On the Middle East in the World Economy, 1800-1914

This book is honestly quite incredible. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that books like this simply aren’t produced anymore — we can theorize why (the postmodern preference for cultural and minority histories, the preponderance of the political), but Owen’s work is a nearly encyclopedic time machine, and that it fits so much into so little space is an achievement in itself. The subject is well described by the title: Owen examines the Middle East — defined here as Anatolia, greater Syria (the Levant), Egypt, and Iraq — through the lens of the production, distribution, and circulation of goods. It’s all here: tables of commodity production, involved discussions of tax and land policy, descriptions of global trade, narratives of nascent industry.

That might sound dull, but it’s genuinely interesting. The world is awfully hard to understand without a grasp of its economic base, and the story here matters. The through-line, as I read it, is that the Middle Eastern provinces were badly mismanaged by Ottoman authorities, which the European powers turned to their advantage, fostering an intense dependence that culminated in the direct colonization of Egypt in 1882 and — beyond this book’s scope — the rest of the region after the First World War. Owen opens with a snapshot of the Middle Eastern economy in 1800. Like everywhere else, it was essentially agrarian and dominated by cereal production, though other commodities — cotton, silk, coffee — were grown too, and most regions were self-sufficient, with one major exception: Mount Lebanon, which largely grew mulberries to feed its rich silk industry. Owen pushes back on the idea that the economy was “stagnant” or “in decline,” though it had serious problems, largely from Ottoman tax policy. The Ottomans took a tithe in kind, with producers handing over a share of what they grew, but they also demanded payment in currency, which pushed peasants toward cash crops they could sell to meet their obligations to the Porte. Mismanagement of those revenues left the Porte and Egypt heavily indebted, taking large loans from Europeans — Britain, France, Germany — to meet their largely military obligations, until by mid-century the cost of servicing the debt outpaced everything else. Both went bankrupt and sought bailouts, and European capitalists used the opening to direct Middle Eastern finances as they liked; the region has not, to this day, broken out of that vicious cycle, even with decolonization.

Owen is honest about the difficulty of the sources. Neither the Ottomans nor the Porte kept records on population, the cost of goods, or even trade, and many of the sources are European consuls, administrators, and businessmen making assumptions — especially for the Mesopotamian provinces, with their large nomadic and semi-nomadic populations and the marsh communities that evaded state supervision entirely. Owen handles all of it with a healthy skepticism, triangulating where he can and telling us plainly when the information isn’t there, and his clarity about his own methods makes me trust him far more. Unrelated to the central argument, the segments on the silk industry, mostly in the chapters on greater Syria, fascinated me — I had no idea how silk was produced, and now that I do, it’s almost obvious why its production collapsed in Lebanon — and his account of Syrian and Lebanese migration helped explain why they became such recognized merchants around the world. The bits on industry, appended near the end of each chapter, interested me too: I hadn’t realized Egypt developed a small, abortive network of factories in the early nineteenth century, though most of the industry covered is small-scale, not factories in the European sense but workshops of fewer than ten men (more than eighty percent of fewer than five). The book won’t be for everyone — it’s dense, slow-going, and packed — but I found it illuminating.