THE BLOCKING OF THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE TRADING FORMATIONS: THE ARAB WORLD AND BLACK AFRICA

The significance of the process of interaction between long­distance trade and the breakup of precapitalist relations is more easily perceived if we compare the way Europe evolved with what happened to the other precapitalist formations.

The Arab world offers us the case of a formation in which long-distance trade played an exceptionally important role but that failed to develop an indigenous capitalism. Why was this?

The Arab world extends over several thousand miles of the semiarid borderland that stretches like a belt across the Old World, between the Atlantic and Monsoon Asia. It occupies in this region a zone that is separated from Europe by the Mediterranean, from Black Africa by the Sahara, and from the Turkish and Persian “worlds” by the mountain ranges of the Taurus, Kurdistan, and western Iran. It is not identical with the Islamic world, which, broadly speaking, occupies the whole of this semiarid belt and is divided between four groups of peoples — the Arabs, the Turks, the Persians, and the Indo-Afghans. This Islamic world has only marginally overflowed into Monsoon Asia (Bengal, Indonesia) and, in more recent times, into some parts of Black Africa (the West African savannah, and the East coast). The Arab world is not to be seen as an ethnoracial phenomenon, for the process of Arabiza­tion has mixed together a wide variety of peoples. The Arab world constituted a relatively centralized political entity for only a ∣ short period of its history, a mere two centuries, and during that ∣ period (the age of the Omayyads and the first Abbasids, between i 750 and 950), linguistic unity was a great deal less advanced than ∣ it is today. The Arab world then broke up into comparatively stable regional political entities, which were not brought together again (and then only superficially) until they were subjected to the Otto­man yoke, that is, to a foreign ruler.

As regards the structures of their precolonial social formations, the Arab countries did not constitute a homogeneous whole. The Arab world was very different from medieval Europe. It was always divided into three zones that were very dissimilar in social structure and in political and economic organization: the East (al Mashraq), embracing Arabia, Syria (i.e., the present states of Syria, Leba­non, Jordan, and Israel), and Iraq; the Nile lands (Egypt and the Sudan); and the West (al Maghreb), extending from Libya to the Atlantic and embracing the modern countries of Libya, Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco, and Mauritania. In the whole region, Egypt alone, which divides the Arab world in two, has always been a peasant civilization. Elsewhere in this semiarid zone agricultural activity is always precarious and the surplus that can be levied from the agriculturists is on the whole very meager. Techniques of agricul­tural production are necessarily not very advanced, the productivity of agricultural labor is low, the standard of living of the agricul­tural community is close to subsistence level, and consequently the forms of social organization inevitably bear the mark of primi­tive collectivism. There is no sufficient basis for a surplus to be levied on a scale that would make possible a feudal class structure or even a brilliant civilization.

And yet the Mashraq (especially, but the Maghreb as well, al­though to a lesser extent) has been the scene of rich civilizations that, moreover, were definitely urban in character. How could this “miracle” have occurred? How are we to explain this apparent anomaly that wealthy Egypt, the only large oasis in this arid zone, has always been a peasant country, with comparatively little urban development until the modern period, even in the great ages of its ancient civilization, whereas the Mashraq₁ which has known equally ■brilliant epochs in its history, has always been an area of great cities?

In order to understand this, we must see the Arab world in its true context, as a great zone of passage, a sort of turntable between the major areas of civilization in the Old World.

This pattern of a trading formation was characteristic of the Mashraq down to the First World War. Thereafter, the integration of the region into the imperialist sphere, which had begun only Superficiallyin the Ottoman period, brought about decisive changes in the class structure of Iraq but only minor ones in Syria a^nd Palestine. At the other end of the Arab world, in the Maghreb, this pattern of society remained characteristic until the French colonial conquest. That colonization, which began earlier and went deeper than that to which the Mashraq was subjected, brought about decisive changes in the Maghreb of modern times. Between the two regions, Egypt continued to be the exception, as a tribute­paying peasant formation well integrated into the world capitalist system.

Islam was born in Arabia, in the desert, among a population of nomads who were organized to carry on large-scale trade between the Eastern Roman Empire and Persia on the one hand and South Arabia, Ethiopia, and India on the other. It was the profits obtained from this trade that made possible the existence of the urban mer­chant republics of the Hejaz. The domination exercised by these towns over the small rural oasis areas around them, which they exploited on a semiserf basis, was not at all the main source of income for the ruling merchant classes.

