Praised even by Voltaire, The Travels of Sir John Chardin into Persia and the East-Indies, Volumes 1-10, is considered by many scholars as a seminal work in Middle-East historical scholarship.  Its publication in 1686 positioned Chardin in French and English society “as one of the most important arbiters of European commercial and colonial expansion.” Indeed, as a rich nobleman and travelling jeweler and merchant, Chardin was at the spearhead of expansionary economic efforts by European powers competing with one another to control trade in the Middle East at the turn of the 17th century.  Moreover, Chardin carefully documented the various workers’ guilds, industries, and budding international trade networks that experienced huge expansion before the industrial revolution began in earnest, transforming economies and communities in the Middle-East and all over the world.  But before the English, Chardin, and his future employer, the East India Company, along with the French and Dutch, expanded into the Middle-East, they had “cultivated a colonial-style trade” with the Ottoman and Safavid empires, and helped set the stage for this extraordinary expansion.

By the 15th century, as Columbus landed in the Americas, three “gunpowder empires” had emerged in the Middle East, the Ottoman, Moghul, and Safavid empires.  Having emerged as victors over successive waves of invasions by Crusader armies from Europe in the 11th-12th centuries, then the more impactful invasions by the Mongols and Central Asian Turkish peoples in the 14th century, the empires, harnessing gunpowder, expanded, in the process creating flexible bureaucracies and more modern states based on the military-patronage model. These “imperial empires,” as scholar Karen Armstrong notes, were “massive…with superb bureaucratic efficiency, unrivalled by any other state at this time.” But events around the globe, as well as internal bureaucratic and administrative hurdles, brought about the beginning of the collapse of these imperial, or gunpowder, empires.  Known as the “crisis of the seventeenth century…the inability of imperial governments to maintain their authority within their territories,” along with a “general rise in prices that struck almost all of the Eurasian continent,” conditions were ripe for the economic upheaval that paved the way for merchants like the East India Company in the Indian Moghul Empire, and later Sir John Chardin as he pedaled gems to Middle-Eastern traders, traders that were newly exposed to European capitalism and unfamiliar with this changing world economic order.

By the 17th century, a “modern world economy” had emerged.  “Unlike the [legacy] system of world empires, which was, for the most part, politically and economically fragmented, the modern world economy is politically fragmented but economically united.” In this new, global economic environment various world events had an enormous impact on the traditional economy in the Middle East, including what has been called the “great inflation,” a global rise in prices attributed variously to an increase in global population, the impact of the Black Death, the “dependence of states on cash,” the continual debasement of currencies (a common tactic to generate value in the pre-modern world economy), and, especially, “the Spanish conquest of the New World,” causing the Ottoman Empire in particular to become a supplier to rich nations demanding very large amounts of goods.  Combined with ineffective methods of taxation, heavy smuggling, and competition, notably merchant republics in the Mediterranean where governments were designed with an edge for global finance, efforts to “encourage economic self-sufficiency” and thereby shore up state institutions to handle increased volumes of production and trade ultimately failed.  As the modern world economy prospered, distinct nation-state units have emerged, those at the core – technologically advanced nation-states like those in Europe – and others at the periphery – “that is, states at a lower technological and economic level.” Nation-states and entities like the Ottoman Empire, that is, traditional agrarian economies, in the 18th century were integrated into the periphery of the modern world economy as suppliers of resources and agriculture goods to more technologically advanced nation-states.

Sir John Chardin was quick to take advantage of the slow pace with which the Middle-Eastern empires could be integrated into the world economy.  On site at Smyrna, in the Levant, “he describes the rival trade missions to the Ottoman Empire and the inflation-inducing trade in debased coins.” Translated to English in the 17th century, Chardin wrote of the Turkish merchants, “There are no People in the World that have been more frequently cheated, or that are more easily gull’d then [sic] the Turks; as being naturally very dull, and thick skull;’d, and apt to believe any fair Story: Which is the reason that the Christians have impos’d a Thousand Cony-catching-Tricks, and Cheats upon’em.”  The “conventional agrarian society” that typified the empires and that still permeates the mindset of Middle-Eastern people today simply involved too many revolutions in politics and education and could not be actualized as fast as the scientific advancements in medicine, navigation, agriculture, and industry that marked the dawn of the industrial age in Western nation-states. In these ways the “technicalization of societ[ies]” could not be reversed as the need to fuel the consumption-based economies of more technologically and scientifically advanced nation-states increased.  And thus, early traders, and even modern day oil barons, have found ways to exploit the economies of the Middle-East.

In reaction, Middle-Eastern empires began to fragment.  By the mid-18th century, after repeated raids by Eastern tribes, the inability of the central government to retain control over such a large land area, and the resulting infusion of people and cultures from central Asia, the Safavid Empire collapsed eventually forming some modern states we know today such as Iran, Turkmenistan, and Azerbaijan.  In the east, the Moghul Empire was conquered and colonized by the British for over 300 years before independence, while the Ottoman Empire stood the longest, surviving 400 years before fracturing into more modern nation-states.  Chardin’s travels and mercantilism throughout the Middle-Eastern empires are just the beginning of a narrative that crosses cultures, time-periods, and philosophies, and that at times is both jarring in its technicality and saddening as the age of world empire gave way and changed the traditional lifeways of people in the Middle-East in so many profound ways.  Armstrong notes that “[t]his colonization was experienced by the agrarian colonies as invasive, disturbing, and alien,” but also that many Middle-Eastern reformers that followed embraced some aspects of Western democratic and capitalist ideologies.  Pointing to Egypt as an example, Armstrong sees the rise of political power in that nation after the Second World War as evidence that, in fact, like most people around the world, citizens of the Middle-East embrace both change and traditional lifeways.  For this reason, the Muslim reaction in the Middle-East to Western dominance and advance around the globe has been a slow, deliberate process where even today individuals and religious interests continue to debate and implement modernization initiatives across the region.

Bibliography

Armstrong, Karen. Islam: A Short History. New York. Random House. 2002.

Eurich, Amanda. “Chardin, Sir John (1643–1712).” Amanda Eurich In Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, edited by H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison. Oxford. 2004.

Gelvin, James L. Modern Middle East, The: A History, 4th ed. Oxford University Press, New York. 2016.