸⁵

In the case of Egypt, the litigation procedure elaborated in the 1845 statute of the commercial courts was not radically new: it specified a series of measures (filing of a complaint, interrogation of the defendant, response from the plaintiff) identical to the exploratory course of action followed by shariʿa courts. The main difference was that the commercial courts did not require an oath if the plaintiff and the defendant presented contradictory versions of events, while the oath was an important element of proof in the shariʿa courts.Footnote ⁸⁶

The commercial tribunals, then, excised an entire area from the shariʿa courts’ jurisdiction and established the parameters of a new domain circumscribed by religious identity, national affiliation, and professional activity. In this domain, specialization increased, leading to a split between two different types of commercial courts in Cairo and Alexandria by the late 1830s: mixed commissions, dealing with disputes between foreign and native merchants; and native courts, ruling on commercial disputes among locals.Footnote ⁸⁷

The creation of a legal system specific to merchants—that is, to their status as merchants, since these same individuals, if they were Ottoman subjects, appeared before the qadi to resolve affairs such as inheritance or custody disputes—cannot be dissociated from the strongly state-centered character of the tribunals. A salaried state employee, rather than a judge, presided over the commercial courts established in 1845 in Cairo and Alexandria. The “special mixed courts” had exclusive jurisdiction over purely professional matters: their activities aimed at elaborating a particular form of justice, adapted to the needs of commerce and subjected to the state's direct tutelage. Since these new state institutions dealt exclusively with commercial affairs, they replaced the influence that merchants had exercised in that domain; yet by definition, and unlike the merchants, such institutions had no autonomous resources with which to threaten the state's growing hegemony.

In addition to the state's interest in encouraging legal specialization in the regulation of commercial disputes, the expansion of the export market in the first half of the 19th century may have encouraged foreign merchants, who could not benefit from the ties established through long experience of trade in Egypt, to demand a legal system capable of compensating for that weakness. At this time, the most powerful local tujjār had professional practices and knowledge of the market that allowed them to resort to less formal guarantees than those offered by the commercial tribunals: the shariʿa courts provided an adequate forum for resolving conflicts that could not be settled through mediation. The large number of cases dealing with debt and credit registered in the shariʿa courts (for example, debt acknowledgment or complaints regarding non-payment), which involve small sums as well as very large ones, show that creditors had assiduous recourse to these institutions. Local tujjār could thus participate in an economy of reciprocity whose parameters were defined by trust and reputation. The merchants who came to Egypt to benefit from the opportunities opened up by the viceroy's policies did not belong to the same environment. They did not have the advantage of business relations transmitted from one generation to the next and reinforced by matrimonial, residential, and inheritance strategies. The newcomers who came to Egypt after Muhammad ʿAli reached power did not have a place in existing credit networks.Footnote ⁸⁸

Perhaps one reason why the legal codes of the commercial courts placed such emphasis on the need to specify very short deadlines for all transactions, including commercial litigation, was the growing need to recoup investments quickly. The instability that marked the first decades of the 19th century must have put particular strain on credit arrangements. Despite the state-directed export of cash crops, intended to draw in hard currency, the 1810s and 1820s were probably marked by a currency shortage, exacerbated by the expense of military reforms and expeditions to Arabia.Footnote ⁸⁹ During the same period, Europeans who hoped to make their fortune had begun to arrive in Egypt, challenging monopolies over certain sectors of trade but finding themselves obliged to negotiate with the pasha to obtain access to strategic commodities.Footnote ⁹⁰ According to Marsot, Salt, the British consul, remarked “that in favourable years the merchants were not called upon to settle their accounts, but when the pasha needed money they became ‘absolutely subjected to [his] mercy . . . scarcely one of them being in a state to come to a final settlement.’” Finally, in October 1820, he “ordered all merchants to pay their debts or leave the country.”Footnote ⁹¹ Such difficult financial circumstances made it especially necessary to shore up credit networks. Yet the existing law was remarkably lenient toward debtors until the 19th century. Lane was among the observers who remarked on this, noting that if debtors could establish their inability to repay their creditors, they were set free. Only those who were able to work were forced to acquit their obligations.Footnote ⁹²

The new commercial courts went to some lengths to deal with this problem. Alexandria's commercial tribunal faced lengthy bankruptcy liquidation cases and practices considered insufficiently punitive toward “bad faith” debtors.Footnote ⁹³ Debtors’ impunity also seems to have incited the Austrian, French, British, Prussian, and Russian consuls-general to work toward the reform of Alexandria's commercial court in 1845: they complained that IOUs systematically came due without being paid and that the liquidation of bankruptcies encountered perpetual obstacles and delays. Debtors were able to avoid penal sanction in almost every case, and the consuls sought to protect non-Ottoman merchants from the consequences of these practices. Indeed, almost all the substantive articles of the code they proposed concerned questions of debt.Footnote ⁹⁴ The 1845 charter devotes one article (16) to the procedure advocated in the case of failure to discharge a debt by the deadline agreed upon by the parties: the debtor's goods were to be seized, and their value was to be distributed among the creditors, who were required to approve this means of compensation.Footnote ⁹⁵

In the absence of institutions that could control anonymous capital circulation, creditors’ trust and debtors’ reputation were the only principles perpetuating the “economy of obligation” in a legal framework based above all on the reliability of witnesses and normative acceptance of the oath as a credible means of establishing truth.Footnote ⁹⁶ When market expansion multiplied and extended credit chains, it became impossible to know all of one's debtors and even less feasible to trust them all. In such conditions, a break, in the form of a single default, had repercussions all along the series of credit relations.Footnote ⁹⁷ The influx and diversity of non-Ottoman merchants therefore seem to have played a part, however minor, in the creation of commercial courts, specialized principally in questions of debt and fraudulent bankruptcy.