Politics of monopoly

Summary

Doumani’s term for the system by which the rulers of Acre, above all Zahir al-Umar and Ahmad Pasha al-Jazzar, implanted themselves as middlemen between foreign merchants and cotton-growing villages, cornering the surplus and controlling prices at the point of sale to foreign merchants (Rediscovering Palestine: Merchants and Peasants in Jabal Nablus, 1700-1900, lines 1900-2166).

Profits from Zahir al-Umar’s less-than-perfect monopoly system helped transform Acre from a little town into an imposing fortress city and the seat of an autonomous enclave within the Ottoman Empire (Rediscovering Palestine: Merchants and Peasants in Jabal Nablus, 1700-1900, lines 1900-2166).
The politics of monopoly never took hold in the rest of Palestine: in Jabal Nablus, competition, not monopoly, characterized the politics of trade in cotton (Rediscovering Palestine: Merchants and Peasants in Jabal Nablus, 1700-1900, lines 2167-2330).
Sulayman Pasha al-Adil’s accession heralded the slow decline of monopoly politics from above, smuggling eroded it from below, and the Egyptian invasion of 1831 dealt it a quick and fatal blow (Rediscovering Palestine: Merchants and Peasants in Jabal Nablus, 1700-1900, lines 2167-2330).
The “free” market that succeeded it was only free in the sense that it was no longer monopolized by a single ruling strongman, not in the sense that there were no political restrictions at all: local merchants “adjusted” the conditions of trade to work in their favor through their networks and through the Nablus Advisory Council (Rediscovering Palestine: Merchants and Peasants in Jabal Nablus, 1700-1900, lines 2331-2389).

tags
aliases	politics of monopoly, monopoly system