People and Goods in Egypt’s 18th-Century Ports: The Ottoman Mediterranean, Revisited

The Ottoman Empire ruled over much of the southern, eastern and northeastern shores of the Mediterranean throughout the early modern period, yet we know strikingly little about the port cities that held this maritime empire together. Port cities emerged as a favorite topic for a generation of scholars influenced by World Systems Theory; but while the fields of Ottoman studies and Mediterranean studies have developed new, critical perspectives in subsequent decades, scholarship on Ottoman port cities has not been revisited. This paper explores Egypt’s Mediterranean port cities of Rosetta (Arabic: Rashid) and Damietta (Dimyat) as critical sites within an Ottoman political economy of imperial provisioning and provincial administration in the long eighteenth century (1680-1810). These cities housed diverse populations of Ottoman Muslim merchants from around the eastern Mediterranean who were drawn to the fabled fertility of commercial agriculture in the northern Egyptian Delta. Records from the local Islamic courts of Rosetta and Damietta, state-level bureaucratic records, and travelers’ accounts reveal that trans-imperial Muslim capital––in the form of land, ships, irrigation equipment, and agricultural surplus––dominated Egypt’s most vibrant early modern ports and their connections to the Ottoman commercial and political arena in the eastern Mediterranean. Patterns of land-ownership shed light on the rise and fall of important individuals within a trans-Mediterranean Ottoman commercial class who were able to translate access to land, water, and the agricultural surplus into significant financial and political clout. This paper illuminates how social groups and institutions in Rosetta and Damietta negotiated the growing rivalry between Istanbul and Cairo, as well as the increasing presence of French Levant traders over the course of the eighteenth century. It restores a dynamism and agency to local actors and local spaces that have been missing from scholarship on Ottoman port cities.