Jewish Tobacco Workers in Salonika

Transcription

5
Jewish Tobacco Workers in Salonika:
Gender and Family in the Context of
Social and Ethnic Strife
Gila Hadar
Salonika, the largest city of Macedonia, is situated in the northern part of modern
Greece.1 An administrative and commercial center for centuries, Salonika2
became one of the main sites of settlement for the Sephardic Jews who were
expelled from the Iberian Peninsula at the end of the fifteenth century (1492–97)
and subsequently became the largest and most dominant element of the city’s
population.3 They were primarily involved in commercial and industrial activities,
and were highly stratified in different classes, professions, and income groups.
Culturally, the Jewish community developed its own distinct traditions in terms
of family values, religious rituals, language (Ladino4), literature, customs, and
habits of everyday life.
In the nineteenth century and at the beginning of the twentieth, the city of
Salonika witnessed far-reaching political, social, geopolitical, and demographic
that influenced all its inhabitants. The various communities were influenced by
Turkish and Hellenic nationalism, by socialist and communist ideologies, and by
the development of modern capitalist industries.
One of the most remarkable phenomena in Salonika was the industrialization
and modernization of the city and the contribution of wealthy Jewish, Greek, and
Muslim entrepreneurs, together with European banks and businesses, to these
processes. The tobacco industry was one of the largest industries in Macedonia and
the Near East. The tobacco factories of Greek Macedonia employed approximately
20,000 workers. In Salonika, where the processing plants were located, 8,000
workers were employed, most of whom were young Jewish girls.5 Nonetheless,
they are absent from the historical narrative of the city, the community, the family,
and the working class.
In this article, I examine the process whereby gender, class, and ethnic identities
were created among the female Jewish tobacco workers6 of Salonika, as well as
their way of life and everyday activities; the ways that their entrance into the
work force influenced how they conceived of themselves in the private and public
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Women in the Ottoman Balkans
spheres; and the ways in which the outside world, the community, and the family
related to the “princess” who broke into the public arena, took part in the events
and social struggles of the time, and became part of the working community
and the Socialist and Communist parties. I address how these processes were
connected to issues of communal and ethnic/national interests in the Ottoman
and post-Ottoman periods. Gender, class, and ethnicity are all emotionally laden
issues, each of which contributes to the formation of identity and the sense of
belonging. Yet throughout this period, we find that delineations of gender, class,
and ethnicity crossed, merged, and even conflicted with one another. These various
aspects are examined here in light of the theories of spatiality of Henri Lefebvre,
David Sibley, and Juval Portugali, as well as the theories of the gendering of
space of Shirley Ardener and others.7
The main source for this paper is the Sephardic Jewish press—newspapers
and journals written in Ladino and published in Salonika from the end of the
nineteenth century until 1941.
The Socialist Federation
Until the Young Turk Revolution (July 1908), trade unions and strikes were
forbidden.8 After the revolution, rallying behind the Young Turk motto of “Liberty,
Justice, Equality, Fraternity,” the workers demanded equality in everyday life
as well as in the factory. In the liberal climate that followed the revolution, a
type of cultural mass-production began among the different ethnic and national
groups, particularly through the free press, serving to raise ethnic and national
consciousness within their respective communities.9 The new regime permitted
the establishment of trade unions and social organizations. “Everyone is eager
to exploit the opportunities which freedom has opened up to them. Everyone is
establishing trade unions and associations that until now have been prohibited by
the authorities. The bakers, railroad workers, tailors, dock workers, shoemakers,
sales clerks in the shops and the young girls in the textile mills and factories have
all been on strike.”10
The umbrella organization of the workers was La Federation Socialista,
which began to work openly immediately after the revolution.11 The Federation
was established in 1909 by a group of workers from all ethnic groups who were
imbued with socialist ideals: Avraham Ben-Aroyah (Benaroya), Alberto Arditi,
Samuel Amon (a tobacco worker), Angel Tomov, Dimitri Michalis, Salih Ben
Abdi, Mehmet Nâzımî, Istiryo Nikopoulo, Dimitar Vlahof, and Jacques Ventura.
The last two represented the Federation in the Turkish Parliament. At the same
time, trade unions were formed along religious and ethnic lines. These unions
participated in the struggle for better working conditions and higher wages. The
organ of the Socialist Federation was Journal del Lavorador (Laborador). It was
published in four languages: Ladino, Turkish, Bulgarian, and Greek. Later, due to
problems with the censor, the name was changed to La Solidaridad Ovradera, La
Solidarite Ovradera, and Avanti.
Hadar, Jewish Tobacco Workers in Salonika
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Immediately following the Young Turk Revolution, strikes began in Salonika.
The first strike in which tens of thousands of workers participated, including
approximately 10,000 tobacco workers and 3–5,000 dockworkers, railroad
workers, and bakers, was organized by the tobacco workers’ trade union.12 The
tobacco workers were the first in the city to form a trade union that was part of the
Socialist Federation. From the very first year of its establishment, female tobacco
workers were part of the tobacco workers’ organization, though they did not take
part in its management, nor in committees that negotiated with employers.
Working Conditions
The participation of young girls in the work force was, in actuality, an extension
of their domestic roles. Just like women who went to work as wet nurses,
seamstresses, servants, and laundresses, in the eyes of the family and of the
employers, tobacco work too was seen as an extension of women’s household
duties: sorting (of tobacco leaves), threading (of the leaves on strings), and
hanging (the leaves to dry).14
Tobacco work was seasonal, and during times when tobacco was not being
processed, the young girls worked as servants and laundresses in Jewish, Muslim,
and Greek houses. The formation of the gender and class identities of these young
Jewish working class girls took place in the private sphere of the home and—
quite literally—on the floor of the factory. The word for “on the floor” in Ladino
is embasho, which also means “below” and carries a certain negative connotation:
in Ladino, the word basho means “inferior—without education or honor.” Just as
floor scrubbing was done on one’s knees, so the tobacco work was done while
sitting on the factory floor (Figure 5.1).
Young girls aged 12–14 were sent to work as servants in wealthy homes. A
Swedish tourist who visited the city in March 1900 wrote: “All the laundresses
and maids, even in non-Jewish homes, are Jewish.”15
The principal reason for the entrance of young girls into the work force,
besides the prevailing hunger and poverty, was the need to save money for a
dowry, a prerequisite for marriage.16 The necessity of providing a dowry was the
issue around which the life of any family that had been “cursed” with numerous
daughters revolved. The equation was simple: a rich dowry meant a rich husband—
a poor dowry, a poor husband—no dowry, no husband. It was estimated in 1910
that a young girl of the working class would need to work 10 to 15 years to save
enough money for a dowry.17
The reputation of young Jewish girls for being industrious workers, together
with the desire of tobacco companies to save on production costs and increase
profit, led to the establishment of production lines relying upon the work of
young Jewish women and girls. The management strategy of tobacco factories
was based on the family. Companies preferred to employ single young girls who,
because of their age and the communal and familial nature of Jewish society, were
considered submissive and obedient, not “troublemakers.” The workers were not
unknown to one another: fathers, mothers, daughters-in-law, sons-in-law, sisters,
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brothers, cousins, and neighbors worked side by side in the drying and sorting
halls, so that there was constant societal supervision over young girls. Both male
and female workers worked principally in the sorting and packaging of the tobacco
leaves according to size, hue, and quality. The workday lasted between 14 and 16
hours, and took place in dark and dry halls in order to preserve the quality of the
tobacco leaves. Female workers sat on the floor either in circles or in lines, and
at their feet lay piles of tobacco leaves to be sorted into baskets. Tobacco dust
particles, carried in the air, penetrated their lungs and eyes and caused respiratory
problems, lung infections, tuberculosis, eye infections, and chronic headaches,
while sitting on the floor caused chronic backaches. In contrast to the textile
industry, where the rapping noise of the looms made conversation impossible in
the production hall, the task of sorting tobacco leaves was quiet in and of itself.
This presented the young girls with a golden opportunity to converse about any
possible subject, among others their romantic dreams about groom, house, and
family—dreams that would never come true if the empty dowry chest was not
filled up with household utensils, bedding, and attire suitable for a bride under
the wedding canopy. Mixed into this stream of conversation were issues of social
and political import: the difficult working conditions, long hours, and low wages,
the discrepancy between the wages paid to males and females performing the
same tasks, and their living conditions as compared to those of the young girls in
the wealthy households where they worked when there was nothing to do in the
tobacco factories. The older women, particularly widows who carried the sole
financial burden of providing for their children, preferred to do domestic labor.
Though wages for domestic labor were low, they were steady throughout the year
and therefore provided more economic security.
As international demand for tobacco increased and tobacco prices rose, the
local tobacco industry was able to offer higher wages than those customary in
the mills and textile factories.18 The division of labor was according to gender.
Men were employed as overseers, cutters, and porters, and they sorted the highquality tobacco leaves—baş balı—whereas young girls picked the leaves from the
fields (Figure 5.2) and sorted the lower-quality tobacco leaves—basma, pastalçı,
mirodatus, and kaba kolak. Furthermore, in cases where both sexes performed the
same task, female workers received from one third to one half of the men’s wages.
In one case, for example, men received 20–23 kuruş a day for cutting and sorting,
whereas young Turkish girls received only 8–10 kuruş a day for the same task.
Workers’ wages were paid according to gender rather than according to task.19
Why did the tobacco industry provide the most fertile ground for the new
socialist ideas, and why did tobacco workers, including young girls, form the
most militant group of all the trade organizations—the one that led the socialist
struggle in the city?
The answer lies in a combination of factors: the relatively large number of
workers who labored under one roof,20 the fact that the work was seasonal,
allowing workers time for political and social organization, and the conditions
under which tobacco leaves were sorted and stringed. Frequent strikes hurt the
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Figure 5.1. A tobacco processing factory at the beginning of the twentieth century.
Beth Hatefutsoth, Photography Archives, Tel Aviv. Greece, Salonika, 322/111.47.
factory owners’ income and increased production expenses. Employers tried to
crush workers’ organizations and reduce production costs by several means. In
1910 there was even an attempt, through an appeal to the courts, to outlaw the
tobacco trade union. The court complied with the demands of the factory owners,
and in response the workers left the factories and laid siege to the courthouse.21
Another attempt by factory owners to increase production and break the Jewish
trade union was to institute a seven-day work week. The Herzog factory, whose
owners were Jewish and which employed 350 Jewish workers along with 30
Turks, Bulgarians, and Greeks, decided to continue production on the Sabbath. In
response, the Jewish female workers went on strike, declaring that they refused to
work in a factory that did not respect the holiness of the Sabbath.22
As female workers were paid less than male workers and were considered more
obedient, girls and young women were hired to replace the men in traditionally
male positions in the factory, in an attempt to cut costs and optimize efficiency.
This process of replacing male workers with female workers was part of an overall
trend taking place in the tobacco industry throughout the Ottoman Empire, and
which succeeded in particular in Bulgaria.23
One of the excuses used for firing male workers and replacing them with
female workers was “safeguarding the honor” of the female workers.24 However,
it was not “the honor” of female workers that prompted factory owners to invite
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Figure 5.2. Six young women picking tobacco leaves under the supervision
of the husband of one of them and his brother, c. 1920.
Courtesy of the Mattaraso Family, Haifa.
Rabbi Meir, Chief Rabbi of Salonika, to inspect the tobacco workshops in order to
“investigate the claim” that Jewish girls were working alongside Jewish, Greek,
and Muslim men in the same workshops. Rather, it was their desire to hire female
workers for traditionally male positions and thus pay female wages. The trade
union declared:
The demand to separate the sexes does not arise from the desire of the
employers to safeguard the honor of their female employees. It is poverty
which shames the male worker as it does the female worker. It is the Tobacco
Worker’s Union that protects the honor of the workers, male and female
alike.25
The Rabbi inspected and found, to his relief, that in the girls’ workshops there
were only female workers, and the only males who—infrequently—entered there
were elderly men.26 From a close inspection of the strikes that broke out at the
tobacco plant of the Régie Cointeressée des Tabacs de l’Empire Ottoman, we can
see an illustration of the tactics of replacing male with female workers. During the
first strike that broke out at the factory in August 1908, 400 male workers and 400
female workers struck, most of whom were Jewish.27 From March until the end
of May 1911, 400 female workers and 90 male workers went out on strike at the
Régie tobacco factory. They were joined by male and female workers from other
tobacco factories such as Hasan Âkif, Keyazis Emin, and Herzog.28 The workers
demanded wage increases in accordance with the cost of living index, the hiring
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of unionized workers, wages that would be paid according to hours worked rather
than production quotas, and the shortening of the work day to 7–8 hours in the
winter, and 10–11 hours in the summer:
The Jewish, Greek, and Turkish workers reorganized and decided on work
hours. The men would work between 7:30 and 16:30 whereas the girls
would work between 8:00 and 17:00. The workers would have two fifteen
minute breaks during the day. There were different meal/rest times for men
and women; the men would take a break when it suited them, whereas the
women’s break time was signaled by a bell.29
One of the main demands during negotiations was that those jobs considered male
tasks would not be appropriated to female workers, and that male workers would
not sort tobacco leaves with the young girls. In this way, work would be assured
for both male and female workers.30 After long negotiations between workers’
representatives and the employers, the strike ended. The wages of female workers
were cut, whereas the value of male workers’ wages was safeguarded. When the
400 female workers realized that their wages had been reduced, they insisted
on continuing the negotiations by themselves; and when the employers refused
to speak with them, the young girls called for a strike of their own. The male
workers who reported to work found the factory gates locked: “The young girls
are on strike and the men are in a lockout.” As a sign of sympathy with the Régie
factory, the owners of Hasan Âkif, Herzog, and Keyazis Emin also closed down
their factories.31
The young girls’ struggle for fair wages and working conditions sped up their
integration into the socialist movement. Female tobacco workers were the first to
establish a vocational sector of their own within the tobacco workers’ union. This
sector was established after the young girls proved their determination and their
independence. Their struggles took place both in the factories and on the street,
against both their employers and their “brethren” workers who, when it came to
the issues of wages and “efficiency” lay-offs, did not hesitate to sacrifice their
female counterparts. Each time the young girls felt that their employers or the
workers’ committees were treating them underhandedly, they called for a strike
and took to the streets to demonstrate. Thus, the young girls who worked in the
tobacco industry of Salonika became active members of the working class; on
the floors of the tobacco factories they acquired an awareness of their rights as
workers and, for a limited period of time (that is, until marriage), a new sense of
self was formed—one that began to demand rights, to take a stand, and to make
decisions not only on the factory floor but also within workers’ organizations. By
1912, the factory owners could only dream of employing a young Jewish girl who
was not a member of the trade union.32
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Changes in Space
As for the class struggle, its role in the production of space
is a cardinal one in that this production is performed solely
by classes, fractions of classes and groups representative of
classes. Today more than ever, the class struggle is inscribed
in space.33
Henri Lefebvre
Historical sources show that, as in other Jewish communities, the Jewish woman
of Salonika was not an independent entity but an inseparable part of the family.
In the patriarchal family and society of Salonika, the life of the family, or, more
exactly, the life of the women and children, was conducted not in accordance with
official space and time—whether it be “government time” or “Jewish time”—
but in terms of more internal, restricted dimensions. Besides the private/public
dichotomy, other dichotomies existed in the areas of dress, language, and speech
as well.
Female workers of the tobacco industry were the first to shatter the separation
between the public and private spheres. Approximately 4,000 workers participated
in the May First march of 1911—men, women, children, and their entire families.
Speeches were delivered in four languages. Ninety-five percent of the participants
were Jews, the rest being Bulgarians, Greeks, and Turks. Public space was
converted into a political marketplace.
The march met with the disapproval of many, not only because of the social
and political identity of the marchers, but also because for the first time, women
and children had participated as well.34 The events of May 1911, when thousands
of male and female tobacco workers, along with their families, occupied and took
charge of their own space, marked a new starting point.35 Beyond the fact that the
march was a show of workers’ strength, it was also seen as presenting a threat to
public order. Whereas female workers demanding equal rights in the factories had
only presented a problem for their employers, girls and young women marching
in the streets presented a threat to the traditional order of society and to its
institutions. As Lefebvre has argued, “The distinction between the within and the
without is as important to the spatial realm as to that of politics. The critique of
what happens within has no meaning except by reference to what exists ‘outside’
as possibility.”36 One could summarize the situation, using an old Jewish adage,
as: “The King’s daughter has stepped outside!”37
In April 1913,38 the female tobacco workers once more went on strike, and the
male workers joined them. Until then, these young girls had had no say in the
decisions taken by the workers’ committees; now they demanded to participate
in the decision-making process.39 On 20 February 1914, on the eve of one of the
largest strikes, five hundred young girls participated in the Convention of Female
Tobacco Workers, which addressed the issue of the place of women workers
within trade unions.40
135
The strike of 1913 had apparently settled the matter of gender relations within
the tobacco workers’ union. The young girls’ participation in the various struggles
and demonstrations and their demand for inclusion in the decision-making process
proved “that the girls have the energy and discipline needed to wage battle.”41
The Class Consciousness of Female Workers
Once men understood that the social and class struggle would not succeed without
the participation of female workers, they encouraged them to organize and take
part in the union’s activities. The young girls internalized the concepts of class
ideology and social equality both as workers and as women.42 Within the Jewish
community of Salonika, a common expression was: “The most respectable
woman is she who speaks little.”43 The fact that these young girls were speaking
out and demanding equality and active participation illustrated a change in their
consciousness. They now used their voice and participated in discussions that
were both political and public. The female tobacco workers possessed both
an ideology, and the words to express it. For example, Orico Baruch, Miriam
Sasbone, Esterina Kovo, Riketa Filo, Matilda Ashkenazi, Sonhola Algava, and
others donated money to the strikers’ fund, proclaiming: “Down with scabs!
Long live the true unionists!”44 Not all the young girls took an active part in the
political activities of the Socialist-Communist Party45 and in the struggles within
the factories. They admired the courage of spirit and the actions of those who did
participate, but shied away from them for fear of losing their jobs.46
There was a small core of young girls who, with the encouragement of members
of their families who were themselves active in the Party and the unions, led
the rest of the girls and urged them to take part in the strikes, demonstrations,
and assemblies: “There is no shame in coming to the workers’ club. Shame is
remaining enslaved. … There is no shame in forming a trade union. Shame is
being without a union and allowing the patrons to suck our blood!”47 “The Union
is Power.”48
These young Jewish girls looked toward Europe as their model: “Girls, prepare
yourselves! Fellow female workers wake up from your deadening slumber;
prepare yourselves for the new life! Why aren’t we looking towards our sisters in
Europe? They take part in everything that happens in the workers’ movement and
even demand their right to be elected as representatives. And we?”49
In 1913, at an evening organized by the Socialist Party, one of the men read
a monologue written by the Italian revolutionary author Ida Negri, a socialist
Jewish woman, and one of the young girls spoke in support of the women taking
to the streets to fight for their rights, side by side with the men.50
However, the militant stance of the female tobacco workers remained limited
to the field of work relations, expressed in the factories and on the streets. The
female workers of Salonika did not succeed in attaining the same achievements
as their socialist sisters in western Europe. In particular, they did not succeed in
implementing the power of women’s solidarity—which they presented toward
their employers and their fellow male workers—within the house and the family.