The first part of the “civilized world” to be conquered by the Arabs was the Fertile Crescent — the lands of Syria and Iraq, along the northern edge of the Arabian Desert. There the Arabs were in familiar territory, for the societies of the Ancient East had been very largely commercial communities of the same type as their own. There were, to be sure, some peasants in this semiarid zone, whereas there were hardly any to the south of it. But these were mountain peasants, clinging to the hillsides of the mountains of the Lebanon, the Jebel Ansariya₁ the Taurus, and Kurdistan, where the rainfall was just enough for them to be able to survive. These rural areas were too poor ^:— despite the epithet “fertile” — to supply the surplus needed to support a brilliant civilization. They had therefore remained “primitive,” organized in village communities and comparatively isolated, jealously defending their independence. Civilization had developed at the edges of the region in two exceptional areas: Mesopotamia and the Mediterranean coast. Mesopotamia had seen the development of the first genuine agri­cultural civilization thanks to the exceptional natural conditions provided by the Tigris and the Euphrates. An organization arose there that was similar to Egypt’s, based upon the surplus levied by the cities from the neighboring countryside.

The unity of the Fertile Crescent was not really disrupted until after the First World War. But it was always a unity in diversity: a diversity, however, that was never “cultural,” still less, ethnic. The intermingling of peoples goes back so far in this region that it is futile to try to contrast one people with another on so fragile a basis. What is characteristic of a zone of civilization of this type, the essence of which is its commercial function of putting in touch two zones that it separates, is that it is dialectically both unifying and dismembering. It is unifying because it causes men to move around ceaselessly so that customs and religions are passed on and a travelers’ lingua franca becomes the predominant speech. It is dismembering because it is based on competition between rival mercantile cities. The detailed course of events is not the main thing here: what is significant is the presence or absence of a single formal political authority. If such an authority is strong, it will, of course, set limits to the competition between the cities, often ensuring a pre-eminent position for the capital.

by way of exception, in Lower Iraq, which was organized into commodity-producing, slave-worked plantations of the “Roman” type. For twelve centuries, between 700 and 1900, the Fertile Cres­cent was thus both unified and divided, experiencing a succession of brilliant periods and periods of decadence, depending on the fate of the trade routes linking Byzantine and Western Europe with India and China.

The Fertile Crescent soon became Arabized. Already on the eve of the Islamic invasion, when it was Christian, it was unified linguistically through the triumph of the Aramaic tongue. Being itself a Semitic language, Aramaic could give way without diffi­culty to Arabic. The region’s linguistic unity has been practically complete for centuries, if we do not treat as different languages ways of speech that differ only in accent and in a few colloquial­isms. A very pure form of Arabic is spoken here, and from Jeru­salem to the borders of Turkey the same “Syrian” accent is charac­teristic. Palestine is a fragment of this Mashraq, nothing more.

But the profound cultural unity of the Mashraq does not imply the absence of diversity, as between the various cities and the various little rural areas. The country districts have been isolated from each other for twelve centuries, and of little weight either economically or politically. They have resisted in arms and with religious dissidence the attempts of imperial authority to subject them. Thus, in the Mashraq, the only truly rural areas are all nonconformist in religion: the mountains of the Lebanon, divided between Maronite Christians and Shi’ite Moslems; the Jebel An- sariya, home of the Alaouites, and the Jebel-Druse, in Syria; and Lower Iraq, with its Shi’ite population. The Shi’a heresy, which divided the Moslem world very early on, found favorable soil in the free communities of the mountains. It developed in these con­ditions a much freer, more critical, and even egalitarian spirit than that of the “official” Sunni doctrine. This is likewise why it was the ideology of the peasant slaves who revolted in Lower Iraq (the Qarmathian rebellion).

We cannot speak of “feudalism” here, even if “semifeudal” forms did develop during periods when large-scale trade was in decline. In the flat country areas the townsmen could dominate more easily; they thus used to make up, by tribute extorted from the peasants, their loss of income from long-distance trade. The plains of the Bekaa, of Palestine, Homs, Hama, and Central Iraq were in this way sometimes brought under control by greedy Iand- owners, especially during the Ottoman period (from 1500 onward), which was a long period of commercial decline. Much later, starting in the 1930s, the modern-style exploitation of agricultural areas, made possible by irrigation works, was to spread wider the zone occupied by latifundia.

