Muslims in the Middle East, 1700 to 1837

Economic stagnation and growth; Iran, 1700 to 1828; The Ottoman Empire, reforms and war against Europeans, 1800-37

Economic Stagnation and Growth

Arabs were to wonder what happened that the Western world surpassed the Islamic world. At least part of the answer lay in an explanation as to why the Islamic Middle East did not keep up with technological developments taking place in the West. Islam and the Arab world was dominated by the Ottoman Empire, an empire built, as empires are, on war, and in the days when booty made warring profitable. Warring had been income for the Ottomans, but by the 1800s the Ottomans could no longer advance themselves economically by war. Warring had become an economic drain.

In the 1700s, Europe had a growing agriculture and a growing population, and Asia had a growing population, while the Ottoman Empire stayed sparsely populated -- a population that suffered from internal warfare and occasional famine followed by epidemics of disease. The Muslims were spending a lot of time fighting each other. The Ottomans were trying to maintain their hold on people in Arabia and fighting the Saud family and those Muslims called Wahhabi (Wahabi). The Wahhabi captured the Shiite holy cities of Karbala and then Mecca in 1802. The Ottomans gave to the Egyptians the task of crushing the Wahhabi, and the Egyptians occupied Mecca in 1812.

Most Muslims worked at growing food, much of it subsistence farming. In the Muslim world were merchants and a few banks, but commerce had been diminished from the 1500s by the rise of European trading on sea and the end of trade passing across Islamic lands. Islam remained pre-capitalist, and the economic policies of government aimed not at economic growth but on mere subsistence and collecting taxes. Trade was largely local, with long distance trade of non-agricultural products limited to goods that were expensive and light in weight. Then, in response to the growing populations and demand for products in Europe, more was grown for export -- mainly cotton but also food -- by the Greeks then ruled by the Ottomans but having their tradition in merchant shipping, acting as the go-betweens. Less was being grown for local food consumption, which endangered food supplies for Islamic cities.

There was little investment in industry and little interest in doing things differently. The sultan, in Turkey, was interested in his harem and in income from taxes and the sale offices in his huge bureaucracy to pay for his style of living. There was little understanding of economic problems and no strong drive to master learning economics in order to cope with change. The sultan was interested in the well-being of his subjects. It was his duty to protect Islam from the outside world and to maintain justice within Islamic society, and he supplied soldiers for maintaining order. There was Islamic law and Islamic courts -- the Sharia -- seen by people as the source of justice and protection from tyranny. Rather than seeing Islam keep up with Britain economically, the sultan was focused on his authority as the maintainer of Islamic traditions.