136
Ethnic Strife within Class Conflict
In their attempts to break the lines of solidarity of the tobacco workers’ organization,
and in their endeavors toward decreasing production costs, employers exploited
the ethnic differences among the workers. After the incorporation of the city into
Greece in October 1912, the strikes and demonstrations in which workers took
part had repercussions within spheres beyond those of class and gender. Relations
between the Jews, Greeks, and Muslims of the city were greatly disturbed. It
would appear that a number of Muslim factory owners felt the new political
reality held new possibilities for breaking the tobacco trade union, the majority of
whose members were Jewish.
In December 1912, the tobacco company of Hasan Âkif, under Muslim
(Dönme51) ownership, decided to end the employment of Jewish workers, men
and young girls alike, and proclaimed that from that day on, the company would
hire only Greeks.52 This tactic, however, did not succeed, as Greek and Turkish
workers supported their Jewish counterparts.53 The support of Greek and Turkish
workers for the class struggle was also expressed in their donations to the strike
fund of the Socialist Federation. Ambel İsa, a Turkish yoghurt vendor, donated to
the fund, declaring “To the Class Struggle!”54 Istiryo Nikopoulos, a Greek tobacco
worker from the Régie factory, made a donation to the fund as well, while Jewish
workers donated proclaiming “Ethnic propaganda will not succeed.”55
After the employers’ attempt to replace their male workers with female workers
failed, and they discovered that the presumably compliant female workers were
precisely those who were involved in organizing the workers and stood at the
forefront of the strikes, they tried to replace the Jewish female workers who were
unionized with Turkish and non-union Jewish female workers. In an attempt to
by-pass the strikers who had congregated at the gates of the factory in order to
deny entrance to non-union Jewish female workers, the employers disguised
these latter in Turkish garb (ferâce), complete with veils covering their faces.56
This attempt failed, however, as the striking Jewish girls revealed the true identity
of the disguised workers and formed committees to consolidate the loyalty of all
female workers. During the Great Tobacco Strike of 1914, the Jewish girls once
again uncovered the faces of the strikebreakers. Only this time they discovered
that behind the veils were not disguised Jewish girls but Muslim girls who had
come to Salonika from villages where the tobacco was grown. They were not
organized in a union, did the men’s work of sorting, and worked for a pittance
and a loaf of bread.57 In the heat of defending their place of work, their wages,
the very sustenance of their families, and their hopes for the future, the Jewish
female tobacco workers ripped the veils off the faces of the Muslim girls. Nine
Jewish girls were arrested by the police for the crime of offending the religious
sensitivities of the Muslim workers.58 In response to these events and to an article
in the Turkish newspaper Yeni Asır [New Age], which was published in Salonika,
Chief Rabbi Meir summoned representatives of the employers and of the Socialist
Federation and implored them to calm the situation. At the same time, Rabbi Meir
137
wrote an article for the newspapers in which he denounced the actions of the
young Jewish girls.
The conflict that arose between the Jewish and Greek workers organized in their
separate unions on the one hand, and the hungry Muslim female workers on the
other, acquired a religious and national character. The strikes and demonstrations
that took place in the midst of the crisis of the First World War deeply disturbed
the relations between the Jews, Muslims, and Greeks of the city. The positive
relationship between the Jewish and Muslim communities, who had shared a
sense of being “the outsider” and of alienation as a result of the annexation of
their birthplace by Greece, was now damaged, while a spirit of patriotism surged
among the Greek population. The strike hurt the principal export of Macedonia—
tobacco—and consequently the income of the Greek government. The Greek
newspapers Nea Alithya [Νέα Αλήθεια, “The New Truth”] and Macedonia
[Μακεδονία], referred to the striking Greek workers as “Greek patriots.” However,
the Jewish workers, who protested in the streets carrying red flags and wearing
the fez59 associated with Ottoman rule, were accused of attempting to incite the
workers of the city in an effort to sabotage Greece’s endeavor to gain the approval
of the League of Nations for the annexation of Salonika.60
A Socialist Popular Culture
Collective cognitive maps are inter-subjective in the sense
that members of the same cultural, economic, ethnic …
group, or people living in the same neighborhood, share
similar cognitive maps.61
Juval Portugali
The need for cultural expressions separate from those of the Jewish, Greek, and
Turkish bourgeoisie can be seen by inspection of the social meeting places of the
working class. Throughout the period discussed in this article, the promenade along
the beach and the coffeehouses near the White Tower were the locales of choice
for the leisure of the Jewish, Greek, and Turkish middle-classes. Attending to the
many who came to enjoy the breeze off the sea, the magnificent sunsets, and the
“Parisian” atmosphere were coffeehouses with names bearing ethnic associations
such as Nea Hellas [Νέα Έλλάς, The New Greece], Eptanisus [Επτάνησος, The
Seven Islands],62 Olympos [Όλυμπος, Olympus], Anadolu [Anatolia], La Turquie
[Turkey], and others.63 Though it might be argued that the patrons of coffeehouses
did not necessarily place any importance on the names of these establishments,
we see that socialists preferred to sit at the café El Amaneser [in Ladino, The
Dawn], El Muevo Mundo [in Ladino, The New World], Café International, and
Café Cristal,64 situated in the northwest of the city near Yeni Kapı [in Turkish, The
New Gate], adjacent to their neighborhoods and the tobacco factories. In short,
the names and locations of the coffeehouses suggest that different groups lived
in the same territory and shared the same space, but at the same time operated in
different cognitive environments.
138
The class consciousness of the young girls was formulated on the floors of
the production halls and then strengthened in the neighborhood. Most of the
workers lived in close proximity to the factories near the Vardar Gate and in
the neighborhoods of Baron Hirsch and Régie Vardar (so named because of its
proximity to the Régie tobacco factories). The family was an inseparable part of
the work experience, the neighborhood, and the social struggle. The leaders of
the Tobacco Workers’ Union understood that they would not reach their goals
by addressing only the workers’ issues of working conditions, wages, and the
participation of female workers; rather, they needed to appeal first and foremost
to the family as a whole and to rally its support for the organization, its goals, and
the struggle. The demand for better working conditions and higher wages was
part of a larger social demand for improved living conditions in working-class
neighborhoods in order to make their “slums of despair” into “slums of hope.”65
The family as a whole was considered to be within the framework of the longrange plans of the union; the entire family participated in First of May celebrations
and in the excursions, dances, and picnics that were organized. Donations and
food packages were collected and distributed to the families of striking workers.66
Sports teams were organized and competitions were held between the teams
of different unions, public libraries were opened,67 and evening classes were
arranged where the young girls of the tobacco factories taught their tired mothers
how to read and write in Ladino (with Hebrew letters); Greek, history, and health
care were also taught.68 Dances were popular events, and those organized by the
Socialist Movement took place in a number of dancing schools that supported and
made donations to the workers’ struggle, such as the Karı Bazar dancing school
and Café Havuzlu.69 Even at the dances organized by the Jewish community, class
hierarchy was maintained and bourgeois women would not be seen dancing with
working class men.70
The cultural association De Grupo Dramatiko, which performed in Ladino,
was part of the socialist movement. Its theatre performances had a political and
an educational agenda. Right from its early beginnings, De Grupo Dramatiko
deliberately engaged in a politics of representation that attempted to develop an
alternative base of political power within the neighborhood. This organization
played a crucial role in the creation and shaping of the social and political spaces
and identities where city and Jewish community policies were negotiated and
contested.
The tobacco workers, experienced in conflict from the factories, were also
struggling with the tensions between fulfilling their expected roles as wife and
mother, on the one hand, and, on the other, their desire to emulate the female heroes
of the working class such as “Therese Rakin,” “Madlene,” “Ana Maslovena,”
and “Mishlin,” the sister of the worker “Gilbert” in Octave Mirbeau’s play The
Socialist Holiday,71 which gave encouragement to the workers of both sexes
in their hour of crisis. Every play that was performed relayed a clear socialist
message.
139
The Female Tobacco Workers in the Eyes of the Bourgeoisie
In the aftermath of the great fire of 1917, the Greek government saw an opportunity
to transform the cityscape and revive its ancient Byzantine and Hellenic character.72
A new spatial geography was shaped, based upon the exchange value of space and
social divisions. The proletariat remained in the deteriorated districts, and were
pushed out of the center toward the outskirts.73
The homes of the tobacco workers and of the urban proletariat, the factories
themselves, and the public houses were all situated within an area called the
Bara. This area included the streets of Irinis [Ειρήνης], Afroditis, [Αφροδίτης],
Prometheus [Προμηθέως], Odysseus [Oδυσσέως], Tantalo [Ταντάλου],74 and
Bacchus [Βάκχου], and was designated by the city as both industrial and adult
entertainment zones.
This double process of industrialization and “purification” has been discussed
by Henri Lefebvre,75 and is described as follows by David Sibley in his The
Geographics of Exclusion:
Nineteenth-century schemes to reshape the city could thus be seen as a
process of purification, designed to exclude groups variously identified as
polluting—the poor in general, the residual working class, racial minorities,
prostitutes and so on.76
The proximity of the tobacco workers to the brothels led to the identification by
the middle class of the young girl tobacco workers with prostitutes (Figure 5.3). In
a 1920 article in the newspaper El Kulevro [The Snake], one writer complains:
We ask the Jewish representatives, “Why do you allow the ‘good girls’ to
remain in the old quarter rather than send them away? Don’t the authorities
know that decent people live in the Bara? Is it fair to leave these ‘fine ladies’
together with decent young women?”77
Another reason for the association of the female tobacco workers with
prostitutes was their attire. Older girls who worked in the tobacco factories would
dress up their younger sisters—sometimes only eight or nine years old—in highheeled shoes and brassieres padded with rags or cotton wool. They also used
make-up on them in an attempt to make them look older, so that they would get
employed and thus be kept off the streets.78
The young female tobacco workers posed a threat to the comfortable, orderly
life of the urban bourgeoisie for an even simpler reason: their employment in
the tobacco factories created a shortage of laundresses and servants. In the eyes
of middle-class women, the young girls did as they chose—they would come to
work in the homes of the middle class when they so desired, and when they did
not, they went to work in the tobacco factories. In a humorous newspaper column,
an “Aunt Clara” complains that one of her servants went to work as a maid in
some Greek or Muslim home because she had not received a raise that would
have allowed her to buy a hat “with a garden of flowers upon it,” gloves, and a
corset to accentuate the charms of her body, all for her Saturday stroll through
140
the Beş Çınar Gardens. “Aunt Clara” went on to decry how times had changed,
and how the lady of the house now needed to treat her help kindly, because she
was under constant threat that her servants might pack their bags, declare that the
tobacco season has opened, and set off to the factories.79
The young girls preferred the work of sorting tobacco leaves. This seasonal
work was a return to a familiar environment. In the factory halls, no “lady of the
house” stood over them yelling orders, and they did not have to work until they
dropped from exhaustion; here they were equals, they were “countesses,” and
they could dream of a different life.80
Within their own neighborhoods, on the other hand, the female tobacco workers
were highly respected. They were supported and esteemed for their diligence,
their contribution to the family income, and especially for their courage in an
environment where docility was part of the cultural code. Articles in the socialist
press criticized the arrogant behavior of middle-class women toward their maids.
They called upon the bourgeois mistresses to protect their female servants from
sexual harassment by the masters of the house and their sons, treat them well, and
pay them on time.81
Love and Romance
As the young girls’ political awareness grew, so did their dreams of romance,
family, and children.
Girls usually married young men chosen by their parents (the preferred match
being someone within the extended family, such as a cousin). Sometimes—albeit
infrequently—a young girl would refuse to marry the appointed candidate,
instead choosing to follow the dictates of her own heart. Given the preferences
of the families in question, a tobacco worker would not necessarily meet with the
approval of the family as a prospective son-in-law, and attempts would be made
to separate the loving couple. So it was when Abraham Eskaloni and Estherina
Cohen, fellow tobacco workers, fell in love. Estherina’s father disapproved of
Abraham’s courting of his daughter and refused to give the marriage his blessing;
moreover, she had been promised to another. A frustrated Abraham accosted
Estherina’s father, stabbing him with a knife.82 After ten long years during which
Estherina stood her ground as to her right to choose her own husband, her father
finally consented to her marriage with Abraham.83 Marriages also took place,
though infrequently, across social and economic classes and religions, as when
Jewish women tobacco workers converted to Islam or Christianity and married
Muslim or Greek tobacco workers.84
Conclusion
In this article, I have focused on a facet previously overlooked in studies on the
private/public spheres, work relations, and the Jewish family and community of
Salonika in the Ottoman and post-Ottoman periods: the female tobacco workers.
It was first and foremost the female tobacco workers—girls and young women
who needed to work in order to help support their families and save a bit of
141
Figure 5.3. Prostitutes in the Bara (Vardar district).
Detail of an anonymous postcard from the collection of Flor Safan Eskaloni.
money for their dowries—who spoke out publicly. They spoke their minds, cried
out their plight, and declared their existence. The female tobacco workers’ social,
class, and political consciousness came about as a result of the working class’s
understanding that without the recruitment and support of the young girls and
their families, the struggle was doomed to failure.
Despite the fact that work in the tobacco factories contributed to the formation
of the female workers’ self-identity, it did not produce a substantial and lasting
change in their way of life. In a society where self-fulfillment was generally
channeled through the family, women did not make a career of tobacco work.
Rather, they saw it as a necessity that enabled them to make a living and save
money for a dowry, so that when the time came, they would be able to marry and
start a family.
From interviews conducted some fifty years later with women who had
labored in the tobacco factories, it appears that for these working-class girls,
industrialization had not meant progress but low-paying and demeaning work.
This is clearly illustrated by the fact that when interviewed, these women did not
wish to speak about their work, working conditions, low wages, participation in
strikes and demonstrations, or the fact that they may have been part of the socialist
or communist movements. Instead, they preferred to speak of their married life,
family, and children.85
142
Tobacco work was but a stage in the maturation of the young girls from
working class neighborhoods of Salonika—a stage during which new values were
introduced into their world, and if only for a short time, they were the “countesses”
and the “princesses” who dared to take to the streets and demand social equality.
Work ties and social and ideological relationships did not replace family bonds,
but rather served as a means of incorporating the family as a whole into a larger
“ideological family.”
Notes
1. This article is adapted from a chapter of my Ph.D. dissertation (Hadar 2003),
written under the supervision of Prof. Minna Rozen.
2. Also Salonica, Saloniki, Salonique, Selânik, Θεσσαλονίκη; On the multiplicity
of names for the city, see Portugali 1993: 156–57: “[T]wo or more collectivities
use different languages to refer to the very same phenomenon, so they might
construct different cognitive maps of the very same territory. … From their
discourse and actions it is clear that each group perceives the past, present and
future of this same territory in its own peculiar way, which is different from
that of the other group.”
3. For a discussion of the demographics of Salonika at the end of the nineteenth
century and the beginning of the twentieth, see Moutsopooulos 1980: 19–23.
The population of the city was principally composed of Jews, Turks, and
Greeks, together with Albanians, Bulgarian, Macedonian, Vlachs, Gipsies,
and foreign residents. For a general survey of Salonika during this period, see
Veinstein 1992; Anastassiadou 1997; Rozen [forthcoming], 1: 137–73.
4. Language is one of the major elements in the creation of the identity of the
group, the nation, and the individual. The Jews of Salonika—and in particular
the Jewish women of all classes, though most pointedly those of the worker
and proletariat classes—spoke only Ladino, a Judeo-Spanish language written
in Hebrew characters.
5. On the Greek tobacco workers, see Dagkas 2004; Quataert 1995: 59–74;
Quataert 1996: 311–32.
6. The majority of the workforce in Salonika’s tobacco industry was made up
of girls between the ages of 10 and 14, with a minority of female workers
falling within the 14-to-20-year-old range. Therefore, when the terms “women
workers” or “female workers” are used in this paper, one must keep this
fact constantly in mind. At the same time one must remember that modern
associations with the term “girl” do not adequately express how these workers
saw themselves, nor how their community related to them.
7. On the “Public/Private” dichotomy, see Ardener 1981; Keohane 1992: ix–xii;
Rizk Khoury 1997: 105–28.
8. Despite this prohibition, tobacco worker strikes did take place in Kavala, and
were suppressed by force. On the strikes of the Kavala tobacco workers see
La Epoca, 23 February 1900, 31 March 1905.
143
9. “In Salonika,” El Avenir, 31 July 1909: “Greek business owners painted their
stalls and the entrances to their stores in the colors of the Greek flag.”
10.Ibid., 28 July 1908.
11.Ben-Aroyah 1972: 311. For the emergence of Greek and Turkish socialism
in the years 1909–1914, see Kofos 1964; Liakos 1985; Harris 1967: 16–20;
Tunçay 1967; Haupt and Dumont 1977; Tekeli and İlkin 1980: 351–82.
12.Aktsoglou 1997: 288; El Avenir, 12 August 1908.
13.Raporto
annuel de la union de los lavoradores del tutun de Saloniqo 1909:
6.
14.Throughout the world, young women were employed in sorting tobacco leaves
under similar conditions. For other examples, see Pollert 1983: 96–114; Stubbs
1985: 71–76; Tilly 1992: 172–73; Baron 1991: 1–46; White 1996.
15.Uziel 1978: 31; see also “Conversions,” El Avenir, 2 April 1909.
16.The dowry tradition is also common among Greeks. The dowry is not only
a transfer of property and bride, but also part of the system of “honor” and
“disgrace.” On the meaning of the dowry in Greek culture, see LambiriDimaki 1985: 165–78; Hirschon 1981: 70–86; Sant Cassia and Bada 1992:
53, 74–76.
17.El
Avenir, January 1910.
18.Quataert 1996: 322–23.
19.“The Tobacco Workers’ Strike,” El Avenir, 13 April 1914; on the low wages
paid to female workers in the international tobacco industry, see Stubbs 1985:
79; Tilly 1992: 175; Pollert 1983: 100.
20.“Letter,” Journal del Lavorador, September 1909; “A Letter to my Sister
Workers,” Journal del Lavorador, October 1909: this was a call to the young
female workers who worked in the silk mills and sewing workshops to form
a union. Regarding a small group of women who attempted to organize a
union but failed, see “Why did they want to commit suicide?” El Popular, 19
August 1930: two Greek nurses who tried to organize the nurses at the city
hospital into a union were fired from their jobs; they were unable to find other
employment as they had acquired the reputation of being “instigators,” and in
the end committed suicide.
21.La
Epoca, 8 July 1910; see also Dumont 1997: 67 ref. 32, a letter from BenAroyah to C. Huysmans, 11 August 1910, Arch BSI.
22.El
Avenir, 24 August 1909.
23.“The Herzog Factory,” El Avenir, 26 October 1909.
24.The concept of honor has many connotations: the honor of the family and
relations, class honor, and more. The honor of the (male) individual is
expressed in a cluster of attributes such as generosity, honesty, seriousness,
loyalty to friends, and defense of those weaker than oneself—women, small
children, and aged parents. A young girl who is unmarried personifies the
vulnerability of the group; for this reason, the family preferred to marry off
the daughter quickly in order to avoid the risk of disgrace. The honor of the
family is inseparable from the Jewish cultural heritage. Historical sources
144
and research work alike show that “honor” is not a local variant or type of
“orientalist” stereotype: throughout the period from the foundation of the
Jewish settlement in Salonika until its tragic destruction, the concept of
“honor” was a leitmotif in the social fabric which encompassed individual,
family, community, and city.
25.El
Avenir, 27 May 1911.