What is essential here, however, is not the country but the town. Here were huge cities, truly of monstrous size when trade began to decline; they were among the most populous cities of Antiquity, the Middle Ages, and modern times before the capitalist period, being much more important than the cities of the West. Aleppo, Damascus, Baghdad, Basra, and Antioch had hundreds of thousands of inhabitants. In their best periods they embraced the majority of the population of the region, which exceeded five million inhabitants, a larger number than it was to contain at the beginning of the twentieth century. These were cities that were always centers of courts and merchants, with great numbers of j craftsmen and clerks around them. They were merchant cities, !like those of Italy, which echoed them in the medieval.West, or Hike those of the Hanseatic League. The accumulation of wealth in these cities expressed the brilliance of their civilization. But this accumulation did not lead to capitalism, precisely because the country districts, isolated as they were, had not been “feudalized.” ^, Retaining thus their mercantile but not capitalist character, the cities of the Mashraq formed a set of little worlds competing with each other; the outlets for their very advanced craft production were the distant markets to which their merchants traveled. The cultural unity of this dominant urban world was pronounced. These cities were centers of Arabo-Islamic culture, citadels of Sunni orthodoxy.

At the other extremity.of the Arab world, in the Maghreb, the same structures were to be found. There nomads and cultivators had struggled since time immemorial for possession of a narrow strip of territory squeezed between the sea, the mountains, and the great desert. The Pax Romana, by setting up a series of forti­fied posts all long the limes, the imperial frontier, had pushed further south the zone of the Berber cultivators, who encroached. upon the lands over which roamed the nomads and seminomads who were also Berbers. Already before the coming of the Arabs, the decline of the Roman Empire had enabled the nomads to recover some of their territory from the cultivators.

When the Arabs arrived, they encountered among the agricul­tural population of the mountainous areas the same resistance that others had experienced before them. They, however, skirted these massifs and established cities in the plains. These cities, as in the East, could not have survived and prospered if they had not found in. large-scale, long-distance trade the resources that were denied them by the difficulty of extracting surplus from the cultivators. The search for income from trade led the Arabs farther and farther afield, across the Mediterranean and across the Sahara, too. Toward the south they encountered Berber nomads who had the same interest as themselves, that of becoming the Caravaneers of a flourishing commerce. These Berbers became Arabized much more quickly than the peasants, who had little interest in the ur­ban civilization of the Arabs. Ibn Khaldun gave a perfect analysis of the nature of these social formationsof the medieval Maghreb. With an intelligence and exactitude that might be envied by many historians and sociologists of the Arab world today, he analyzed these formations as being based not on a surplus levied from the peasants of the region but on the profits of large-scale trade. It was in this way that all the great states of the Maghreb were founded upon the trade in gold, the gold in question coming from West Africa. For centuries and until the discovery of America, West Africa was the chief supplier of.the -yellow metal to all the western part of the Old World — to the Roman Empire, to medi­eval Europe, to the Ancient East, and to the Arab world. This trade in gold nourished to the north of the Sahara the states of the Almoravides, the AImohades₁ and others, and to the south of the great desert the states of Ghana, Mali, and Songhay. The structures of these social formations were so alike that Ibn Khaldun, with the Arab travelers of the time (Ibn Batuta, for example), assimilated them all to the same pattern.

Alliance between the cities and the nomads, together with ex­clusion of the peasantry from the civilized state, are characteristic features of the civilization of the Maghreb, as of the Fertile Cres­cent. Ideologists of the French colonization of the Maghreb sought to explain these features in terms of the conflict between' races — Berber peasants against Arab nomads — and to account for the decline of the Maghreb by the ravages of the Arab nomads, who had destroyed agriculture and the works that made it possible. Similar explanations have been given in relation to the Arab East, where decline was also ascribed to the devastation wrought by nomads. However, one observes that the brilliant ages of Arab civilization, in the East as in the Maghreb, were not marked by great achievements in the agricultural field but by the prosperity of trade and the cities, and often, in connection with the prosperity of trade, by the rule of great nomadic tribes to the detriment of the peasantry, who never counted for much in those parts.

Decline came to the Maghreb with the shifting of the trade routes. As these were displaced from West to East, we note a corresponding shift in the centers of civilization, both to the north of the Sahara and to the south of it. Thus, in the earliest period there were the states of Morocco in the north and Ghana and Mali in the south; later, the gold routes shifted toward Tunis, and later still toward Egypt, while the south saw the flowering of the Songhay and Hausa states. And in the Maghreb the peasant redoubts upheld their autonomy by clinging to the Berber language and culture, just as in the Arab East, having been Arabized so far as language was concerned, they sought to maintain their auton­omy through religious dissidence.

