ABSTRACT
To many in the West the Middle Eastern town has been seen as, above all, an emporium; perhaps because so much of the West’s borrowings from Middle Eastern culture between about AD 800 and 1800 have lain essentially in the domain of trade – imported foods, cloths, implements, weapons, ornaments and luxuries of all kinds. 1 The region’s position at the cross-roads of three continents has helped the development of external city-based contacts; and it is the great caravan cities of the Middle East and North Africa that have been best known outside the region. Historically cities such as Fes, Cairo, Damascus and Mashhad fluctuated with commercial and political changes, the presence of political power contributing significantly to long-distance trade. The demand for luxury items created by a court could in itself enable a city to develop higher order functions than the numbers and wealth of the local inhabitants would normally warrant, as in the case of Tlemcen in Algeria under the Abd al-Wadids. 2 Equally the removal of political power could lead to a decline in the city’s commercial role, as many of the towns of western Turkey experienced, 3 after a reorganisation of the Ottoman administrative hierarchy early in the twentieth century. Although these functions may have stimulated commercial life, the cities of the Middle East and North Africa in the past were not, of course, supplied with the immediate necessities of life, food and drink, by caravans or overseas trade. They relied on their local regions for these. Two partly contradictory views of the nature of the relationship between city and hinterland are taken in the current literature on the subject. On one side the traditional role of the city in urban-rural relations is seen as parasitic: rural surpluses were removed from the countryside by taxation or absentee landlords and dissipated in non-productive urban consumption, thus, incidentally, stimulating commerce within the city. The process was carried out by political means before the last century, through taxation, 4 while in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the spread of rent capitalism has concentrated economic power in the hands of private individuals. 5 The overconcentration of wealth in cities has led in the present century to even further concentration in a few cities. On the other side some of the literature, particularly by geographers, emphasises the mutually reciprocal relations of city and rural hinterland, in which goods, mostly agricultural produce, are sold by the rural population in return for merchandise, manufactured goods and services which are provided in the city. 6