26.The demand to separate the sexes arose in previous strikes. See Journal del
Lavorador (October 1909): 2; El Avenir, 27 May 1911. Male workers also
appealed to the Chief Rabbi to intervene in order to help save their jobs.
27.Ibid., 8 August 1908. The principal demands were a 30% increase in wage and
a shortening of the work-day to10 hours. It would appear that the demand for
tobacco was high, and the management of the Régie agreed to a 20% wage
increase.
28.“The strike at the Régie,” La Solidaridad Ovradera, 28 April 1911, 5 May
1911, 12 May 1911. The strike spread to all the tobacco factories in Kavala,
Drama, and Istanbul.
29.Avanti,
16 October 1913.
30.“The Lockout,” La Solidaridad Ovradera, 21 April 1911; La Solidarite
Ovradera, 12 May 1911.
31.“One Strike,” La Solidaridad Ovradera, 31 March 1911, 12 April 1911; “The
End of the Strike,” ibid., 2 June 1911.
32.Avanti,
9 December 1912.
33.Lefebvre 1991: 55.
34.“The First of May in Salonika,” El Avenir, 2 May 1911.
35.Lefebvre 1991: 56.
36.Shields 1988: 45.
37.The Jewish adage “The realm of the princess’ honor is within” reflects a
certain social order that dictates the subdivision of space between genders
as expressed in the Ladino proverb “A good woman’s realm is to be found
behind closed doors.” On honor and shame, modesty, and sexual humility, see:
Peristiany and Pitt-Rivers 1991: 1–20; Pitt-Rivers 1965: 19–78; Friedl 1986:
42–45; Sant Cassia and Bada 1992: 1–3.
38.Avanti,
2 May 1913. The First of May 1913 was the first Socialist “holiday”
after the annexation of Salonika by Greece. As the Greek officials feared that
the strike would expand and that disturbances would break out as a result of
the traditional May Day march, the march was forbidden and the workers
celebrated in closed halls at the workers’ club. They heard speeches in Turkish,
Bulgarian, Greek, and Ladino.
39.“The Young Girls’ Convention,” Avanti (2 May 1913): 3.
40.“The Socialist Movement,” ibid (20 February 1914): 3.
41.“Women and Socialism,” ibid., 7 May 1913.
42.“Equality between the Sexes,” ibid., 8 December 1913.
43.In Ladino: La mujer la mas alavada, es akeya ke avla poco. Yona 1903: 15.
145
44.In Ladino: Abasho las amariyas, Vivan las verdaderas syndikalistas. Avanti,
22 December 1913.
45.Leontidou 1990: 75. There were many areas of overlap between the Communist
Party, the K.K.E. (Κουμμονιστικό Κόμμα Ελλάδος), and the tobacco workers.
The Greek Communist Party, founded in 1918, found supporters among
the intelligentsia, refugees from Anatolia, and a large part of the industrial
workers—the tobacco workers in particular. In 1924, many of the Jewish
members of the Socialist Federation joined the Greek Communist Party. BenAroyah later left the party, and Ventura left as well, in 1928.
46.Interview with Bienvenida Pitchon Mano, Thessaloniki, February 2002.
47.“Letter,” Avanti, 27 October 1921. Whereas the female tobacco workers had
an organization of their own in 1913, the seamstresses and female workers in
the textile mills attained their own organization only in 1921.
48.“The Union is Power,” Journal del Lavorador, February 1910.
49.“Letter,” ibid., October 1909.
50.Avanti,
29 December 1913.
51.Eden and Stavroulakis 1997: 37–47. In the mid-seventeenth century, Sabbetay
Zvi, a Jew from Smyrna, declared himself the redeemer. The sultan gave him
the alternative of death or conversion, and he and his followers converted
to Islam. Turks and Jews called them Dönme (in Turkish, “convert” or
“turncoat”). They referred to themselves as Ma’amin, which is Hebrew for
“believer.” (The corresponding Turkish-Arabic word is virtually identical.)
Salonika and İzmir were Dönme centers. On this movement and community,
see Scholem 1973; Georgeon 1992: 105–18; Küçük 1977.
52.“Lockout,” Avanti, 9 December 1912.
53.“Between Tobacco Workers,” ibid., 5 November 1913.
54.“The Daily List of Donations to the Tobacco Strikers,” ibid., 11 April 1913.
55.“The Daily Fund of the Socialist Federation,” ibid., 14 April 1913; Lucha and
Rejina Dasa, Istirio Nikopoulos, Jacob Hassid, and Lazer Zion from the Régie
factory; ibid., 8 September 1913.
56.In Ladino: Eyos las azen vestir kon ferâje ... y ansi se izo un groop o de ninias
judias—Turkas. (“Between the Tobacco Workers,” ibid., 5 November 1913.)
57.Avdela 1998: 424–27. Avdela describes the Great Tobacco Strike of 1914 as
a unique event that marked a turning point. In my opinion, this is not so. The
young Jewish girls participated in demonstrations prior to that time and fought
throughout this period against the Turkish and Gypsy girls hired to break their
strike. The struggle and the negotiations over better working conditions and
wages for both male and female workers began with the Great Strike of 1911,
continued in August 1912 and throughout 1913–14. See “The Tobacco Crisis:
to the Public, to the Workers, to the Fathers and to the Mothers,” Avanti, 14
May 1913. “Since the 17th of August, 1912, the tobacco workers trade union
have been engaged in a struggle against the owners of the tobacco factories.”
On the employment of Turkish and Gypsy girls, see “The Tobacco Conflict”
(ibid., 9 May 1913): 3. The striking girls were replaced with 8–10-year-old
146
Turkish girls; “The Tobacco Conflict,” ibid., 13 June 1913. The writer of the
article claims that the Turkish and Gypsy workers were unfamiliar with the
work of the tobacco factories.
58.“The Tobacco Workers Strike,” El Avenir, 14 April 1914; “The Strike,” ibid.,
15 April 1914.
59.La
Epoca, 23 November 1900: “Beginning next week, every worker of the
Régie Tobacco Company must wear a fez.” The fez, which the Young Turks
wore proudly, became a symbol of freedom, liberty, and class. The tobacco
workers of Salonika, who at first wore the fez as a result of orders issued from
above, continued to wear it as a symbol of the pride of the tobacco worker;
Avanti, 9 December 1912. A month after the Greeks entered the city, the Greek
press began to criticize the Jews who wore the fez as a form of scorn towards
the Greeks (from the newspaper Paros); “The First of May in Salonika,” ibid.,
2 May 1913. Though the workers were forbidden to hand out pamphlets and
fliers about the First of May demonstrations, they congregated in the workers’
club with red flags, red decorations on their buttons, and wearing the fez.
60.Avdela 1998: 424–30. The strikes and demonstrations hurt the tobacco
industry which fed Greece’s principle export: in 1918, tobacco made up 43% of
Greece’s exports; “The Jews and the Recent Incidents,” El Mesajero, 14 May
1936. Similar claims were heard during the Great Tobacco Workers’ Strike
at the beginning of May 1936. The fact that by that time, Jews comprised a
demographic minority in the city and a minority among the demonstrators in
the streets did not prevent the newspaper Tahidromos [Ταχυδρόμος, The Mail]
from accusing Jewish strikers and demonstrators of being devoid of Greek
national sentiments and of harming public order.
61.Portugali 1993: 156–57. “Collective cognitive maps are of immediate
relevance to the cultural, economic, ethnic and class conflict.”
62.This name referred to the seven islands off the western coast of Greece.
63.Anastassiadou 1997: 191–92.
64.Ben-Aroyah 1972: 311. Socialism was seen as the dawn of a new era; “The
Socialist Federation Fund,” Avanti, 29 September 1913. In January of 1915,
at the Paradise Hall, the theatre troupe of the Socialist Federation put on
a performance of Molière’s L’avare in honor of the release from prison of
Alberto Arditi, a prominent leader of the Federation. “El primo mayo en
Saloniko,” Suplimento del Avenir, 2 May 1911; Dumont 1997: 82.
65.Leontidou 1990: 84–88.
66.“The Tobacco Crisis,” Avanti, 13 June 1913.
67.“Books,” La Solidaridad Ovradera, 3 March 1911; “Library,” Avanti, 10
December 1921: “The Library of the Communist Youth is open every evening
from 6:00 until 9:00 and on Saturday throughout the day.” For the names of
the books that have a clear socialist message, see also Dumont 1997: 95, ref.
15.
147
68.“Ladino Lessons,” Avanti (21 November 1913): 2. Two Ladino classes were
offered, one for men and one for women; “Our Life,” ibid., 11 February 1914;
an Interview with Flor Eskaloni Sapan, Ramat-Gan, 2000.
69.“The Daily Fund of the Socialist Federation,” Avanti, 6 October 1913.
70.“The Federation Socialiste Fund,” Avanti, 15 December 1913: Porké una
noble dama refuzó de baylar kon un ovrador, i ke les sea segunda lisión, a los
lavoradores ke adiran el Sionizmo.
71.Romero 1983: 256–57, 283–86.
72.Yerolympos 1996.
73.“The Industrial Area,” Aksion, 8 January 1935. The municipality decided that
within 15 days, all factories were obliged to move to the outskirts of the city
between “26th of October” Street and the edge of the Beş Çınar Gardens.
74.The tobacco factories of Praudos, Papastrato, Latour, Pomro and others were
all situated on Tantalo Street.
75.Lefebvre 1996: 71–72.
76.Sibley 1995: 57.
77.El
Kulevro, 23 July 1920.
78.Interview with Bienvenida Pitchon-Mano. Ms Mano did not attend school;
her three older sisters took her to work with them in the tobacco factory.
79.“Bula Clara: Chronica Popular,” El Avenir, 3 August 1906.
80.Interview with Bienvenida Pitchon-Mano. The song La Cigarrera went:
“How your blue suit becomes you, you look like a countess when you walk
out of the tobacco factory.”
81.“For the Honor of the Jewish Girls,” El Avenir, 27 October 1910. This article
relates the stories of two brothels where Jewish girls between the ages of 15
and 20 worked while their parents were led to believe that they were employed
by the tobacco factories.
82.El
Avenir (2 September 1904): 12.
83.Perhaps the father was right to be concerned over Estherina’s choice: after
five years of marriage Abraham died, leaving her a pregnant widow with three
little babies, no money, and no support. Estherina worked for a time as a wet
nurse and later returned to work in the tobacco factory. Her children grew up
in her brother’s and sisters’ homes. During World War II, Estherina and her
children hid in the village of Hortiachi using fake documents, and fought with
the Greek resistance against the German occupation.
84.“Religious Conversions,” El Avenir, 2 April 1909. In this article, the writer
decries the fact that young Jewish girls from poor families work as domestic
help in Greek and Turkish homes.
85.Interviews with Flor Eskloni Safan and Bienvenida Pitchon–Mano.
148
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IRSH 54 (2009), Supplement, pp. 45–68 doi:10.1017/S002085900999023X
r 2009 Internationaal Instituut voor Sociale Geschiedenis
Gendering Ottoman Labor History: The Cibali
Régie Factory in the Early Twentieth Century*
G Ü L H A N B A L S O Y
Department of History, Binghamton University
E-mail: [email protected]
SUMMARY : This article examines the ‘‘mutual distancing’’ between Ottoman labor
history and women’s and gender history. For this purpose, I first summarize the
scholarship produced by each field and scrutinize the ways in which both fields
have remained unresponsive toward one another. I then offer a specific way to
make women visible to labor history in the particular setting of the Cibali Régie
Factory in the early decades of the twentieth century. Using photographic
images of the factory and an approach which applies gender as a conceptual tool of
historical analysis, I discuss the social conditions of work, the sexual division of
labor, and the channels through which power structures were established in the
Cibali factory. This study does not claim to present a comprehensive history of
labor in the Ottoman Empire; my goal is rather to make women visible to labor
history, to remind one that women were present on the shop floor, and to discuss
how the available sources can be interpreted in gendered ways. In that sense, this
article challenges the mainstream of Ottoman labor history, and seeks to answer
the question as to why the female workers who appear in the photographs, in
archival documents, and in other sources have so far remained largely invisible in
the historiography.
In the Fall 2005 and Spring 2006 issues of the interdisciplinary journal
Tarih ve Toplum, Yiğit Akın and Ahmet Makal exchanged ideas about
and debated new perspectives on labor history.1 Although both scholars
* I would like to express my thanks to the two referees of the International Review of Social
History; to Professor Donald Quataert for sharing with me the photographs that constitute the
primary material used in this article; to Professor Jean Quataert for her useful criticisms on the
first version of this article, which I submitted to her colloquium on gender history; and to Mert
Sunar for his technical assistance with the photographs.
1. Yiğıt Akın, ‘‘Erken Cumhuriyet Dönemi Emek Tarihçiliğine Katký: Yeni Yaklas-ımlar, Yeni
Kaynaklar’’, Tarih ve Toplum: Yeni Yaklas- ımlar, 2 (2005), pp. 73–111; Ahmet Makal, ‘‘Erken
Cumhuriyet Dönemi Emek Tarihi ve Tarihçiliği Uzerine bir Değerlendirme’’, Tarih ve Toplum:
Yeni Yaklas- ımlar, 3 (2006), pp. 215–264.
46
Gülhan Balsoy
agreed that the field should be further developed, they identified different
reasons for the dearth of scholarship and hence proposed different
approaches to overcome it. Akın re-emphasized the dominance of the
modernization paradigm and the problem of sources, whereas Makal
analyzed historiography in relation to the economic and political context
within which the Turkish labor force has developed. Even though the
debate was necessary and fruitful for the prospects of labor history, it
unfortunately remained totally silent on the issues of sex and gender
as integral elements in a meaningful analysis of labor history. Despite
their ostensible search for a new perspective on labor history, neither
scholar acknowledged the role of female workers or offered gender as an
analytical category for revisionist approaches.2 They therefore bluntly
continued the long history of neglect, omitting gender from the reconstruction of the past. Unfortunately, this shortcoming of the historiography on labor has deepened and been compounded by the failure of
women and gender historians to address adequately the differences among
women along the lines of class.
In this article, I first summarize the scholarship produced by each field
and scrutinize the ways in which both fields have remained unresponsive
toward one another. The absence of female workers and gendered analysis
of labor in scholarship is, I argue, the outcome of a mutual process.
Overcoming this ‘‘mutual distancing’’3 between those two fields will
broaden the horizons of both and contribute to our overall understanding
of late Ottoman history. In the second part of this article, I offer a specific
way to make women visible to labor history in the particular setting of the
Cibali Régie Factory in the early decades of the twentieth century.
Through the use of photographic images of the factory and an approach
which applies gender as a conceptual tool of historical analysis, I discuss
the social conditions of work, the sexual division of labor, and the
channels through which power structures were established in the Cibali
factory. This study does not claim to present a comprehensive history
of labor in the Ottoman Empire; my goal is rather to make women visible
to labor history, to remind one that women were present on the shopfloor, and to discuss how the available sources can be interpreted in
gendered ways.
2. Although this debate was restricted to a discussion of the scholarship on early republican
labor history, the topics raised are, I argue, relevant and thought provoking in evaluating the
historiography of labor in the Ottoman Empire, which has for the most part ignored women
and gender, as I explain below.
3. I have borrowed this term from Kathleen Canning, who introduced it in evaluating the
relationship between German labor history and the histories of women and gender; Kathleen
Canning, ‘‘Gender and the Politics of Class Formation: Rethinking German Labor History’’,
The American Historical Review, 97 (1992), pp. 736–768.
Gendering Ottoman Labour History
47
The photographs of the Cibali factory that I use were taken by Guillaume Berggren in the 1900s at the request of the factory management.4
The photographs show the workers of the factory at various stages of
tobacco processing and cigarette production. They do not depict workers
individually but instead show them in the larger space of the shopfloor,
performing their work, and in relation to one another. Hence, they offer
us an otherwise unavailable image of the workers within the context of
their everyday workplace interactions. Besides visualizing the organization of the immense work space and its layout, the photographs engender
a concrete picture of the daily workings of the factory, with its female and
male workers, trace the stages through which tobacco was processed and
cigarettes were produced, and illustrate the level and use of technology.
Those images are also inflected with gendered assumptions, and show that
the work was also divided with regard to gender hierarchies as well as
to the nature of tobacco production. In that sense, the Cibali factory
photographs offer an opportunity to overcome the mutual distancing
between Ottoman labor and women’s and gender histories. It is not only
the numerous working women that appear in the pictures but also the
gendered discourse created by the pictures that create an opportunity to
initiate communication between those two fields.
The metaphor of visibility has been central to feminist criticism of
gender-blind history. Whereas textual documents might disguise women
with the language used or other linguistic strategies, photographic images
constitute unique sources for precipitously making women visible in
history. Furthermore, what we see from the photographs is not merely
women and men, but gender. The photographs suggest that gender was at
the heart of the division of labor, definition of skill, organization of the
4. The photographs I have used are courtesy of Professor Donald Quataert. These photographs
are also exhibited in the Kadir Has University, which is today located in the building that
housed the Cibali Régie Factory until the 1990s. Guillaume Berggren was born in 1835 in
Sweden. After traveling throughout Europe and Russia, in 1866 he set out from Odessa on a
world tour. While his ship was waiting in Istanbul, he decided to take the opportunity to
explore the city; impressed by what he saw, he immediately decided to settle there. Until 1870,
he worked in the sea lines. In the early 1870s, he opened a photographic studio on the Grande
Rue de Pera, one of Istanbul’s most fashionable neighborhoods at the time. He portrayed bays,
streets, and people in many different parts of the Ottoman lands. During the construction of the
Baghdad railway, he accompanied the construction team and photographed the cities, ancient
ruins, and Islamic monuments along the railroad. See Engin Özendep, Photography in the
Ottoman Empire, 1839–1919 (Istanbul, 1987). Berggren took a total of twenty-five photographs
at the Cibali Factory. Unfortunately, we do not know when exactly those photographs were
produced. However, we do know that cigarette production at the factory started in 1900 and it
is possible to see images of women rolling cigarettes in the photographs. One can reasonably
conclude therefore that the photos date from just after 1900. For a similar argument concerning
the date of the photographs see Füsun Alioğlu and Berrin Alper, ‘‘Cibali Tütün ve Sigara
Fabrikasý: Sanayi Yapısından Üniversiteye’’, in Istanbul, 27 (1990), pp. 32–39.
48
Gülhan Balsoy
factory space, and the establishment of workplace hierarchies, all of which
underlay the definition of workers’ identities. Yet the photographs, like
other sources, are mediated through the point of view of their producers,
either the photographer or the commissioner. Thus, it will be problematic
to interpret them without asking questions such as for whom the photographic images were produced, for what purpose, or how things were
made visible. Besides taking advantage of making overt what has hitherto
remained indiscernible, I point out the problems of the decontextualized
use of visual and textual sources. For that reason, I try to support the
photographs that I use with archival documents and other contemporary
sources.
Most of the archival documents I used for this article come from the
Ministry of Interior collections of the Ottoman Archives of the Prime
Ministry. I discuss more elaborately the problem of sources in the next
part of this article, when I evaluate the scholarship, but although most of
the documents in that archive were produced for official purposes it is still
possible to find evidence of human experience in them when approached
from a critical perspective. As I will stress once again below, it is not the
absence of the workers but the approaches of scholarship that for a long
time resulted in a silencing of those workers’ voices.