Egypt’s history was quite different. From one of the oldest peasant peoples in the world a huge surplus could be tapped by the ruling classes, thus providing the basis for civilization. State centralization imposed itself early here, and in an extreme form, both for “natural” reasons (the need to organize large-scale ir­rigation works) and in order to protect the Egyptian oasis against the danger from the nomads. In order to survive, Egypt has always tried to live retired within itself, relying on numbers to beat back the onslaughts of the nomads. When Egypt conquered territory outside the Nile valley, the motive was to better defend its peasant civilization by installing garrisons in the heart of the lands of the nomads and seminomads — to the east in Sinai and Syria, to the west in Libya. In Egypt, however, there were never, until the Hellenistic period, any really great trading cities. The capitals of the Pharaohs were set up in the midst of the fields, in the densely populated countryside.

The very type of the traditional social formation in Egypt was thus constituted on foundations that were quite different from those of the Mashraq and the Maghreb. The peasant redoubts of both of the latter were autonomous, not much integrated into civilization, and with a very low level of development of the pro­ductive forces. The Mashraq and the Maghreb also remained to a large extent organized in village communities. The Egyptian peas-1 antry left that stage behind them over four thousand years ago. ⅛. The Egyptian formation was not of the type in which the towns and the merchants are predominant, but of the rural type, with a tribute-paying peasantry. This tribute-paying formation, in which the peasants are not oppressed in groups retaining the relative autonomy of their village community but individually, in small family units, thus evolves on its own toward a form of genuine feudalism. The latter, which I would prefer to call a developed ' tribute-paying formation, and which resembles that of China, i differs from the feudalism of the West only in its state centrali- ≡ zation, the ruling class that levies the surplus being strongly or­ganized in a state.

After Alexander’s invasion Egypt became a province, forming part of empires based on large-scale trade: this was its situation in the Hellenistic world, then in the Byzantine world, and even­tually in the Arab world. During the brilliant periods of these empires, when long-distance trade was flourishing, Egypt expe­rienced mercantile urban civilization. But this civilization remained something “foreign,” established in cities of courts and merchants that did not really become Egyptianized until the long-distance trade by which they lived began to decline. Such was Alexandria in the Greek period, Fostat, and later Cairo, in the Arab period. The world of rural Egypt remained outside all that. So far as it was concerned, the only change was that the surplus it had paid to the national ruling class around the Pharaoh was now paid to foreign courts.

Nevertheless, Egypt became Arabized in the matter of language. This happened belatedly, however, just when the trading empire of the Arabs was losing its raison d'&tre. The country had then to turn in upon itself once more, and the Arab ruling classes had to Egyptianize themselves, taking more interest in the peasants. The latter adopted Islam, though this happened slowly, and the Arabic J language, also slowly (several centuries had to pass before the ∖Coptic language disappeared). In becoming Arabized, however, the Egyptian people kept a very firm sense of their distinctness. They never called themselves “Arabs,” a word that remained for them Synonymouswith “barbarians,” but always “Egyptians.” And Egypt has retained its originality, not on the linguistic plane but on that of culture and values, which in Egypt are peasant values.

Southward from Egypt, the Sudan belongs both to Black Africa and to the Arab world. In its northern part, nomadic Arab tribes who came from the East, from the shores of the Red Sea, and inter­married with the black natives of the area, established a civilization of nomadic stockbreeders. In addition, these nomads, who not only became Moslems but also adopted the Arabic language, functioned as trading middlemen between Egypt and the lands to the south. The central regions of the Sudan, however, retained their traditional agrarian civilization, based on the village clan community common to all Black Africa. By way of exception, these black peoples adopted the Arabic language, though elsewhere, in West Africa, similar groups merely adopted Islam without becoming Arabized. This Arabization was doubtless due to the prolonged and thorough ascen­dancy exercised by the Arab nomads of the north over these communities. Later, in the nineteenth century, the Egyptian con­quests, from the time of Mehemet Ali (1810-1848) and the Khedives who succeeded him down to the British occupation (1882) and the revolt led by the Mahdi (1882-1898), superimposed upon this ascen­dancy the domination of the Egyptian military.bureaucracy. Here, however, the subject Arabized black peasants retained down to our own day their autonomous village organization, long since forgotten in Egypt. Only very much later, in certain areas of colonial exploitation, during the British period, especially in the Gezireh, was a real agrarian capitalism created; the peasantry was prole- tarianized, and the system benefited the nomad chieftains to whom the colonial power granted the lands brought under cultivation by irrigation works. Altogether, it was a process similar to what went on in Iraq in the same period, that of the British Mandate, giving rise to an agrarian economy that was modern (capitalist) and alien to tradition, both African and Arab.

