Summary
A Nablus merchant family whose ancestors are listed among the merchant elite emerging after 1657, and whose brothers Sayyid As’ad and Sayyid Sa’id Bishtawi provide Chapter 5’s case study of wealth concentration and vertical integration in soap production: a corporate three-generational patrilocal household that financed its own soap factory, cooked soap for its own account as well as for other merchants, and combined moneylending, oil trading, soap manufacture and large landownership (Rediscovering Palestine: Merchants and Peasants in Jabal Nablus, 1700-1900, lines 496-526, lines 3985-4100).
Details
- The July 2, 1857 inheritance estate of Sayyid As’ad son of Yusuf Bishtawi and his brother Sayyid Sa’id had to account for both brothers, though only As’ad died, because they jointly owned commercial and personal property, jointly financed the soap factory’s construction, and evenly split all business expenses and profits, down to furniture, copper kitchen utensils and the clothes they wore (Rediscovering Palestine: Merchants and Peasants in Jabal Nablus, 1700-1900, lines 3985-4100).
- As’ad’s oldest son Hajj Yusuf secured appointment as legal guardian (wasi) over his minor male siblings before his father died, became legal agent for his two sisters, bought his mother’s shares in twenty parcels of agricultural land and three shops, then one sister’s shares in the same properties, and resumed with his uncle the purchase of dozens of olive groves, shops, oil presses and houses (Rediscovering Palestine: Merchants and Peasants in Jabal Nablus, 1700-1900, lines 3985-4100).
- The brothers converted a building of warehouses and shops in the Wikala Asaliyya into their own soap factory, bought shares in another factory, and cooked for their own account 20 percent of the factory’s output for the cycle recorded in the estate; Table 8 of the estate lists commissions by eight other parties totalling 1595.0 jars of oil and 142,940 piasters in cooked soap as printed (Rediscovering Palestine: Merchants and Peasants in Jabal Nablus, 1700-1900, lines 3985-4100).
- To secure olive oil the brothers combined ownership of numerous olive groves and oil presses with a network of Salam contracts; at As’ad’s death salam loans were outstanding with peasants from eight villages — Asira, Rafidya, Aqraba, Bayta, Adhmut, Salim, Ajansinya and Bayt Dajan — all but one in a single subdistrict (Rediscovering Palestine: Merchants and Peasants in Jabal Nablus, 1700-1900, lines 3985-4100).
- In February 1807 leading Bishtawi family members were among those present at the disposal of Sayyid Abd al-Qadir Hanbali’s estate and bought commercial properties, and a Bishtawi was among the soap-factory owners present (Rediscovering Palestine: Merchants and Peasants in Jabal Nablus, 1700-1900, lines 4101-4215).
- Hajj Yusuf Bishtawi’s pursuit of a runaway Salam debtor’s sheep and movables, and in 1865 his guarantor’s vine-orchard, is given in Chapter 4 as an example of enforcement (Rediscovering Palestine: Merchants and Peasants in Jabal Nablus, 1700-1900, lines 3220-3279).
- Chapter 5’s remainder makes the brothers’ conversion of their Wikala al-Asaliyya shops and warehouses into a soap factory symbolic of merchant capital’s shift into soap and of the industry’s concentration; As’ad Bishtawi is among the eleven major soap merchants of circa 1853 who signed the petition protesting new export taxes, and the notes record the factory’s endowment as a family waqf on July 23, 1856 and an August 1842 endowment of a small share of the Husayniyya factory (Rediscovering Palestine: Merchants and Peasants in Jabal Nablus, 1700-1900, lines 4216-4340, lines 4766-5058).
Related pages
Rediscovering Palestine: Merchants and Peasants in Jabal Nablus, 1700-1900, Salam, Jabal Nablus, Nablus