THE SCHOLARSHIP
Feminist challenges played an important role in drawing the attention of
labor history away from factories and organized labor to the problems of
domestic and unorganized home-based work, especially in the scholarship
produced in the United States. Not only did feminist historians broaden
the horizons of labor history with their studies of the sexual division of
labor, family, leisure, and workplace cultures and hierarchies, they also
firmly demonstrated that those categories were the result of complex
power relations and that they changed over time. Most of the energy of
earlier feminist intervention was spent in making women visible to labor
history and in demonstrating that women, like men, were present in the
public space, in paid work, in labor unions, and labor struggles.5 In other
words, the feminist effort was predominantly channeled to fitting women
into the topics previously studied in a sex-blind manner and to criticizing
the approach that recognized only males as the subjects of historical
research. However, from the 1980s, women and gender historians began
to point out that, despite crucial contributions, feminist scholarship left
5. Their works are too numerous to mention here, but perhaps the two most influential have
been Louise A. Tilly and Joan W. Scott, Women, Work and Family (New York, 1978), and
Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle
Class, 1780–1850 (London, 1987).
49
untouched the main categories of analysis, class being the most important.
Pointing out the limitations of the notion of class and acknowledging the
necessity of filling its cracks across the lines of race, ethnicity, and
nationality, gender historians shifted their focus from women to gender
relations, and besides discussing the differences between men and women
they acknowledged and scrutinized differences among women.6
Notwithstanding the controversies among women and gender historians,
from the 1980s onward, gender theory as a whole made a significant
contribution to broadening the focus of labor history from the shopfloor,
unions, and labor activism to previously disregarded issues such as consumption, bodies, sexuality, and health.7 Encountering the challenges of the
linguistic turn, women and gender historians also questioned even very
fundamental concepts such as experience and agency, the catchwords of
labor history since the publication of E.P. Thompson’s seminal book,
The Making of the English Working Class. Of course, scholarship produced
diverse ways to come to grips with that challenge. While some scholars
claimed that only with the help of the categories, women and men, could
feminist scholarship recover the female subject and render her politically
active, others argued that the deconstruction of historical agency does not
mean the disenfranchisement of women; instead it will redefine femininity,
enriching and improving its capacities.8
Although the historiography on Ottoman labor has also undeniably
come a long way since the 1980s, it is somewhat disheartening to see that
6. For a further historiographical discussion on the feminist challenge to labor history, see Sally
Alexander, ‘‘Women, Class and Sexual Differences in the 1830s and 1840s: Some Reflections on
the Writing of a Feminist History’’, History Workshop, 17 (1984), pp. 125–149; Joan W. Scott,
‘‘Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis’’, American Historical Review, 91 (1986),
pp. 1053–1075; idem, ‘‘On Language, Gender, and Working-Class History’’, International
Labor and Working Class History, 31 (1987), pp. 1–36; Ava Baron (ed.), Work Engendered:
Toward a New History of American Labor (Ithaca, NY [etc.], 1991); Kathleen Canning,
‘‘Gender and the Politics of Class Formation: Rethinking German Labor History’’, American
Historical Review, 97 (1992), pp. 736–768; Laura Frader and Sonya O. Rose (eds), Gender and
Class in Modern Europe (Ithaca, NY [etc.], 1996).
7. Sonya Rose, Limited Livelihoods: Gender and Class in Nineteenth-Century England
(Berkeley, CA, 1992); Victoria De Grazia and Ellen Furlough (eds), The Sex of Things: Gender
and Consumption in Historical Perspective (Berkeley, CA, 1996); Anna Clark, The Struggle for
Breeches: Gender and the Making of the British Working Class (Berkeley, CA, 1995); Judith
Coffin, The Politics of Women’s Work: The Paris Garment Trades, 1750–1915 (Princeton, NJ,
1996); Kathleen Canning, Languages of Labor and Gender: Female Factory Work in Germany,
1850–1914 (Ithaca, NY, 1996); Katrina Honeyman, Women, Gender and Industrialization in
England, 1700–1870 (NewYork, 2000).
8. Linda J. Nicholson (ed.), Feminism/Postmodernism (New York [etc.], 1990); Judith Butler
and Joan W. Scott (eds), Feminists Theorize the Political (New York [etc.], 1992); Kathleen
Canning, ‘‘Feminist History after the Linguistic Turn: Historicizing Discourse and Experience’’, Signs, 19 (1994), pp. 368–404; Seyla Benhabib et al. (eds), Feminist Contentions: A
Philosophical Exchange (New York, 1995).
50
Gülhan Balsoy
generally the feminist challenge has attracted very little critical scholarly
attention. Ottoman labor history, even in the traditional sense of concentrating on organized workers, labor unions, and leaders, has developed
as a field only recently. Disregarding the global factors that have increasingly led to a lack of focus on topics related to workers and labor in the
past few decades,9 most scholars agree that the historiographical tradition
that places the elites at the center of the historical account is one of the
primary reasons for the dearth of scholarship.10 This paradigm approaches
history from the point of view of the state and the elites, and sees
their interests and considerations as the main driving force of history.
According to this view, modernization is the ultimate goal to be reached
and the whole of nineteenth-century history is understood as a procession
toward it. As a result, social dynamics, as well as the role of subordinate
classes, workers, peasants, ethnic and religious minorities, and women, are
disregarded. Moreover, even the revisionist historians, who criticized the
statist approaches, were unable to avoid reproducing the same perspective,
since they tackled merely the structural factors and ignored almost totally the
experiences of real workers. Regrettably, when they did focus on workers,
their discussion was restricted to organized labor and labor unions.
Besides the problems of subscribing to the modernization paradigm,
the use of sources played an important role in the paucity of studies on
Ottoman labor history, as scholars agree.11 Historians argued that most of
the available documentation was produced by the state and hence merely
reflects the ideals of the Ottoman government authorities rather than the
actual practices of workers. Even though this argument is accepted in
many respects, by concentrating on concepts and themes rather than
chronologies, and taking into consideration by whom those documents
were produced, for what purposes, and whose interests they reflect, a
critical reading of those sources can help overcome the statist bias in the
documents. Furthermore, I reject the claim that there is a scarcity of
documents related to workers and argue instead that the perspective that
overlooks workers as subjects of history caused an insensitivity to the
sources and to the documents that are available.
9. For the shift away from labor history, see André Gorz, Farewell to the Working Class: An
Essay on Post-Industrial Socialism (Boston, MA, 1982); and the special issue of International
Labor and Working Class History, 57 (Spring 2000), especially Geoff Eley and Keith Nield,
‘‘Farewell to the Working Class?’’, in that volume and the replies to it.
10. For a discussion of this issue see Donald Quataert, ‘‘The Social History of Labor in the
Ottoman Empire: 1800–1914’’, in Ellis J. Goldberg (ed.), The Social History of Labor in the
Middle East, (Boulder, CO, 1996); Zachary Lockman, ‘‘Introduction’’, in idem (ed.), Workers
and Working Classes in the Middle East: Struggles, Histories, Historiographies (Albany, NY,
1994); Akın, ‘‘Erken Cumhuriyet Dönemi Emek Tarihçiliğine Katkı’’.
11. Quataert, ‘‘The Social History of Labor in the Ottoman Empire: 1800–1914’’. Akın, ‘‘Erken
Cumhuriyet Dönemi Emek Tarihçiliğine Katkı’’.
51
In the last twenty years, Ottoman labor historians have undertaken
important steps in overcoming these two major barriers – the bias of the
modernization paradigm and the problem of sources. One of the major
achievements of this increasingly sophisticated literature has been the
exploration of the relationship between class, ethnicity, religion, and
nationality.12 Ottoman labor historians have come a long way in uncovering
the point of view of the small artisans, unorganized workers, and peasants.13
Moreover, some recent studies made significant contributions by showing
that the relative absence of large-scale factory work did not mean the decline
of industry in the nineteenth century, and that in different parts of the
Ottoman lands, small-scale, unorganized, export-oriented industries, some of
which were essentially dependent on female labor, flourished. While this
approach forces us to re-evaluate what we know about Ottoman industries,
it genuinely reconstructs the profile of the Ottoman workforce, by pointing
out its fractural character. Thus, not only does it constitute a fertile bedrock
for future studies in labor history, it also explains the difficulty of writing the
social history of Ottoman labor in relation to its specificities.14 Despite these
important contributions, however, Ottoman women remain largely invisible
to scholars.15 Furthermore, Ottoman labor historians deliberately or inadvertently continue to base their assumptions on binary oppositions such as
‘‘public’’ versus ‘‘private’’, ‘‘factory’’ versus ‘‘home’’, and ‘‘production’’ versus
‘‘reproduction’’, a framework that excludes gender.
Unfortunately, women and gender historians, who could have made a
meaningful contribution to challenging this dichotomous way of thinking,
12. See for example the collection by Mete Tunçay and Erik Jan Zürcher (eds), Socialism and
Nationalism in the Ottoman Empire: 1876–1923 (London, 1994) – although the focus of that
book is on socialist and nationalist political movements rather than labor movements, it also
provides helpful insights into the Ottoman working classes. See also Cengiz Kırlı, ‘‘A Profile of
the Labor Force in Early Nineteenth-Century Istanbul’’, International Labor and WorkingClass History, 60 (2001), pp. 125–140.
13. On this topic see Donald Quataert and Erik Jan Zürcher (eds), Workers and Working Class
in the Ottoman Empire and the Turkish Republic: 1839–1950 (London, 1995). See especially
Sherry Vatter, ‘‘Militant Textile Weavers in Damascus: Waged Artisans and the Ottoman Labor
Movement, 1850–1914’’, in that volume. In uncovering the artisan’s point of view, her discussion of militant textile weavers in Damascus is a particularly important contribution to the field.
See also Donald Quataert, Miners and the State in the Ottoman Empire: The Zonguldak
Coalfield, 1822–1920 (New York, 2006).
14. Donald Quataert, Ottoman Manufacturing in the Age of the Industrial Revolution (Cambridge,
1993); Michael Palairet, The Balkan Economies c.1800–1914: Evolution without Development (New
York, 1997); Yüksel Duman, ‘‘Notables, Textiles and Copper in Ottoman Tokat 1750–1840’’ (Ph.D.,
State University of New York at Binghamton, 1998). Although it discusses a different context, an
important contribution to this perspective is John Chalcraft, The Striking Cabbies of Cairo and
Other Stories: Crafts and Guilds in Egypt, 1863–1914 (Albany, NY, 2004).
15. Some major exceptions are Quataert, Ottoman Manufacturing, and Fariba Zarinebaf-Shahr,
‘‘The Role of Women in the Urban Economy of Istanbul, 1700–1850’’, International Labor and
Working-Class History, 60 (2001), pp. 141–152.
52
Gülhan Balsoy
failed to fill the lacuna of the works on labor history due to their notable
lack of interest in labor and working women. For a long time, issues
related to women and gender in the Ottoman Empire attracted very little
critical scholarly attention. The first serious academic studies appeared in
the 1990s,16 and focused mainly on making women visible in the historical
accounts. Except for a few articles published in edited volumes, most
first-generation research did not employ gender as an analytical category
of historical analysis and sex/gender distinctions remained largely unaddressed. In the context of a multi-religious, multi-ethnic empire stretching
over a vast geography, overlooking the differences among women manifestly weakened that scholarship. Nonetheless, the fact that the historiography has become increasingly sophisticated in recent decades, and
topics such as sexuality,17 gendered aspects of law,18 family,19 education,20
charity,21 and masculinity22 are receiving their due attention from historians, is very promising. The increasing use of court records in particular not only helps subtly to reconstruct the everyday lives of Ottoman
women but also contributes to investigating the power structures within
which gender relations were embedded.23 Notwithstanding those major
achievements, studies on the history of women and gender have, for the
16. Nikki Keddie and Beth Baron (eds), Women in Middle Eastern History: Shifting Boundaries
in Sex and Gender (New Haven, CT, 1991); Madeline Zilfi, Women in the Ottoman Empire:
Middle Eastern Women in the Early Modern Era (Leiden [etc.], 1997); Lila Abu-Lughod (ed.),
Remaking Women: Feminism and Modernity in the Middle East (Princeton, NJ, 1998); and
Margaret Meriwether and Judith E. Tucker (eds), Social History of Women and Gender in the
Modern Middle East (Boulder, CO, 1999).
17. Dror Ze’evi, Producing Desire: Changing Sexual Discourse in the Ottoman Middle East,
1500–1900 (Berkeley, CA, 2006).
18. Leslie Peirce, Morality Tales: Law and Gender in the Ottoman Court of Aintab (Berkeley,
CA, 2003).
19. Beshara Doumani (ed.), Family History in the Middle East: Household, Property, and
Gender (Albany, NY, 2003); Amira El Azhary Sonbol (ed.), Women, the Family, and Divorce
Laws in Islamic History (Syracuse, NY, 1996).
20. Elizabeth B. Frierson, ‘‘Unimagined Communities: Women and Education in the LateOttoman Empire, 1876–1909’’, Critical Matrix: The Princeton Journal of Women, Gender, and
Culture, 9:2 (1995), pp. 55–90.
21. Fariba Zarinebaf-Shahr, ‘‘Women, Patronage and Charity in Ottoman Istanbul’’, in Amira
El-Azhary Sonbol (ed.), Beyond the Exotic: Women’s Histories in Islamic Societies (Syracuse,
NY, 2005).
22. Marc Baer, ‘‘Manliness, Male Virtue and History Writing at the Seventeenth-Century
Ottoman Court’’, Gender & History, 20 (2008), pp. 128–148.
23. Iris Agmon, ‘‘Women, Class, and Gender: Muslim Jaffa and Haifa at the Turn of the 20th
Century’’, International Journal of Middle East Studies, 30 (1998), pp. 477–500; Marc Baer,
‘‘Islamic Conversion Narratives of Women: Social Change and Gendered Religious Hierarchy
in Early Modern Ottoman Istanbul’’, Gender & History, 16 (2004), pp. 425–458; Dror Ze’evi,
‘‘Women in 17th-Century Jerusalem: Western and Indigenous Perspectives’’, International
Journal of Middle East Studies, 27 (1995), pp. 157–173.
53
most part, been produced with no regard for the category of class and in
relative isolation from the work of labor historians. As a result, women
and gender historians have put too little effort into understanding lowerclass women as economic actors involved in paid or unpaid work, and
hence missed the chance to challenge the historiography on labor conceptually and empirically.
To sum up briefly, I argue that while labor historians overlooked
women in the labor force, women and gender historians neglected
workers among women. Whereas labor historians limited their focus to
the experiences of male workers and reproduce dichotomous polarities,
women and gender historians showed insufficient interest in challenging
this approach and in highlighting the interdependency and mutuality of
those oppositional pairs. As a result of the mutual distancing of both
fields, working women were silenced both in the history of labor and in
the history of women and gender, and a party which could otherwise have
become an important agent of historical change was isolated by most of
the social accounts of the Ottoman past. It is regrettable, moreover, that
the ‘‘mutual distancing’’ between the two fields of historical inquiry
undermined the achievements of each field and weakened our overall
understanding of the nineteenth century. My study of the Cibali Régie
Factory in the early twentieth century, however, makes female workers on
the shopfloor visible and brings their experiences back into labor history.
It demonstrates that among tobacco workers gender and class were in
constant interaction. Finally, it dislocates the elites from the center of
historical research and replaces them with male and female workers as the
agents of historical change.
O T T O M A N T O B A C C O I N D U S T RY
The last few decades of the nineteenth century were a period of major
financial crisis for the Ottoman government. After the first external loan
taken out to finance the Crimean War in 1854, the Ottoman government
soon fell into the trap of paying back its debts using further foreign
borrowing. In 1881, the European states founded the Public Debt
Administration in order to control the Ottoman state’s major sources of
revenue for payments toward its debt.24 To control the revenues from
tobacco, a major source of income, the Tobacco Régie was founded in
1884 and granted a monopoly over the administration of the cultivation,
purchase, exportation, and sale of tobacco. The same year, the Tobacco
Régie established the Cibali Tobacco Factory, or the Cibali Régie Factory
24. S- evket Pamuk, The Ottoman Empire and European Capitalism, 1820–1913: Trade,
Investment, and Production (Cambridge, 1987), p. 61; Fatma Doğruel and Suut Doğruel,
Osmanlıdan Günümüze Tekel (Istanbul, 2000).
54
Gülhan Balsoy
as contemporaries called it, to process tobacco.25 After a short time, the
factory, which began to produce cigarettes from the 1900s onward,
became one of the most important factories in the Ottoman Empire, with
a production capacity of 12,000 kilograms of cigarettes per day.26
Within the Ottoman Empire, Istanbul, Izmir, Thessalonika, and Egypt
were some of the centers of the tobacco industry in the second half
of nineteenth century; all were characterized by the prominence of
Greek families in cigarette production.27 It is also notable that the tobaccoprocessing industries in Egypt and the Balkan provinces of the Ottoman
Empire have been researched better than the same industry in the Anatolian
regions. Beinin and Goldberg, for example, mention that the cigarette
industry became the center of gravity of the emergent Egyptian working
class around the beginning of the twentieth century. Around the 1880s,
5 Greek firms controlled 80 per cent of the cigarette export trade and
employed approximately 2,200 workers. Almost 2,000 workers worked in
other firms producing mainly for the local market, including the smaller
workshops owned by Armenians and Europeans. The elite hand-rollers
were primarily Greek, but included Armenians, Syrians, and Egyptians as
well. The least skilled workers, the tobacco-sorters, were mostly Egyptian
women. Making cigarettes was initially a highly skilled and essentially
artisan activity, but the introduction of machinery by the end of World War
I dramatically changed the nature of the workforce, with skilled artisans
being replaced by unskilled women and children.28
One of the most recent and comprehensive works on the Egyptian
cigarette industry is by Relli Shechter.29 It examines the role of the
Egyptian tobacco industry within the world economy through an analysis
of the introduction of tobacco into the Ottoman Empire, the industrialization of cigarette production, and the development of the tobacco
market in Egypt. While Shechter duly conceptualizes the market as a
web of relations between various actors interacting within a number of
different frameworks and aptly demonstrates the multi-layered relationships among the factory owners, sellers, buyers, and the state, he hardly
mentions the role of workers within this complex network. As to female
workers, Shechter presupposes that scarcely any women were employed
25. Doğruel and Doğruel, Osmanlidan Günümüze Tekel.
26. Bernhard Stern, Die Moderne Turkei (Berlin, 1909).
27. For the tobacco industry in Egypt, see Joel Beinin, Workers and Peasants in the Modern
Middle East (Cambridge, 2001), and Ellis Goldberg, Tinker, Tailor and Textile Worker: Class
and Politics in Egypt, 1930–1952 (Berkeley, CA, 1986).
28. Beinin, Workers and Peasants; Goldberg, Tinker, Tailor and Textile Worker.
29. Relli Shechter, Smoking, Culture and Economy in the Middle East: The Egyptian Tobacco
Market 1850–2000 (London, 2006). See also idem, ‘‘Selling Luxury: The Rise of the Egyptian
Cigarette and the Transformation of the Egyptian Tobacco Market, 1850–1914’’, in International Journal of Middle East Studies, 35 (2003), pp. 51–75.
