Regions and Markets of Ottoman Syria: Comparisons and Transformations

Abstract

In Ottoman times (l6th-early 20th centuries) geographic Syria did not constitute a single political unit. Under Ottoman rule Syria was administered from a number of provincial centers. These always included Aleppo and Damascus, plus one or two other towns that governed or monitored the coast and the coastal mountains. At first the littoral provinces were centered on Sidon and Tripoli, but in the nineteenth century Beirut eclipsed these. Likewise Ottoman Syria was not a single market, and in the earlier Ottoman period the country was not a closely interconnected economic unit. Rather, cities and towns bad intense and multi-stranded relations with their immediate hinterlands. Urban-rural ties comprised local markets that met the majority of subsistence needs. A web of complementary transactions and interrelationships joined townspeople, peasants, and pastoralists to one another.