The southern part of the Arabian peninsula is made up of a group of social formations that truly belong to the Arab tradition. Agriculture never played a decisive part in the development of civili­zation here: except on the heights of the Yemen, where the monsoon rains enabled a peasant community to exist, even if under rather arduous conditions, civilization in this area was urban and mer­cantile. The maritime “empire” of Muscat and Zanzibar provides the very pattern of it: an urban trading state drawing its revenues from its role as intermediary between the Mediterranean world, the eastern shores of Black Africa, and India. Encircled by nomads in the service of the maritime traders, the peasants of the Yemen, like those of the Fertile Crescent, safeguarded a limited degree of autonomy by taking refuge in religious dissidence: like the Alaouites in Syria, they are Shi’ites.

This, then, is the Arab world: basically a commercial grouping, with Egypt as the only great “peasant” exception. In this world the ruling class is urban, made up of court officials, merchants, religious leaders, and around them that little world of craftsmen and petty clerks that is typical of Eastern cities. The ruling class is the cement that binds the whole grouping together: everywhere it shares the same language and the same profoundly Islamic cul­ture, which, moreover, is orthodox (Sunni). This class is highly mobile, being able to move from Tangier to Damascus without ceasing in the slightest to feel at home. It is this class that has created “Arab civilization.” Its prosperity is bound up with that of long-distance trade. The latter is the basis of its alliance with the nomadic tribes, its caravan escorts. This explains the isolation of the agricultural areas, which retain personalities of their own, either linguistic (Berber) or religious (Shi’a), but play no important part in the civilization of the Arab world. Except in Egypt, the peasantry enters little into the system and is subjected only epi­sodically and slightly to the levying of tribute. This Arab world is thus both diverse and profoundly unified — by its ruling class. It is not to be compared to feudal Europe of the Middle Ages, which was thoroughly “peasant” in character. This is doubtless why Europe the very slight black element in the population of the southern Maghreb (only a few hundred thousand), compared with the hundred million Negroes in America, is enough to show how ill-founded this view is. For this reason, moreover, the ideas that circulated along with the goods were accepted readily in this region — notably Islam, which appeared very early on the banks of the Senegal River. The importance of this trade, its nature as equal exchange, and the independence of the African formations all stand out clearly from the Arab writings of the time. It is easier to understand the admiring tone of the accounts written by the Arab travelers if we appreciate that the North African and West African formations were at much the same stage technologically; they were similar in their structures and in the place they occupied in the world system of the time. The link between the royal monopoly of the exploitation of gold and its marketing by Moslem merchants provides the key to the structure of these formations. The merchants in question were, as so often, organized in a sort of caste, forming here a religious minority.

For centuries the social formations of the Mediterranean world and those of Tropical Africa were thus closely related. The gradual shifting of the trade routes from West to East was reflected in a parallel shift of civilization and of powerful states both in North Africa and in the West African savannah lands, as we see in the successive might of Ghana, Mali, the Hausa cities, Bornu, Kanem, and Darfur. The shift in the center of nascent European mercan­tilist capitalism from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic also caused a crisis in Africa. This shift tolled, in the sixteenth century, the knell of the Italian cities, and at the same time it brought ruin to the Arab world and to the Black African states of the Sudan- Sahel zone. A few decades later the representatives of Atlantic Europe made their appearance on the shores of Africa. The shifting of the center of gravity of trade in Africa from the savannah hinter­land to the coast was a direct consequence of the shift of the center of gravity in Europe from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic. However, the new exchanges between Europe and Africa were to serve a different function from those of the previous period and form part of the operation of mercantilist capitalism.

Obviously one cannot know what would have become of the African formations if they had continued to evolve on their own after the seventeenth century. Integrated at an early stage (the mercantilist stage) in the nascent capitalist system, they were broken off.at that stage and soon began to regress. It seems, however, that the large-scale trade of premercantilist Africa, remarkable though it was in some regions, being linked with relatively poor formations of the communal or tribute-paying types, would not have been able to generate by itself the capitalist mode of production.

7.