55
in the tobacco industry due to the general exclusion of women from
public life and the rigid gender segregation in Egypt.30 However, in his
much earlier work Beinin criticized those studies that ignored female
workers in the cigarette making industry. Referring to the fact that
Egypt’s 1907 census, which was the first to count industrial workers,
had enumerated only 15 women out of 3,162 cigarette factory workers,
Beinin argued that since the same Greek families and production methods
prevailed in the Balkan provinces and in Egypt, and since female workers
were employed elsewhere in Egypt there is no reason to presuppose
that social norms in Egypt posed a greater barrier to women’s factory
employment. He argued that this statistical error might reflect the
ambivalence of the state authorities toward women working for wages in
the public sphere and an uncertainty about how to categorize a new urban
social group still largely identified with foreigners.31
We are lucky to have several contemporary accounts that shed light on
the nature of the tobacco industry and the social conditions of workers
in the Balkan regions of the Ottoman Empire. In the early twentieth
century, the tobacco processing work was seasonal in character.32 During
summer, this sector’s high season, the workday extended to eleven or
twelve hours, while in winter workers remained idle with scarce opportunities for employment. The inconsistency of the availability of work,
and hence of income, throughout the year was one of the major issues
raised in workers’ struggles. As the contemporary documents disclose,
most of the time the industrialists were driven to reduce the number of
male workers, and employed, instead, women and sometimes children in
order both to lower labor costs and to increase their authority over the
workers. This choice, obviously, helped to avoid union activities, to the
advantage of manufacturers.
In the case of the tobacco industry and cigarette production in the
Anatolian regions of the Ottoman Empire, due to the paucity of the
secondary literature, what we know is limited largely to the industrial
statistics compiled between 1913 and 1915.33 According to those statistics,
Izmir and Istanbul were the two major sites of cigarette production in
Anatolia, and 2,109 workers, 923 of them female, were employed in their
factories in 1913. Unfortunately, other than noting the presence in the
factory of child workers, who packed tobacco, this source does not offer
much in relation to the social conditions of labor in the factories.
30. Idem, Smoking, Culture and Economy, p. 42.
31. Beinin, Workers and Peasants, pp. 68–69.
32. ‘‘Tabakerzeugung, bearbeitung und -handel in der Europaishen Turkei’’, in Berichte über
Handel und Industrie, 18:7 (5 December 1912).
33. These statistics were later reprinted. For that newer version see Gündüz Ökçün, Osmanlı
Sanayi İstatistikleri: 1913–1915 (Istanbul, 1984).
56
Gülhan Balsoy
C İ B A L I R É G I E F A C T O RY
In the remaining part of this article, I focus on the late nineteenth- and
early twentieth-century history of the Cibali Régie Factory. This specific
location is peculiar for the photographic evidence available. Berggren
did not simply illustrate the physical layout of the factory, he also
photographed the workers and the way they worked, dressed, and rested.
He vividly demonstrated the stages through which tobacco was processed
and cigarettes produced, with a special emphasis on the role of the
workers throughout. As such, his photographs offer an unparalleled
opportunity to reconstruct the experiences of the workers in the everyday
context of their relationships to one another, to their superiors, and to
technology. Moreover, they suggest that gender is pivotal for understanding and analyzing worker experiences. The shopfloor was not
merely a space where production was carried out, it was a stage upon
which gender values were enacted. The history of the Cibali Régie
Factory is rife with gender and class conflicts, and both the photographs offering its image and the other textual evidence are tainted
with them.
The Cibali Régie Factory was one of the largest tobacco processing
and cigarette manufacturing factories in the Ottoman Empire. The
factory building was located on the Golden Horn, close to the Jewish
and Greek quarters. As Figure 1 demonstrates, the three-storey massive
stone factory structure contrasted sharply with the small wooden houses
of the neighborhood. The specific location of the factory, by the sea,
offered advantages for transportation, especially since shipping was the
major and cheapest means of transportation at the time.34 Despite the
lack of reliable information on the recruitment practices of the factory,
the photographs demonstrate that a substantial part of the factory’s
labor force consisted of female workers, who, given their uncovered
hair, were presumably non-Muslims. Other sources also claim that
almost all the female workers were Jewish or Greek girls,35 which
would also explain the other reasons for the specific location of the
factory. Yet, in total, the workforce reflected the cosmopolitan nature of
the Ottoman population in the 1900s, and Muslim, Jewish, and Greek
workers worked together, shared the same grievances, and organized
protests to overcome them.
34. Dünden Bugüne Istanbul Ansiklopedisi (Ankara and Istanbul, 1993–1995).
35. See, for example, Stern, Die Moderne Turkei, pp. 71–72. In the Bapbakanlık Osmanlı Ars-ivi
[Ottoman Archives of the Prime Ministry] we also find in DH.MKT 912/53 (1322.N.23/
2.11.1904) the names of several non-Muslim female workers. (In references to the Ottoman
Archives of the Prime Ministry I use the acronym BOA, followed by the abbreviated name of
the classification (in this example DH.MKT), the document number, and finally the lunar and
solar dates of the document.)
57
Figure 1. The Cibali Régie Factory was one of the largest tobacco processing and cigarette
manufacturing factories in the Ottoman Empire.
Photograph: Guillaume Berggren. Collection Kadir Has Museum. Used with permission.
The factory edifice comprised several buildings that were linked to one
another via courtyards or passageways.36 Just to the right of the entrance
of the factory house was the large depot where the bulks of tobacco leaves
were kept. One of Berggren’s photographs offers a view of the depot, with
workers and their superintendents carrying, counting, and stacking the
large tobacco bales and the processed tobacco and cigarette packages
(Figure 2, overleaf). The depot in Berggren’s photograph is quite an
orderly place, with signs identifying the tidy blocks, bales, and packages.
The tobacco leaves processed in the factory workshop consisted of
different types of Turkish tobacco cultivated in various regions of Anatolia, from the finest quality to the plainest. From the depot, the daily
quota of tobacco to be processed was carried to the entrance of the factory in bales. Tobacco was pulled from those bales and sorted leaf by leaf.
All the different leaves were then mixed into one quality, called harman.
That task was the exclusive responsibility of male workers called
tütüncü,37 who knew how to handle the delicate tobacco leaves without
damaging them and to monitor the moistness or dryness of the leaves. The
tütüncü were highly qualified workers, and sorting was one of the most
important and demanding tasks of tobacco processing since the tobacco
36. Alioglu and Alper, ‘‘Cibali Tütün ve Sigara Fabrikası: Sanayi Yapısından Üniversiteye’’,
discuss the architectural characteristics of the factory structure and its transformation over time.
37. Tütün is the Turkish word for tobacco.
58
Gülhan Balsoy
Figure 2. The depot of the Cibali Régie Factory, with workers and their superintendents carrying,
counting, and stacking the large tobacco bales and the processed tobacco and cigarette packages.
mixes (harman) prepared by the tütüncü determined the quality, taste,
aroma, and proper burning of the cigarette.38
After the tobacco mixes (harman) were prepared, the leaves were cut
either by hand or by machine. The better-quality tobacco was cut by
hand, with the use of simple grinding machines called havan, which
enabled a more delicate handling. Larger steam machines with a capacity
to cut up to 8,000 kilograms of tobacco daily were also employed, but
they were used exclusively to process the lower-quality tobaccos that
were not as delicately handled.39 The hand-cutters, who were responsible
for cutting the finest tobacco leaves, had young apprentice boys helping
them too, as we can see in Figure 3. As the photograph also shows, the
hand-cutters worked in pairs, the apprentice passing the leaves for cutting
to his master. The workers were lined up in parallel rows. The master and
the apprentice saw only each other, and worked with their backs turned to
the other workers. While the workshop in which the hand-cutters worked
was smaller than the many other workshops in which other stages in the
tobacco processing were carried out, it was quite well lit by the large
38. Stern, Die Moderne Turkei, p. 70.
39. Ibid., p. 71.
59
Figure 3. The hand-cutters, who were responsible for cutting the finest tobacco leaves, had
young apprentice boys helping them.
windows along the two facades. The apprentices were paid directly by the
masters, and their total earnings were determined by the overall quantity
they produced in collaboration with their masters and by the quality of
their product.40 The piecemeal nature of this work placed a great deal of
pressure on the workers. Due to the nature of the work and to the constant scrutiny of the superintendents, the masters and their apprentices
had little opportunity for interaction.
Once the tobacco mixes had been prepared, they were either packed
and sold as loose tobacco or sent for cigarette manufacturing. The loose
tobacco was packed by female workers, who worked dexterously.
Berggren’s photographs also present a snapshot of the female workers
employed in the tobacco-packaging department (Figure 4, overleaf). We
see three separate rooms opening onto each other. The workers here were
quite young girls. Some of them sifted the tobacco through a sieve to
separate out the coarse pieces and craps; others prepared cigarette papers,
weighed the tobacco, filled and sealed packages, and placed them on a
board of hundred-pack batches. Again there was a superintendent, in the
second room. The girls had to be precise about the amount they put into
40. Ibid., p. 70.
60
Gülhan Balsoy
Figure 4. Female workers employed in the tobacco-packaging department of the Cibali
Régie Factory.
the packs since those boards were weighed before being sent to the depot;
if the packages were not of the exact same weight, they would all have to
be emptied and refilled.41 While that process was not considered to be
skilled work, in fact it required great precision as to the amount to be put
into the packages, and hence a great deal of dexterity.
The tobacco, which was not packed right away, was sent for cigarette
manufacturing. To produce cigarettes, cigarette papers were filled
with tobacco, rolled, and finally packed. That task was not considered
to require special skills and was carried out only by female workers.
However, it was highly labor-intensive and several hundred female
workers were employed, working in large halls, sitting side by side, doing
the same tiring and repetitive task all day.42 In Figure 5, we see a large hall
where young female workers rolled cigarettes. The photograph offers
a wide angle covering the greater part of the hall. We see that the workers
were mostly very young girls; some might even have been children.
They were lined up and sat on desks facing each other. The hall is rather
41. Ibid., p. 71.
42. Ibid.
61
Figure 5. Large hall with young female workers rolling cigarettes.
spacious; however, though the image is of poor quality, it seems a little
dim. Berggren offers a similar image in another photograph too (Figure 6,
overleaf). Here we see a smaller but still largish workshop, where young
female workers are seated in rows of desks. There are windows on both
sides of the hall, but they are relatively small. There are three male
superintendents watching the workers. There is also one female worker
who is standing at the third row. She seems much older than the other
workers, and might too be a superintendent.
In addition to employing workers for those main tasks of tobacco
processing, the factory was a source of employment for many others.
While some worked in the depot storing unprocessed tobacco, processed
tobacco, cigarette packages, cigarette paper, packaging paper, tobacco tins,
and many other smaller items, others performed mechanical tasks at the
forger, grinder, the sheet-metal shop, machine shop, and the carpentry
shop. In the Cibali factory, 600 to 1,000 kilograms of tobacco were packed
into 350,000 to 400,000 differently sized packages, and an average of
500,000 cigarettes were produced daily.43 Although it is hard to estimate
the daily production capacity of a worker, it has been suggested that the
43. Ibid.
62
Gülhan Balsoy
Figure 6. A smaller but still largish workshop, where young female workers are seated in
rows of desks.
female workers each produced up to 3,000 cigarettes daily, which must
have been quite a heavy workload.44
In the Cibali factory, the stages of manufacturing were strictly defined
as either male or female tasks and relevant skill components were assigned
to them. Male workers were generally supposed to be specialists, whereas
female workers were assumed to perform unskilled tasks. However, this
assumption was not always based on fact, and while there were many
male workers performing tasks that did not require specific training,
female workers, those for example packing loose tobacco, needed considerable manual precision, which was not considered to be a special skill.
Workers were organized hierarchically on the shop floor not just in
terms of skills but also physically. The female and male workers worked
in single-sex departments. Although workers probably could not see the
other department and interact with colleagues of the opposite sex, the
wooden panels that can be seen in Figure 7 suggest that the walls between
the departments were not impenetrable, but porous. The panels allowed
light to diffuse into the halls when artificial sources of illumination were
44. Ibid.
63
Figure 7. Although workers probably could not see the other department and interact with
colleagues of the opposite sex, the wooden panels suggest that the walls between the
departments were not impenetrable, but porous.
not available. Yet, in spite of the porosity of the walls, only superintendents, not ordinary workers, could access the female departments.
Moreover, mobility in the factory space was a privilege of power. Only
those higher up in the hierarchy could move freely within the factory,
while those occupying lower ranks were increasingly static, sitting
alongside their colleagues without much space to move. Mobility within
the factory space served to reflect and confirm workplace hierarchies. The
directors had the right to enter whichever department they wanted to
check, the superintendents were free to move within the departments
under their control, and masters were able to move about in their
workshops, unlike their apprentices, who mostly remained stationary,
while at their desks the cigarette-rolling girls repeated the same body
movements all day, with virtually no opportunity to move.
While the photographs demonstrate how the workers worked together
in the factory, archival evidence shows that they also had other things to
share, work grievances being one of them. Moreover, despite the fact that
scholars have not been especially receptive to the presence of women in
popular protests and labor activism, it is evident that female workers were
indeed politically active within the Ottoman Empire. In 1904, Cibali
factory workers organized a major strike to reclaim weekly payments
64
Gülhan Balsoy
withheld from them. To compensate for the amount due, they demanded
a payment during the Easter break; a similar payment had been made the
previous year. When the factory management rejected their request, the
workers went on strike and marched to the headquarters of the Tobacco
Régie at the building of the Ottoman Bank in Galata. Of the 250 protesters 50 were female workers. The protestors finally managed to force
the factory management to accept their demands, at least partially.
Management agreed to pay the Greek workers, who were celebrating
Easter, but rejected making payments to the Jewish workers who had
participated in the demonstration in support of their fellow workers, and,
moreover, fired them. The police subsequently carried out an investigation and identified twelve workers as leaders of the protest. That list
included the names of three female workers too, Mari Behar, Ras- el
Eskinazi, and Bin Behar, who all happened to be Jewish and most
probably lost their jobs.45 Finally, three workers, Sigaracı (Cigarettiere)
Nesim, Vasil Yani, and Vangel Sarandi, were found to have planned and
coordinated the entire event. Since Sigaracı Nesim was an Italian subject,
he was expelled; the two others were arrested.46
The Cibali Régie Factory was highly mechanized by the early twentieth
century. Although some tasks were still carried out by skilled hands,
many had become mechanized by then. The introduction of contemporary technologies to the production process and the use of modern
machinery, which was praised by contemporary observers, did not pass
without conflict and caused considerable tension among workers. In 1893,
one of the first Luddite protests on Ottoman territory was staged at the
Cibali factory and the workers stopped work (terk-i es- gal) to resist the
use of the new grinding machines (havan). The workers complained that
the new grinding machines were so wide they could not compress the
tobacco by hand. Although the factory management consented to the use
of the old machines, fifty-two workers did not return to work after
complaining and demanding a wage increase. The factory management
reported the event to the Grand Vizierate (Sadaret) and the Ministry for
Internal Affairs (Dahiliye Nezareti), which immediately contacted the
Police Department (Zabtiye Nezareti), the Ministry of Finance (Maliye
Nezareti), and the Istanbul Municipality (S
- ehremaneti). Finally, the
management announced that it would continue to employ and would not
punish those who ended their protest before that evening, but that those
who did not consent to abandon their protest would never be employed
at the factory again. The factory management claimed that the ban on
future employment would act as a warning to those workers who had not
45. BOA DH.MKT 912/53 (1322.N.23/2.11.1904), appendix 4.
46. BOA DH.MKT 912/53 (1322.N.23/2.11.1904), appendices 13–17.
65
Figure. 8. The machine shop of the Cibali Régie Factory.
participated in the protest, and discourage them from organizing similar
protests.47
Ironically, although the introduction of new machinery to production
processes led to considerable labor activism, access to contemporary
technologies was a privilege accorded only to male workers. The use of
technology, in other words, created its own gender values, and those
could also be observed in the photographs. In many of the images, male
workers were represented in relation to contemporary technologies, while
female workers were almost always depicted performing manual tasks.
The association of masculinity with technical skills becomes most explicit
in Figure 8, which portrays the machine shop. The pulleys, gears, wheels,
machines, iron ropes, and metal tools illustrated here were not only part
of the ironsmiths’ tradition, but also an indication of mechanization, and
were the prerogatives of male workers. Besides their association with and
access to contemporary technologies, the male workers performed more
varied tasks than female workers did. They sorted, mixed and cut tobacco
leaves, worked in the machine shop, carried and stacked tobacco bales and
packages, worked in the depot, and, of course, watched and supervised
47. BOA I.HUS 11/1310.L.7 (1310.L.9/26.4.1893), BOA DH.MK 22/24 (1310.L.10/27.4.1893),
BOA Y.A.HUS 273/60 (1310.L.10/27.4.1893).
66
Gülhan Balsoy
other workers. Female workers, however, performed only manual tasks,
and were involved in a much less varied range of activities.
The postures of the workers we see in the photographs also reflect gender
values. The female workers were represented as hardworking, industrious,
and devout. They were chaste, austere, and proud in their unadorned but
neat dresses and white aprons. They seem to be working hard, expending a
lot of effort. Still, we should realize that the photographs reflect what factory
management wanted us to see, and the values that management sought to
impress on the viewer. In the photographs, the workers are lined up in neat
rows in huge halls, working industriously, focusing only on their own tasks,
without looking around. However, a closer look shows that there were many
workers looking around, as well as some looking directly into the camera, as
if trying to show that they were not anonymous individuals but had their
own hopes, dreams, and resentments.
What the photographs present is a de-contextualized setting, which tells us
nothing about questions relating to those women’s daily lives, their families,
the neighborhoods they came from, their houses, whether they were tired or
sick. We do not know how the supervisor or the factory directors treated
them, or whether there was much solidarity or tension between the workers.
Although it might never be possible to answer such questions or to recover
fully the daily experiences of those workers, the use of other types of
historical sources besides photographic images can contribute to reconstructing a more inclusive account. Despite the lack of otherwise solid data on
the sanitariness of working conditions, we are offered a glimpse of conditions
experienced by female workers in the tobacco industry in a contemporary
medical book about pregnancy and childbirth.48 The author, Besim Ömer, a
medical doctor and a pioneering obstetrician in the Ottoman Empire, listed
the tobacco industry among those industries hazardous for pregnant women.
According to the statistical data he cited, 45 per cent of women in the tobacco
industry had suffered a miscarriage. Although that rate might be slightly on
the high side, his claim that the tobacco dust to which female workers were
exposed when they handled tobacco and rolled and packed cigarettes posed a
serious threat both to their own health, and to that of their infants, is crucial
to reconstructing the experiences of female workers in this industry. Besim
Ömer also mentioned that those infants which survived the risk of miscarriage were born with either severe health problems or missing limbs, and
their health worsened when they were breastfed by their mothers, since the
toxins in the tobacco dust passed from mother to infant in the breast milk.
The ideal workspace that was presented in the photographs contrasts not
only with the account given above but also with archival documents. In the
photographs we see healthy workers, working intently and dexterously, in a
48. Besim Ömer, Gebelik ve Gebelikte Tedabir (Istanbul, 1900–1901), pp. 74–75.
67
peaceful environment without tensions. What the archival documents reveal,
however, conflicts with that image. An inspector’s report from 1898 claimed
that the shopfloor was not in fact neat, clean, and airy. The report went on to
say that although the large hall in the middle of the factory enabled air to
circulate, the windows located on just the one side of the building did not
allow tobacco dust to be extracted from the shop floor, and hence created a
hazard for the health of workers. To solve that problem, several chimneys
were opened, the report said, but those were only partly effective in eliminating the dust. The inspector’s report also noted that there were only 22
toilets for 1,300 workers, which was obviously insufficient. What was more,
the toilets did not have windows, and as a result of the lack of ventilation
they were unhygienic and had to be improved.49 The unhygienic, unventilated, stifling, and stuffy factory presented in the inspector’s report is in stark
contrast to the airy and clean workshops epitomized in the photographs.
