Trade and Personal Wealth Accumulation in Tunis from the Seventeenth to the Early Nineteenth Centuries

The purpose of this research is to reach a fuller knowledge of the merchant community in Tunis during Ottoman rule and to analyze the ways through which individuals became rich, as well as the mechanisms for consolidating wealth within this social group. First, we tried to go beyond the anonymous approach initially suggested by such expressions as “merchant families” or “merchant milieu.” A series of merchant profiles were identified and we tried to retrace the activities and destinies of representative people corresponding to these profiles. Ranging from the ubiquitous ordinary merchants to the Islamized merchants of European origin (more frequently encountered in the seventeenth century), to the mamluks (more visible after 1750) and tax farmers, it was a large, diverse, and dynamic world. We then tried to identify the activities that made certain merchants rich, as well as the procedures used to preserve their wealth. Foreign trade and related monopolies as well as commercial credit appear to have been the most profitable money-making areas. It also appeared that merchants’ wealth, if not acquired through privileges granted by the state, was not necessarily threatened by it either. In order to avoid incurring the risk of arbitrary seizures, merchants resorted to the institution of habous, safe-haven investments, and matrimonial alliances. Thus, the existence or absence of a merchant bourgeoisie was neither dependent on the state nor necessarily autonomous from it. Individual initiative remained the key element to merchants’ wealth. The Tunisian case does not seem to be unique in the Ottoman world.