Summary
The argument, common in both nationalist and colonialist discourses in Doumani’s account, that European machine-made textiles caused the decline and death of the once-prosperous textile-manufacturing sectors of Greater Syria — an account Doumani treats as a much more complicated story of adaptation and restructuring (Rediscovering Palestine: Merchants and Peasants in Jabal Nablus, 1700-1900, lines 2390-2529).
Details
- Dominique Chevalier’s 1962 study of the resistance techniques of Syrian artisans was the first concrete rebuttal of the traditional view of unmitigated decline; Roger Owen and Donald Quataert later raised more general objections (Rediscovering Palestine: Merchants and Peasants in Jabal Nablus, 1700-1900, lines 2390-2529).
- Quataert faulted historians for not taking into consideration the underlying assumptions of contemporary European observers or the contexts in which their reports about the destruction of handicrafts industries were made, and brought up the importance of cheap labor, especially female labor, in allowing locally produced goods to survive, restructure and remain competitive (Rediscovering Palestine: Merchants and Peasants in Jabal Nablus, 1700-1900, lines 2390-2529).
- Ihsan Nimr’s epitaph for Nablus’s manufactures, in a section entitled “The Undermining and Destruction of the [Jabal Nablus] Manufactures”, is quoted at length and qualified: Nimr painted the picture from the vantage point of the second half of the twentieth century and conflated developments of several periods, most of which took place after World War I (Rediscovering Palestine: Merchants and Peasants in Jabal Nablus, 1700-1900, lines 2390-2529).
Related pages
Rediscovering Palestine: Merchants and Peasants in Jabal Nablus, 1700-1900, Roger Owen, Ihsan Nimr, Nablus