The scant sources produced by Ottoman workers also reinforce the
picture of an insufficiency of health measures in the factory. Although Stern
praised the presence of a pharmacy in the factory and claimed that workers
had health insurance, a later piece published in a worker’s journal asserted
that there was neither a pharmacy nor a doctor in the factory. That account
also mentioned the harmful effects of tobacco dust on workers’ health,
giving examples of workers suffering from tuberculosis.50
In Figure 7, we see a clock on the wall. While the clock in the photograph
suggests that workers were time-disciplined, the archival documents demonstrate that they were time-conscious in other ways and protested about
working hours and the workday, and demanded payment during religious
holidays. The increase in the number of holidays was a primary demand
when the factory’s workers protested to management in February 1911.51
Security and tensions in the workspace constitute a final issue that we
cannot see in the photographs but which are crucial for understanding the
politics of work in the Cibali factory. Management, which had previously
felt intimidated by the vehement behavior and furious language of the
workers, used spies drawn from the workforce to monitor its workers.
Those spies informed the directors that the workers were planning to
destroy a number of machines, and even to set the factory on fire.52 Back
in 1904, following a demonstration at the factory, a security unit comprising police, gendarmerie, and soldiers was established to monitor and
spy on the activities of workers in an effort to prevent further protests.53
As other documents also suggest, that security unit was still in place in the
49.
50.
51.
52.
53.
BOA DH.MKT 2111/107 (1316.Ca.13/29.9.1898).
Sefik Saffet, ‘‘Tütün İs-çileri’’, in Aydınlık Extraordinary Workers’ Supplement, 6:1 (1924).
BOA DH.EUM.KADL 8/23 (1329.S.19/19.02.1911).
Ibid.
BOA DH.MKT 912/53 (1322.N.23/2.11.1904).
68
Gülhan Balsoy
1910s. Yet we see no policeman, gendarme, or soldier in the calm and
peaceful image presented by the photographs. We neither see security
units nor sense the tensions on the shopfloor. On the contrary, the
workers in the photographs seem oblivious of any thought of protest,
demonstration, or opposition; they seem content with their jobs and their
working conditions. However, in contrast to the dutiful and obedient
workers we see in the photographs, one finds recalcitrant workers referred to in the documents, workers who broke machinery and damaged the
doors of the factory, threatened to set the building on fire, who went to
the headquarters of the tobacco monopoly to protest at working conditions, who organized strikes and demanded better payment and improved
rights, who established a labor union at the risk of being arrested or
sacked, and who wrote in socialist newspapers.
In this article, I have sought to discuss the distance between Ottoman
labor history and women and gender histories. To bridge the gap between
those two fields of historical inquiry and to construct new perspectives on
labor history, I have argued that we need to pay closer attention to the
presence of women on the shopfloor, to critically re-evaluate the theoretical
tools through which we approach labor, and to examine the context within
which historical evidence was produced. For this purpose, I have used a
hitherto untapped source, the photographs of Cibali factory workers, and
tried to interpret them through the lens of gender and in relation to other
historical evidence. Although female workers are also present in archival
documents, as I have tried to demonstrate, historians have tended largely to
overlook them. The photographs, however, make it impossible to disregard
those female workers. In addition to making them physically visible, the
photographs are also rife with gendered assumptions.
As well as ethnicity, religion, and nationality, access to contemporary
technologies, the sexual division of labor, and workplace hierarchies
defined the ideal female identities on the shop floor. But even on the shop
floor, those identities sometimes engendered conflict. The use of different
types of historical evidence and their critical reading reveal conflicts
between the ideals represented in the sources and the day-to-day reality
on the shop floor. Such an approach constitutes a substantial alternative to
the dichotomous view based on binary oppositions predominant in the
wider historiography. Undertaking such an endeavor will contribute
conceptually and empirically to scholarship by weaving theory into historical research. Moreover, it will reshape and contest the traditional
perspective on Ottoman labor history, and, one hopes, answer the question as to why the female workers who appear in the photographs, in
archival documents, and in other sources have so far remained largely
invisible in the historiography.
Selling Luxury: The Rise of the Egyptian Cigarette and the Transformation of the Egyptian
Tobacco Market, 1850-1914
Author(s): Relli Shechter
Source: International Journal of Middle East Studies, Vol. 35, No. 1 (Feb., 2003), pp. 51-75
Published by: Cambridge University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3879927 .
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Int. J. Middle East Stud. 35 (2003), 51-75. Printed in the United States of America
DOI: 10.1017.S0020743803000035
Relli Shechter
SELLING LUXURY: THE RISE OF THE EGYPTIAN
CIGARETTE AND THE TRANSFORMATION
OF
THE EGYPTIAN TOBACCO MARKET, 1850-1914
Aroundthe mid-19th century,the cigarette,the latest fashion in tobacco consumption,
gained popularity in Egypt, as it did globally and throughoutthe Ottoman Empire.
Some fifty years later, the cigarette had become the predominantsmoking preference
in Egypt, and luxury Egyptian cigarettes were being exported aroundthe world. Indeed, Egyptian and Turkishbrandsplayed a significant role in introducingcigarettes
to different parts of the globe and thus in shaping world cigarette production.This
article sets out to tell the fascinating story of the luxury Egyptian cigarette and uses
this case to reflect on the development of modern marketsin Egypt.
Arguably the most significant change in the process of integrating the Ottoman
Empire into the world economy was the evolution of markets,internationaland local.
Although this "greattransformation"has been discussed from various scholarly perspectives, it is still not sufficiently emphasized.1Scholars such as Kenneth Cuno,
Peter Gran,Huri Islamoglu-Inan,Regat Kasaba,Roger Owen, and Sevket Pamukhave
demonstratedthat, to understandOttomaneconomic transformationsand their meaning, we need to consider the Ottoman Empire in the context of the world economy
since the 18th century.2This context enables us to understandbetter the processes
that related to the creation of local capitalism in Ottoman areas: the development of
industrializedagricultureof cash crops; the buildup of new industriesand the adjustment or disappearanceof existing ones; and the creation of an infrastructureof railroads, roads, and ports that facilitated the transportationof commodities into and out
of the country.As a result, we also know more (althoughprobablynot enough) about
the developmentof the financial institutionsthat facilitated these processes.
Study of the market in the Arab world was an integral part of research on the
Islamic world before the introductionof a modernmarketeconomy.3Somewhatparadoxically, however, such researchwent missing at a time that the processes of continuity and change in the market were at the core of contemporarytransitions. In other
words, past research has provided us with insights into markets and the centralityof
Relli Shechteris a Lecturerin the Departmentof Middle East Studies, Ben-GurionUniversity, Beer Sheva
84105, Israel; e-mail: [email protected].
? 2003 Cambridge University Press 0020-7438/03
$12.00
52 Relli Shechter
markets in the economies of both the city and the countryside and given us lively
descriptions of business practices and commercial life up to the 19th century. With
few exceptions, this kind of research has almost no equivalent in the study of the
Ottoman Empire during the 19th and early 20th centuries. We know very little about
markets in matters such as their locations, the architectureof new stores, and the
presentation of commodities. Further,commercial practices that developed in these
markets-and, most significantly,the introductionof new marketingpractices,promotion techniques, and advertising-are rarely discussed. The role of consumers and
their choices, preferences,and tastes in this process has been studied even less.
This paper examines markets as places of exchange (physical and social) where
producers,sellers, buyers, and the state met and interacted.It also relates to the sociocultural and political factors that determine the contours of these encounters. This
approachechoes Ben Fine's "vertical"approachto consumptionstudies, which seeks
to integratesupply and demandin the study of commodities.4It reflects dissatisfaction
with strict political-economy approaches,seen in most of the literatureon integration
in the study of economic change, but it also goes against a trend in consumption
studies to do the same in reverse-that is, to consider socio-cultural and political
aspects of consumptionwith little regardfor productionand sale."Thus, I seek a more
integrative approach,which considers all forces related to continuity and change in
markets in the frameworkof what Fine termed "a system of provision."
From this perspective,the article evaluates the changes that occurredin the tobacco
market with the introductionof the cigarette in the mid-19th century. It focuses on
the political economy that reshaped the market with the establishment of a new
tobacco-revenuesystem in Egypt. It emphasizes the consumers' role as buyers in the
initial push toward the buildup of the uniquely successful cigarette industry of the
time. Finally, the article examines the high-end marketfor luxury cigarettes and discusses the selling and advertising practices of this commodity both in Egypt and
abroad.
Although the origins of cigarette smoking in Egypt (and in the Ottoman Empire)
are not entirely clear, the cigaretteprobably arrivedin Egypt from France. However,
this was by no means a story of cross-culturalconsumptionin which foreign commodities were first adopted by the elite, then gradually "trickleddown" to other social
groups.6Rather,different classes adopted the cigarette simultaneously,and the cigarette was produced,sold, and consumed in a variety of fashions. Further,the cigarette
was never one productin the tobacco or smoking paper used in its manufactureor in
its size and weight. Cigarettebrandswere also priced, marketed,advertised,and sold
in a variety of ways and through different outlets. The act of smoking itself gained
different meanings, depending on the social group and the context in which the cigarette was smoked. Thus, the cigarette could, at the same time, be a cheap smoke, a
luxury commodity,a work-enhancingdevice or leisure-timeactivity,a symbol of new
individualismand independence,or a smoke to share with friends.
My decision to focus on the high-end marketfor cigarettesin Egypt-the consumption, production,and sale of ready-madeluxury Egyptian cigarettes-thus does not
stem from the fact that this segment of the marketwas a precursorto future development in the business. In fact, the period under discussion saw the establishmentof a
mass marketfor tobacco productsthathad little in common with this high-end market.
Selling Luxury 53
Rather, the study of the establishment of a market for luxury cigarettes reflects a
uniqueperiod of economic developmentin Egypt in which the evolution of the market
closely followed the introductionof colonial rule, coupled with a quick process of
globalization that further linked Egypt to world markets. In this environment, the
Egyptian cigarette was also a telling exception to the familiar story of "division of
labor"between center and periphery,because cigarettes producedin Egypt were successfully exported abroad. Further,Egyptian and Turkish cigarettes promoted consumptionof cigarettesglobally and influenced the kind of tobacco used in production
of cigarettes worldwide.
FROM
PIPES
TO CIGARETTES
Before the arrival of the cigarette around the middle of the 19th century, Ottomans
smoked the chibouk (pipe), which was adopted at the turn of the 17th century when
Ottomansbegan to consume tobacco. Until the arrivalof the cigarette,the pipe-and
not the waterpipe-was the most common smoking device. The waterpipe (narghile),
a Persian invention that also dates from the early 17th century,was used to facilitate
the smoking of an especially strong Persian tobacco (tumbak).7In Egypt, the waterpipe was called shrsha after a glass containerreplaced the traditionalcoconut shell.
The goza, which was made from a coconut shell connected to a cane tube, continued
to be used by the urbanpoor and the fallahs.8 In addition to using smoking tobaccos,
the Ottomansalso consumed chewing and snuff tobaccos.
It is difficult to documentspecific moments of change in smoking preferences(and
in consumptionpatternsin general) among Egyptian elites. Further,smokers probably
continued with their older smoking habits while adopting the cigarette. However, the
reception of the cigarette seems to be related, both symbolically and practically,to
acceleration in the pace of life in Egypt and to the emergence of a new lifestyle,
which resulted from the process of integrationinto the world economy. The creation
of a centralized state, a large standing army, and the Effendi class of state officials
and Western-educatedprofessionals further contributed to this process. It was the
cigarette rather than the pipe or waterpipe that suited this new setting. Moreover,
much like the tarboosh, whose use was spreading at the same time, the cigarette
became an icon of this new period. It representeda break from the past and symbolized a certain dynamism associated with modernity.The high-quality Egyptian cigarette, which would soon be famous aroundthe world, was the perfect commodity for
this purpose in that it reflected successful adaptationto global changes while retaining
an authenticEgyptian identity.
On its arrivalin Egypt, the cigarette made rapid inroads among the Egyptian elite.
Under Khedive Ismail, the cigarettereplaced the pipe at official gatherings.In 1869,
the khedive entertaineda group of American officers who had come to serve in his
army.9After the reception, the officers were offered cigarettes, coffee, and sherbet.
This practice continued through 1882, when British officers received cigarettes from
Khedive Tawfiq.'oAt the turn of the century, a survey of journalists-one of the
professions most closely associated with modern life in Egypt-showed that most
were passionatecigarettesmokers."11
Women of the elite also adoptedthe new fashion,
and the cigarettebecame a favorite smoke in the Ottomanharem.12By the early 20th
54 Relli Shechter
century, according to one account, "pipe-smoking [among women] had gone out of
fashion and had been replaced by cigarette smoking."'3
The rapid naturalizationof the cigarette and the increased demand for cigarettes
soon broughtabout the establishmentof a successful industryfor ready-madeluxury
cigarettes. Two major developments facilitated this process: the arrival of tobaccomen, a group that included merchants(wholesalers and retailers) and manufacturers
of tobacco products who were mostly Greeks, from other provinces of the Ottoman
Empire in Egypt; and the creationof a new tax-revenuesystem that effectively transferred commerce in tobacco from local merchantsto these newcomers.
THE
REARRANGEMENT
OF COMMERCE
IN TOBACCO
In 1860, the OttomanEmpire imposed a state monopoly on tobacco.14 From that date
on, the Ottomangovernmentbroughtcultivation,processing, and sale of tobacco under official control. In 1875, it issued new regulations to ensure tighter control over
the tobacco market.'5In the same year, the governmentdelegated the right to collect
taxes on the sale of tobacco to the Administrationof the Six Revenues, a group of
Istanbul bankers who collected six major revenues in order to pay the outstanding
Ottomanpublic debt.'6In 1883, a tobacco administration(the Regie) was established
under the auspices of a consortiumof several Europeanbanks.
The 1875 regulations,and even more the Regie activity that began in 1884, brought
about majorchanges in the tobacco business. Accordingto Donald Quataert,the Regie
began to supply cultivators with interest-freeloans for up to 50 percent of the estimated value of their crops. In this way, it prevented tobacco merchants and local
landholdersfrom participatingin financing cultivation. As the Regie started its own
manufacturingand selling enterprises, it forced out the already established tobacco
manufacturersand sellers. As a result, approximatelythree hundredtobacco factories
closed. '7
Tobaccomenbegan to arrive in Egypt from Greece and other provinces of the empire in the 1870s, with the majorityimmigratingafter the Regie began operatingin
1884. They choose Egypt for various reasons. Egypt had a large Greek community,
and the newcomers fit easily into the country's Levantine mixture of Ottoman and
Europeancultures. Even more important,in Egypt, tobacco was not under state control, as was the case in other provinces and for certain periods of time in Greece, but
it was conveniently located near majorcenters of tobacco supply.Cairo, the center of
cigarette production,had a hot and dry climate, which was requiredin the processing
of the tobacco leaf.'8
The tobaccomenfound a thrivingeconomy in Egypt, due in large part to the cotton
boom of the 1860s, the rapid expansion of cotton cultivation, and the buildup of an
infrastructureto supportcotton exports. The economic prosperityof the country,coupled with the establishmentof large foreign communitiesand a class of affluent Egyptians, createda growing demandfor high-qualityconsumer goods. In fact, Egypt was
an ideal place for aspiring businessmen and entrepreneursof all sorts who flocked to
the country from the Ottomanprovinces and from Europe. Inevitably,emerging businesses such as the tobacco industry soon developed to meet these new consumer
needs.
Selling Luxury 55
Well-integratedinto the world economy via internationaltrade routes, Egypt was
an ideal place to startan export-orientedbusiness, as the cigaretteindustrysoon would
be. The Egyptian cigarette industry soon became the best-known industry in the region, and cigarettes made of Eastern tobacco-tobacco cultivated in the Ottoman
Empire, Greece, and the Balkans-would be associated globally with the Egyptian
cigarette. As tourism to Egypt grew, the tobaccomen reached a larger clientele and
enjoyed free advertisingof their productsabroad.
Shortly after their arrival,the immigranttobaccomenreshapedthe Egyptiantobacco
market to their own economic advantage.The first step in reshapingthis market occurred when the tobaccomen came to dominate tobacco imports, despite the established commerce in this lucrativeitem. Of major significance in this process was the
shift in the sources of imported tobacco, as a result of the OttomanRegie's decision
to transfertobacco cultivationfrom the Sham provinces, which traditionallyprovided
Egypt with tobacco, to Anatolia and the Europeanparts of the empire.'9This led to a
decrease in trade in tobacco from Syria and Lebanon. Further,the change in cultivation areas gave the arrivingtobaccomen an advantagein using existing networks in
these new centers of tobacco. Thus, it was the regulations of the Regie, which had
pushed many tobaccomen to emigrate from the empire, that helped them to re-establish themselves in Egypt.
Until 1884, only tobacco from the OttomanEmpire could be imported legally into
Egypt. The opening of the Egyptian marketto Greek tobacco occurred after the signing of a Greco-Egyptiancommercialtreatyin March 1884, which provided means for
the Egyptian governmentto control tradein tobacco and prohibithashish by allowing
it to search Greek stores in Egypt for illegal commerce in these commodities.20 This
was very importantfor the Egyptian government,because the smuggling of tobacco
from Greece had crippled taxation. Further,Greece was a major supplier of hashish,
and the treaty enabled the Egyptian government to enforce control of smuggling in
ways that had been prohibitedby capitulations.Soon after the signing of the agreement, Greece became a majorexporterof tobacco to Egypt.21 The access of newcomer
Greek tobaccomen to high-qualityimports further improved their position in relation
to that of local tobacco merchants.
The 1890 ban on local cultivationand the establishmentof a new tobacco-revenue
system, however, constituted the more significant change in the Egyptian tobacco
marketand enabled the newcomers to control the trade. The growing financial needs
of the Egyptian state under Khedive Ismail led to a change in the tobacco-revenue
system, and in 1857, the Egyptian governmenttaxed tobacco cultivation for the first
time.22The lobby of Greek tobacco importers,together with the Greek consul, further
pushed the state into establishing a new revenue system. In 1878, a group of Greek
tobacco importerspetitioned the Egyptian government to adjust taxation, stipulating
that the current tax on local tobacco was too low and would destroy commerce in
imported tobacco. The merchantsargued that this endangeredthe financial interests
of the state, because tax revenues on imported tobacco would decline. The petition
was effective, and in March 1879, the Egyptiangovernmentincreasedthe tax, required
growers to obtain special permission to cultivate tobacco, and imposed high monetary
penalties on illegally grown tobacco.23
At the same time, the group of importers also cooperated with the Greek govern-
56 Relli Shechter
ment, which was trying to open Egypt to the import of Greek tobacco. After signing
the 1884 trade treaty,the Greek governmenttried to persuadethe Egyptian government to limit tobacco cultivation in Egypt. The Greek consul general, M. Byzantios,
reportedseveral conversationshe held on this topic with EgyptianMinisterof Finance
Nubar Pasha and the British financial adviser, Edgar Vincent, between 1887 and
1889.24The Greek consul lobbied for limitation of the area in which tobacco was
cultivated as a first step toward bringing about a total ban on cultivation.Supporting
the consul were two prominentGreektobacco merchants,Simeonidis and Papathanassopoulo, who submittedpetitions to the Egyptian governmentdemonstratingthe economic benefits of banning local cultivation.
In 1888, these goals were realized in an agreement signed by the Egyptian and
Greek governments,by which the Greek governmentapprovedan increase in customs
on Greek tobacco imported into Egypt; in return,the Egyptian government limited
the cultivationof tobacco in Egypt to 1,500 feddans per year.25The effect on cultivation was immediate. In 1889-90, the khedivial Ministry of Finance approved only
1,286 feddans of the 6,280 feddans for which it had received requests for tobacco
cultivation.26On 25 June 1890, the Egyptian government banned the cultivation of
tobacco in Egypt entirely.27In the new Egyptiantobacco marketthat developed, immigrant tobaccomen dominated imports so completely that established local tobacco
merchantslost most of their businesses after 1890.
Two days before the introductionof the new ban, Riad Pasha, the minister of finance, addressedan official report to Khedive Tawfiq in which he explained the reasons for introducingit.28He argued that locally grown tobacco reduced the government's revenues from customs on imports, and that an increase in tax on cultivation
of local tobacco had led to clandestine cultivation of tobacco and further stimulated
the illegal cultivationof hashish, which growers cultivatedin the same areas. Finally,
the governmentwanted to avoid speculationon the price of local tobacco-which the
fluctuation in taxationrates on local tobacco had created-by completely dispensing
with local cultivation.
What Riad Pasha did not admit, however, was that the Egyptian government enacted a total ban because doing so was less complicated and less expensive than
controlling local cultivation.The ban was also part of a broaderreorganizationof the
Egyptian tobacco market, which the government fashioned after the British model.
Accordingly, the Egyptian governmentintroducedtaxes on imported tobaccos while
This broughta
reinforcingthe existing monopoly on imports of cigars and tumbak.29
in
increase
custom
revenues
on
tobacco
from
441,443
rapid
imported
Egyptianpounds
in 1889 to 727,788 Egyptian pounds in 1890.30 From 1890 to 1913, tariffs on tobacco
were as profitableto the state as the duties on all the othercommodities importedinto
Egypt combined. After 1895, tobacco constituted about 10 percent of the total revenues of the Egyptiangovernment."3 The new tobacco-revenuesystem was also partof
a wider governmentpolicy concerning taxation. According to this policy, the government did not raise direct taxes, and in some cases even reducedthem. Instead,it relied
on an increase in indirecttaxes and duties to answer its financial needs.32
PRODUCING
HIGH-QUALITY
CIGARETTES
The arrival of the Greek tobaccomen in Egypt and the change that they were able to
bring to commerce in tobacco were the first steps towardestablishing a new cigarette
Selling Luxury 57
industry in Egypt. Because Egypt did not have a state monopoly on tobacco or any
other restriction on its manufacture,immigrant tobaccomen who ran tobacco shops
could expand into cigarettemanufacturing,without any official constraints,as demand
increased.Because the productionof handmadecigarettes did not requirelarge initial
capital and was done in a small workshop,productionbegan gradually.The combination of the low capital investment and the relatively small risk involved in initial
manufacturingmade cigarette production ideal for small entrepreneurs.In fact, the
development of the cigarette industry provides a good illustration of how artisans
turnedinto industrialistswhen opportunitycame their way.
Owners of tobacco stores first produced "made-to-order"cigarettes-that is, they
rolled cigarettes for customers on request and for a fee. This requiredknowledge of
high-qualitytobacco and the blending of different tobaccos and some skill in rolling.
Gradually,this became standardpractice, and the tobaccomen expanded their businesses and began to produce and sell ready-madecigaretteson a regularbasis. Using
revenues generatedfrom tobacco sales, retailers later established small workshops in
their stores in which they usually employed a few workersas cigarette rollers. By the
second half of the 1880s, most businesses had shifted to cigaretteproduction.
The manufacturersof made-to-ordercigarettes were mainly Greeks who had come
to Egypt in the early years of tobacco activity.As the biographiesof the leading Greek
manufacturersshow, most had arrivedin Egypt before the large wave of immigration
of tobaccomen after 1883.33 These entrepreneursenjoyed the advantageof being first
in the field, and when most immigranttobaccomen arrivedin Egypt, their established
businesses quickly absorbedthese workers.
The rapid growth of business after 1884 led manufacturersto enlarge their production facilities, first by moving from simple workshops, often merely a room adjacent
to the tobacco store, to larger locations separate from the retailing facilities. These
factories were often located in residentialbuildings or palaces, which manufacturers
refurbishedto fit their new purpose. When Nestor Gianaclis,the founderof the Egyptian cigarette industry,arrivedin Egypt in 1864, he opened a tobacco store in Suez,34
where he re-establishedhimself as a retailerand sold cut tobacco in boxes and rolling
paper to cater to the new demand for cigarettes. To further enlarge the production
facilities for ready-madecigarettes,he moved his factory to a palace in Midan Ismailia
built in 1871 by KhairyPasha, ministerof educationunderIsmail.35 Additionalprofits
provided an impetus to enlarge productionand expand the factory.In 1907, Gianaclis
moved to a bigger factory. He rented the building of his old factory to the newly
opened Egyptian University (now the American University in Cairo), which still uses
it. The new factory was also a renovated palace, to which Gianaclis added a large
new wing.
The new factories were designed for cigarette productionwith separatespaces for
the different departmentsof the business. They were self-sufficient at all levels of
production. For this purpose, manufacturersexpanded into the cutting of cigarette
paper and preparingof packages, previously provided by contractorsoutside the factory.The factories of the main producerswere large, employing several hundredworkers, and had huge productionhalls (see Figure 1).
The cigarette industrythus developed from small made-to-ordermanufacturingto
the large-scale productionof a ready-to-useconsumer good. The development of this
new production system was based on the professionalization of work through the
58 Relli Shechter
FIGURE1.
Twentieth
Rollinghall in the Gianaclisfactory(WrightandCartwright,
CenturyImpressions,
488).
creation of a "rationalized"productionline and standardizationof the products.All
these changes signified a major transitionfrom a more traditionalworkshop production to a factory system. This occurred even before the mechanizationof cigarette
manufacturingtook place after WorldWarI. The outcome was a fully preparedproduct, easy to distributeand more profitableto sell. As a result, manufacturersexperienced rapid growth of their businesses. Although the large manufacturerscontrolled
most of the business, productionwas not limited to factories. In fact, the profitability
of trade broughta proliferationof smaller manufacturers.36These manufacturersproduced cigarettes in their stores-turned-workshopsand even at home, where they enlisted the help of family members.
MARKETING
CIGARETTES
ABROAD
Although local demand inspired the early developmentof a luxury cigarette industry
in Egypt, it was demand from abroadthat played a key role in the rapid growth of
the industry.In the periodbefore WorldWarI, with the exception of textiles, cigarettes
were the only significantmanufacturedcommoditythat Egypt exported.37 Demand for
cigarettes startedto develop in Europe, Britain, and the United States in the 1880s,38
at the time that the Egyptiancigaretteindustrywas rapidlygrowing. In the globalizing
world economy before WorldWar I, it was easy for manufacturersof Egyptian cigarettesto export their goods. Moreover,Egypt was convenientlylocated on majorinternationaltradingroutes.
Exports of cigarettesstartedin a casual mannerwhen travelers,soldiers, and diplomats in Egypt spreadthe word about this new Egyptianattraction.In 1882, Gianaclis
Selling Luxury 59
received a boost to his export sales from a group of British army officers who enjoyed
his cigarettes at an official dinner party.39Lord Kitchener also helped to popularize
Melachrino'scigarettes after he first smoked them in Cairo.40The development of the
tourist industrynot only increasedthe sales of the cigarettes locally; it also promoted
them in world marketsas touristsreturnedhome with Egyptian cigarettes.
Cigaretteproducerswere quick to capitalize on these initial opportunitiesand became highly skilled in promoting sales abroad.Manufacturersregularly participated
in internationalindustrial fairs and won medals for the quality of their cigarettes.
D. Elefthriou'scigarettes won awards at the Athens Exposition of 1888 and the Paris
Exposition of 1900.41Dimitrino won a "Diplome d'honneura l'exposition universelle
de Liege" in 1905, a "M6daill6d'or 'al'exposition industriellede Cape-Town 1905,"
and the "GrandPrix a l'exposition internationellede Salonique 1928."'42
Egyptian exporters also promoted sales through local distributorsand agents in
Europe, European colonies, and the United States. To persuade retailers abroad to
sell their cigarettes, they and their agents advertised in internationaltobacco trade
publicationssuch as Tobaccoand The Tobacco YearBook.
Apart from distributingthroughretailers abroad,Egyptian manufacturersprovided
cigarettes to social clubs all over the world and to internationalnobility. This further
guaranteedname recognition abroad,and manufacturersused the names and banners
of their celebrity customers in their ads and on their cigarette packages. They also
provided cigarettes to the British army and navy and sold their products through
nationaltobacco monopolies in importingcountries.Thus, by the time other manufacturersof Easterntobacco cigarettesin the OttomanEmpire and Greece responded,the
Egyptian cigarette industry was already enjoying wide global demand. Because the
cigarettewas a new commodity worldwide, manufacturersexperiencedlittle competition abroad.Until the establishmentof such competition, manufacturersin Egypt did
not encounterprotectivetariffs in importing countries.
In 1903, the Egyptian government finally acknowledged the contributionof cigarettes to Egyptian exports and added a special cigarette section to its foreign commerce annualreports.Table 1 illustratesthe main trends in exports between 1903 and
1914. Germanywas the biggest importerof Egyptian cigarettes. Although imports to
Germany dropped sharply after 1905 as a result of new tariff barriers, until 1914
Germanycontinued to be a very significant importer.
British soldiers had already learned to smoke cigarettes during the Crimean War,
when a shortage of tobacco rations led them to adopt the Ottomanand Russian habit
of smoking Easterntobacco rolled in paper.44Cigarettes made from Eastern tobacco
were among the first cigarettesproducedin Britain, after veterans of the war brought
this new fashion home. A veteran of the war was also credited as being the first
producer of cigarettes made from tobacco originating in Latakia (Syria). By early
1884, Britain'swell-established tobacco industryhad introducedmachine-madecigarettes.44Moreover,British consumers preferredto smoke Virginia tobaccos, and as a
result Egyptian cigarettes captureda relatively small segment of this market.45
Colonies in the Far East, especially India, were the third-largestmarketfor Egyptian
cigarettes. In fact, the earliest mention of cigarette imports to India was of cigarettes
made by Vafiadis, a Greek manufacturerin Egypt.46Egypt lay on the main trading
route to the East via the Suez Canal, and manufacturerscould easily export their
60
Relli Shechter
TABLE
1
Export of cigarettes in kilograms from Egypt to different countries
in 1903, 1905, 1906, 1909, 1911, 1913, and 1914
1903
England
1905
1906
1909
1911
1913
1914
90,533
86,581
79,276
76,280
73,952
63,001
Britishpossessions
in the FarEast
97,770 74,364
243,798 368,645
Germany
33,597 50,998
Austria-Hungary
Chinaandthe FarEast
15,698 25,054
France
16,457 22,718
73,681
266,458
46,769
21,937
19,895
55,169 60,758 52,101"
108,223 100,778 109,985
51,245 63,737 57,385
29,146
33,979 47,613"
31,832 24,268 26,947
Sweden/Norway
13,882
12,900c
20,750'
46,519
81,842
28,883
All others
40,551
70,501
74,726
73,822
67,230
96,850
Total
531,199
702,813
590,047
457,232
508,872
493,716
46,205
48,939
32,597
45,199
20,645
30,211
83,995
370,792
aBeginningin 1913, the category "Britishpossessions in the Far East"was divided into two subcategories:"BritishIndia"
and"OtherBritishpossessionsin theFarEast."Thisfigurerepresents
thesumof thesetwo subcategories.
bBeginning in 1913, the category "Chinaand the Far East" was divided into two subcategories:"China"and "OtherFar
East states."This figure representsthe sum of these two subcategories.
'The figure representsonly Sweden in 1905 and 1906.
Source: Direction G6n6ral des Dovanes, Le commerce extirieur de I'Egypte (Cairo, various years).
cigarettes. Passengers on their way to the Far East helped increase sales on arrival.
Another significant importerof Egyptian cigaretteswas the HapsburgEmpire.
The cigarettefound its way to North America from Britain,and American smokers
graduallyacquireda taste for Easterntobacco cigarettes.47Although the United States
was never a large importer,Egyptianand Turkishcigarettes (both manufacturedfrom
Eastern tobacco) had a lasting impact on the productionof cigarettes in the United
States and, via American industry,on world production.In 1889, S. Anagyros began
to export the brandEgyptian Deities from Egypt to the United States.48Nestor Gianaclis was perhapsthe first Egyptianmanufacturerto export cigarettesactively to the
United States, and his Nestor cigarette was later branded"the original Egyptian."49
In
the early 20th century,when he realized that exports from Egypt could not adequately
supply the growing local demand, he opened a factory in Boston. Gianaclis later
moved his establishmentto New York, near to anothermajor Egyptianmanufacturer,
Melachrino, who had opened his branchthere in 1904.5"
Because the industry in the United States was initially developed by Armenian,
Greek, and Turkishimmigrantsfrom the OttomanEmpire, Greece, and Egypt,"5handmade Easterntobacco brandsmaintainedtheir reputationand continuedto enjoy popularity among consumers, even after James Duke began to sell cheaper brandsmade
from U.S. tobaccos when he introducedthe Bonsack cigarette-makingmachine in the
early 1880s. This was because "therewas a touch of high fashion about the foreign
In fact, as late as 1903, Easternbrandsconstitutedabout 25 percent of the
brands."52
national U.S. market."5
Duke's American Tobacco Company (ATC), a conglomerate that came to control
most U.S. cigarette production,initially engaged in an advertisingcampaign against
Eastern brands.54When its campaign failed, the company took over major Eastern
tobacco manufacturersin the United States, such as S. Anagyros.55It later manufac-
Selling Luxury 61
turedcigarettesmade from a blend of Easternand Americantobaccos to compete with
the Easterntobacco fashion.56Once undertakenby the ATC, blending became a standard feature in the production of American cigarettes. The U.S. industry began to
depend on supplies of Easterntobacco leaves, and imports from the Balkans, Greece,
and Turkeygrew rapidly.57
In 1913, R. J. Reynolds, one of the companies created after ATC broke up, introduced the first brandsold nationwide."The company named its cigarette Camel and
printedthe Pyramids,palm trees, and Islamic architectureon the cigarette packages
to associate it with the renowned Egyptian cigarette (see Figure 2). Although the
reputationof the Egyptian cigarette has long since disappeared,Camel stays a reminder of its past glory.
During the 1900s, growing competitionand increasedimport tariffs abroad,as well
as the refusal of the Egyptian governmentto take steps to supportthe industry,had a
negative effect on cigarette exports. This was especially the case as the handmade
Egyptian cigarette remained an expensive product, while manufacturersabroad cut
costs by using cigarette-makingmachines. Because productionof luxury cigarettes
was essentially different from serving most Egyptians with economy cigarettes and
cheap tobacco products,manufacturersof high-qualitycigarettes were unable simply
to transformtheir businesses from export to local marketproduction.Manufacturers
furthersuffereda decrease in exports in the early years of WorldWarI, when exports
to Germanyand the HapsburgEmpire stopped completely. In the period after World
War I, further decreases in sales abroad,as well as mechanizationof productionin
Egypt, broughtthe demise of this unique industry.
SELLING
LUXURY
CIGARETTES
IN EGYPT
Togetherwith marketingcigarettesabroad,cigarettemanufacturersdeveloped the marketing of cigarettes in Egypt. Their experience illustrates the development of high-
FIGURE
2. Camel cigarettepackage (ChrisMullen, The CigarettePack Art [New York: St. Martin'sPress,
1979], 50).
62 Relli Shechter
end modern retailing in Egypt. Manufacturersopened new stores in the big cities'
Cairo was the main center of the trade, and most
newly built "European"quarters.59
of
retailing
high-quality cigarettes was located in the Muski and especially in or
aroundEzbekiya.All majormanufacturersand many smallerproducersopened outlets
on Kamil Street, the main street that crossed Ezbekiya from north to south (Figures 3
and 4). Shepheard'shotel, which was located on this street and served as the center
of social life for Egyptian high society, was particularlytargeted. Thus, Gianaclis
and Melachrinohad stores in the Halim building beside Shepheard's.Mantazarisand
Company,Dimitrino,and Cortesi opened stores opposite the hotel.60 Otherstores were
situated near the Continental and Savoy hotels and on the streets surroundingthe
Ezbekiya Gardens,Place de l'Op6ra, and 'AbdinPalace.
The new tobacco stores were highly visible in this urban landscape because the
shops often were clustered together.In September 1899, one observer noted that, "if
you go in the streets of Cairo ..., you see more tobacco stores than other stores for
the sale of different products."6'Although this may be exaggerated, by 1906 Cairo
alone had fifty-five to sixty cigarettefactories,62each with its own outlets. Cairo also
had a large number of smaller workshops that sold their own products. Retailing of
cigarettes was not limited to the two major cities, Cairo and Alexandria. The big
FIGURE
3. Kamil Street (Wrightand Cartwright,TwentiethCenturyImpressions,340).
FIGURE 4.
Salonica and Cortesi shops on Kamil Street(Wrightand Cartwright,TwentiethCenturyImpressions, 493-94).
64 Relli
Relli Shechter
Shechter
manufacturers
and tourist
tourist sites
manufacturers also
also opened
branches in cities
cities and
sites throughout
Thus,
opened branches
throughout Egypt.
Egypt. Thus,
in
"retail
rooms"
Cairo,
Alexandria, Port-Said,
Port-Said, Suez,
Suez,
Ltd., kept
Cairo, Alexandria,
Engelhardt, Ltd.,
Leopold
Leopold Engelhardt,
kept "retail rooms"
for
and Aswan;
the company's
tobacco products
were also
also for
Tanta,
Tanta, Zagazig,
Luxor, and
Aswan; the
Zagazig, Luxor,
company's tobacco
products were
sale
and
sale in Fayoum,
Beni Souef,
Wadi Khalifa,
Souef, Assiout,
Khalifa, and
Wasta, Beni
Assiout, Keneh,
Keneh, Kom-Ombo,
Kom-Ombo, Wadi
Fayoum, Wasta,
Khartoum.63
Khartoum.63
some manufacturers
manufacturershad
role
had agents
the country,
the role
different parts
Although some
agents in different
country,the
Although
parts of the
of independent
distributors
in
the
sale
of
was
and
each
the sale
limited, and each
independent distributors
high-quality
high-quality cigarettes
cigarettes was limited,
manufacturer
his
was closely
the wholesaling
well as the
the retailing
manufacturer was
involved in the
closely involved
wholesaling as well
retailing of his
This
continued
even
after
manufacturers
brands.
brands. This practice
practice continued even after manufacturers developed
developed large
large production
production
facilities
outfacilities and
and greatly
their outincreased outputs.
manufacturers named
named their
outputs. Accordingly,
greatly increased
Accordingly, manufacturers
lets
after
the
which
was
more
often
than
not
their
own
name.
When
lets after the factory,
factory, which was more often than not their own family
family name. When
the
then added
their cigarettes,
used the
the factory's
name first,
added the
first, then
factory's name
they
they promoted
promoted their
cigarettes, they
they used
brand
name
the
As
as
also
controlled
of
manufacturers
their
the cigarette.
manufacturers also controlled their
specific brand name
long
specific
cigarette. As long
was their
their name
name rather
rather than
than the
the cigarette's
brand name
name that
that the
the public
distribution,
distribution, it was
cigarette's brand
public
learned
to
learned
recognize.
recognize.
The
The new
new tobacco
not only
the modern,
modern, "European"
tobacco stores
stores were
were not
situated in the
"European"parts
only situated
parts of
also
offered
consumers
a
new
the
the
new shopping
the cities;
cities; they
they also offered consumers
shopping experience
experience by adopting
adopting the
and
retail
of
The
new
stores
lured
consumers
with their
their
faqades
practices
Europe.
Europe. The new stores lured consumers with
faqades and retail practices
attractive
from
attractive windows.
windows. Further,
the store,
the customers
customers were
were separated
Further, on entering
store, the
entering the
separated from
and
their
on
the
outside
these
attention
was
focused
the
and
their
the outside by
attention was focused
the commodities
commodities
barriers,
by these glass
glass barriers,
the store.
store. These
were branded
These commodities
commodities were
branded and
and packaged
than
rather than
packaged rather
presented in the
presented
sold
The little
sold in bulk.
bulk. The
little information
information that
that we have
have on the
the interiors
interiors of the
the shops
shops suggests
suggests
were lavishly
customers further.
further. In
In 1933,
an article
that they
decoratedto attract
attractcustomers
article in
that
1933, an
they were
lavishly decorated
The
in
the
described
the
Gianaclis
store
The
the Greek
Greek magazine
described
the
Gianaclis
store as
Sphinx,published
magazine
Sphinx,
Egypt,
published
Egypt,
"marvelous
decor."64
for its Arabian-style
"marvelous for
decor."64
Arabian-style
For
these exclusive
stores were
and socialize.
For consumers,
exclusive stores
were a place
socialize. Shoppers
consumers, these
shop and
place to shop
Shoppers
of
visited
the
and
the
various brands,
visited several
several different
different stores,
the
and
the various
brands,
stores, compared
quality
price
compared
quality
price
and
from
the cigarettes
their choice.
choice. While
While shopping
received service
service from
and bought
shopping they
bought the
cigarettes of their
they received
different
The
who
several
different
The
who
several
knowledgeable salespeople,
cigarette
knowledgeable
cigarette
salespeople,
spoke
spoke
languages.
languages.
stores
Their location
location
stores were
were also
also a gathering
where people
met in order
order to smoke.6'
smoke.6'" Their
gathering place
place where
people met
more fashionable
fashionable districts
districts of the
the cities,
near
other
such
as
coffee
the more
in the
near
other
such
as
coffee
highlights
highlights
cities,
further
with
other
modes
of sohouses
and big
further
with
other
modes
sohouses and
hotels,
integrated
big hotels,
integrated cigarette
cigarette shopping
shopping
and leisure.
leisure.
cialization and
cialization
The
The location
location of the
the stores
stores and
and the
the marketing
that retailers
retailers employed
marketing practices
employed
practices that
the
of
the
consumers:
affluent
the
the
consumers:
affluent
clearly
clearly suggest
suggest
identity
identity
targeted
targeted
Egyptians,
Egyptians, foreign
foreign
and tourists.
fashionable quarters;
tourists. These
These crowds
crowds frequented
residents,
residents, and
traveled,
frequented fashionable
they traveled,
quarters; they
and
Anmost important,
afford the
the expensive
were able
able to afford
and most
important, they
expensive Egyptian
they were
Egyptian cigarettes.
cigarettes. Anto
other testimony
the
exclusiveness
of
the
were
the
to
other
the
exclusiveness
of
the
were
the
themselves,
packages themselves,
testimony
cigarettes
packages
cigarettes
which
carried slogans
French rather
rather than
than Arabic.
Arabic.
which carried
slogans in English
English or French
stores were
were highly
selection of brands.
and offered
offered aa wide
wide selection
brands. In
Cigarette
highly specialized
Cigarette stores
specialized and
of
one
of
inlist
Dimitrino
and
the
one
the price
list
Dimitrino
and
the
1915,
manufacturers,
1915, the
manufacturers,
price
Company,
Company,
bigger
bigger
of
was
distindifferent
brands
Each
brand
cluded
was
distindifferent
brands
Each
brand
cluded fifty-five
5).
(see
cigarettes
cigarettes (see Figure
fifty-five
Figure
guished
guished by
by the
the quality
quality of
of the
the tobacco
tobacco blend,
blend, the
the size
size of
of the
the cigarette,
cigarette, the
the type
type of
of paper,
paper,
cardboard
and
the
type
of
filter
(called
tip)
used.
Retail
stores
also
sold
cigarettes
in
and the type of filter (called tip) used. Retail stores also sold cigarettes in cardboard
and
and tin
tin boxes
boxes and
and in
in different
different quantities--ten,
twenty, fifty,
fifty, or
or one
one hundred
hundred cigacigaquantities--ten, twenty,
rettes.66
rettes.66
FormintI
!Vu"-sim
'iks des
des Formats
Fac-similks
45
o
513
Z5S9
49t
49
ssoEO
48
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47
47
46
46
45
S3
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9
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s
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Price list of Dimitrino and Company, 1915. CourtesyRobert J. Baxter.
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42%
6
1915.
from 1915.5.
List from
Price
Price List
Prixofouront.
Prix-Courant.
12EI
4
64
4
66 Relli
Relli Shechter
Shechter
Prices
Prices of cigarettes
varied to the
the same
same extent
extent as their
their quality.
Dimitrino's price
cigarettes varied
quality. In Dimitrino's
price
the
most
were
the cheapest
about six times
times as costly
ones.
list,
list, the most expensive
cigarettes were about
expensive cigarettes
costly as the
cheapest ones.
Because
were exported,
one should
Because most
most cigarettes
should compare
their prices
with the
the price
prices with
cigarettes were
exported, one
compare their
price
of cigarettes
in
to
which
In
a
were
which they
the
1915, Wills,
Wills, the
country
country
September
cigarettes
they were exported.
exported.
September 1915,
manufacturer in England,
for 5d,
sold its Woodbine
Woodbine cigarettes
5d, Capstan
largest
England, sold
largest cigarette
cigarette manufacturer
Capstan
cigarettes for
for
for 7.5d,
Flake for
for 8d (retail
and Gold
Gold Flake
for a package
that time,
7.5d, and
time,
(retail prices
prices for
package of twenty).67
twenty).67 At that
Dimitrino's
for
sold
19/3d
Dimitrino's cheapest
brand, Lou,
Lou, sold for 19/3d (wholesale
1,000 cigarettes
(wholesale price
cheapest brand,
price per
per 1,000
cigarettes
sold
sold in Cairo)
about 5d
5d per
This means
means that
that Dimitrino's
Dimitrino's cheapest
Cairo) or about
per twenty.
twenty. This
cigarettes
cheapest cigarettes
were
in
the
same
as
Wills's
when
brands
were
the same price
Wills's brands when a retailer
them in Cairo.
retailer bought
Cairo.
price range
range
bought them
half of Dimitrino's
Dimitrino's cigarettes
However,
about half
cost 2 British
British pounds
and
However, about
more, and
cigarettes cost
pounds or more,
Dimitrino's
Dimitrino's Famosa
Famosa (tres
cost 6 pounds.
more
were significantly
Thus, they
grand) cost
pounds. Thus,
they were
significantly more
(trbs grand)
Wills's brands,
than Wills's
the fact
fact that
still
that these
these cigarettes
brands, especially
expensive
expensive than
especially considering
considering the
cigarettes still
had
to
be
where
faced
and
substantial
had
then distribdistribabroad, where they
tariffs, and then
they faced substantial import
shipped
shipped abroad,
import tariffs,
uted
uted to retailers.
retailers.
CIGARETTE
ADVERTISING
Much
Much like
like retailing,
reflected the
the state
state of promoting
cigarette advertising
retailing, cigarette
goods in
advertising reflected
promoting goods
the
under
discussion.
Before
the
end
of
War
and
World
much
World War I, and much
Egypt
Egypt during
during the period
period under discussion. Before the end
like
other
of
in
the
Arabic
like other commodities,
the Arabic press
was limited.
limited.
commodities, advertising
advertising
cigarettes
cigarettes
press was
There
There was
was a large
between the
and smokers
the educated
educated Egyptian
class and
smokers
large degree
degree of overlap
overlap between
Egyptian class
of handmade
and
al-Ahram
as
well
as
were
which
handmade cigarettes,
well
cigarettes, and al-Ahram
al-Muqattam,
al-Muqattam, which were among
among
the
the leading
the period,
carried cigarette
advertisements aimed
aimed at these
these
leading publications
period, carried
cigarette advertisements
publications of the
this group
was still
still
However, this
Egyptians.
group of readers-consumers,
Egyptians. However,
readers-consumers, although
although growing,
growing, was
most consumers
consumers lived
lived in cities
cities where
where they
were already
Moreover, most
very
very small.68
already exsmall." Moreover,
they were
exestablishments. Manufacturers
retail establishments.
Manufacturers therefore
therefore lacked
incenlacked a major
posed
posed to cigarette
cigarette retail
major incentive
tive to advertise
advertise in the
the Arabic
Arabic press-advertising
would not
not extend
the circle
circle of conconextend the
press-advertising would
sumers
those
within
the
reach
of
the
outlets
sumers beyond
themselves.
beyond those already
already within the reach of the cigarette
cigarette outlets themselves.
Further,
established clientele
clientele would
not significantly
would not
Further, repeated
advertising to an established
significantly inrepeated advertising
brand
This
crease
sales
or
create
was
true
because
brand
This
crease sales
create
was especially
loyalty.
loyalty.
early advertising
advertising
especially true because early
did not
not contain
contain graphic
which would
would have
have intensified
intensified their
their messages.
usually
usually did
graphic images,
images, which
messages.
new producers
and small
small retailers
retailers to gain
initial
Cigarette
advertising mainly
Cigarette advertising
mainly helped
helped new
producers and
gain initial
manufacturers
used
the
to
with
media
communicate
manufacturers
used
the
with
media
communicate
recognition.
recognition. Large
occasionally
Large
occasionally
an established
of consumers.
establishedcircle
Armenianmanufacturers,
circle of
consumers. Advertisements
Advertisements by Armenian
who
manufacturers, who
of
controlled production
in
the
Arab
that
of
controlled
in
the
Arab
that
brands,
production cheaper
cheaper brands, suggest
press
suggest
press
advertising
advertising
consumers. Gamsaragan's
more modest
modest consumers.
for example,
targeted
targeted more
factory, for
published an
Gamsaragan's factory,
example, published
advertisementin al-Muqattam
readersthat,
to avoid
avoid further
furthercounterfeits,
advertisement
the
that, to
counterfeits, the
al-Muqattam informing
informingreaders
had
the
on
the
of
the
famous
had
the
the
the
famous
cigarette.69
Abu-Najma cigarette.69
factory
factory
changed
image
package
Abu-Najma
changed
image
package
Matossian
Matossian published
official price
lists of tobacco
tobacco blends
blends and
and cigarettes.7"
published official
price lists
Because
was largely
Because cigarette
oriented toward
toward foreigners
and
largely oriented
cigarette production
production was
Egypt and
foreigners in Egypt
manufacturers
were
more
keen
on
in
manufacturers
were
more
keen
abroad,
media,
abroad,
advertising
advertising
foreign-language
foreign-language media,
which
non-Egyptians as
to a large
which catered
catered to
to non-Egyptians
as well
well as
as to
large segment
segment of
of the
the Egyptian
Egyptian elite.
elite.
This
was
especially
the
case
for
producers
trying
to
capture
the
lucrative
This was especially the case for producers trying to capture the lucrative tourist
tourist marmarket,
ket, where
where name
name recognition
recognition was
was extremely
extremely important
important in
in competing
competing for
for customers.
customers.
Still,
Still, advertising
advertising was
was limited
limited even
even in
in the
the foreign
foreign press.
press. The
The Egyptian
Egyptian Gazette,
Gazette, for
for
example,
carried
few
cigarette
advertisements,
and
although
their
numbers
example, carried few cigarette advertisements, and although their numbers grew
grew in
in
Selling
Selling Luxury
Luxury 67
the
World War
War I, they
never occupied
Manufacturers
the years
before World
years before
they never
occupied significant
significant space.7'
space.7"Manufacturers
in
travel
and
books
that
catered
to
advertised
the
travel guides
business community.
advertised
the foreign
community.
guides and books that catered
foreign business
about their
their
also used
used more
more covert
covert forms
forms of advertising
information about
They
They also
advertising by supplying
supplying information
to
of
books
on
operations
operations
publishers
publishers books on contemporary
contemporaryEgypt.72
Egypt.72
On-site
With their
their central
central
was more
more popular
than press
On-site advertising
advertising was
popular than
press advertising.
advertising. With
window
and
stores
themselves
were a
location,
cases, and large
location, flashy
flashy window cases,
large signs,
cigarette stores themselves were
signs, cigarette
crowds that
constant
advertisement for
for the
the crowds
that passed
Manufacturers also
also used
used many
constant advertisement
passed by.
many
by. Manufacturers
in
means
other
devices
that
were
tune
with
international
other advertising
tune with international means of promoting
advertising devices that were
promoting
20th century,
the first
first quarter
the 20th
cigarettes.
cigarettes. During
During the
quarter of the
century, twenty-seven
twenty-seven companies
companies in
series
of
cards-small
circulated
130
different
pictures or
Egypt
Egypt circulated 130 different series
cigarette
cigarette cards-small
printed
printed pictures
The
that
manufacturers
distributed
inside
cigarette packages.73
purpose
photographs
photographs that manufacturers distributed inside cigarette
packages.73 The purpose
of the
same brand
brand in order
order
the cards
cards was
was to induce
induce smokers
smokers to continue
continue to purchase
the same
purchase the
to collect
The majority
these cards
cards were
were pictures
women in
collect the
the entire
entire series.
series. The
majority of these
pictures of women
This indicates
indicates that
that manufacturers
manufacturers addressed
addressed
(see Figure
6). This
Figure 6).
sexually
sexually suggestive
suggestive poses
poses (see
FIGURE
FIGURE6.
Cigarettecardsdistributedby Ch. Cassimis and Dimitrino(Haritatosand Giakoumakis,History,
98-99).
68 Relli
Relli Shechter
Shechter
their
their advertising
male consumers.
consumers. Other
Other cards
cards depicted
advertising campaigns
campaigns predominantly
predominantly to male
depicted
well as famous
famous actors
actors and
and actresses.
actresses.
landscapes as well
Egyptian
Egyptian landscapes
Manufacturers
Manufacturers also
also attracted
attracted the
the attention
attention of tourists
tourists and
and potential
customers abroad
abroad
potential customers
free
which
consumers
could
send
to
and friends,
friends,
by distributing
distributingfree postcards,
postcards, which consumers could send
family
family and
further
further spreading
the manufacturers'
manufacturers' names
names abroad.
abroad. These
These postcards
included
spreading the
postcards usually
usually included
the
name
of
the
manufacturer
as
well
as
illustrations
of
the
the name
the manufacturer
well
illustrations
the cigarette
outlet
factory or outlet
cigarette factory
addition to postcards,
manufacturers distributed
distributed small
small gifts
cus(see
(see Figure
Figure 7). In addition
postcards, manufacturers
gifts to customers.
tomers. One
DecoOne such
such gift
was a diary,
which Nestor
Nestor Gianaclis
Gianaclis distributed
distributed in 1912.
1912. Decogift was
diary, which
rated
rated price
lists also
also served
served to promote
the fact
fact that
that manufacturers
manufacturers
sales, although
price lists
promote sales,
although the
one
that
lists
their
brands
thousand
these
catered mostly
priced
cigarettes suggests
priced their brands per
per one thousand cigarettes
suggests that these lists catered
mostly
to wholesalers
wholesalers or retailers,
not to individual
individual consumers.
consumers.
retailers, not
Of major
was the
the fact
fact that
that manufacturers
manufacturers packmajor significance
significance in advertising
advertising cigarettes
cigarettes was
packtheir
the
to
the cigarette
helped
cigarette
aged
aged their products.
products. Initially,
Initially, packaging
packaging helped
preserve
preserve the quality
quality of the
and
and enabled
enabled manufacturers
manufacturers to keep
stocks. Another
Another important
influence of packaging
keep stocks.
important influence
packaging
was
the
standardization
of
the
because
it
was the standardization
the cigarette,
size and
and
required
cigarette, because
required uniformity
uniformity in size
of
as
well
as
taste
and
aroma.
also
led
to
the
well
taste and aroma. Packaging
the branding
weight
cigarettes
weight
Packaging also led
branding
cigarettes
because
because it enabled
and
enabled manufacturers
manufacturers to identify
their products
names and
identify their
products by specific
specific names
on
the
carton.
the
mobile
itself
became
a
the carton. Moreover,
advertiseMoreover, the package
images
images printed
printed
package itself became mobile advertisement
ment and
and a constant
constant reminder
reminder to enforce
enforce consumers'
consumers' brand
The package
brand loyalty.
loyalty. The
package
served
in
to
the
brand
the
smoker's
social
environment.
For all these
served
these reasons,
reasons,
promotethe brand the smoker's social environment. For
promote
were very
much aware
aware of the
the importance
and
producers
producers were
very much
well-designed package,
package, and
importance of a well-designed
most
most of the
the bigger
manufacturers developed
section in their
their factories
factories that
that
bigger manufacturers
developed a printing
printing section
used
used advanced
When exported,
the colorful
advanced lithographic
colorful Egyptian
lithographic printing.
printing. When
exported, the
Egyptian packages
packages
stood
from
the
the
Ottoman
stood out
out among
from
the Ottoman Empire,
where manufacturers
manufacturers
among the competition
competition
Empire, where
in monochrome.74
also helped
the Egyptian
monochrome.74 Eye-catching
printed
printed mostly
Eye-catching packaging
packaging also
helped the
Egyptian
mostly in
to
with
and
U.S.
brands.
with
and
U.S. brands.
cigarette
compete
cigarette
compete
European
European
Each
Each cigarette
carried a number
number of slogans,
the name
name of the
the
cigarette package
package carried
slogans, including
including the
the
brand
the
words
or
and
the
brand
the
words
the
manufacturer,
name,
manufacturer,
name,
"Egypt"
"Egyptian,"
praise of the
"Egypt"
"Egyptian," and praise
also carried
the cigarette.75
carried a variety
quality
quality of the
cigarette.75 Packages
Packages also
variety of graphic
graphic images:
images: pictures,
pictures,
This
and
medals.
combination
of linguistic
This
and
medals.
combination
and visual
visual messages
trademarks,
banners,
trademarks, banners,
messages
linguistic and
was
was not
not unique
was the
the staple
Rather, it was
Egyptian cigarette
unique to Egyptian
cigarette packages.
packages. Rather,
staple of modem
modern
of
the
a
that
Thomas
Richards
has
called
the
"a
the
that
Thomas
Richards
has
called
the
advertising
day,
advertising
day, style
style
"spectacle""spectacle"--"a
set of aesthetic
for
of
the
the
most
basic
element
for
aesthetic procedures
the
the
most
basic
element
procedures
magnifying
importance
magnifying
importance
of exchange,
the commodity."76
were probably
the first
first
However, cigarette
exchange, the
cigarette producers
producers were
probably the
commodity."76 However,
in Egypt
to
their
follow
this
and
commodities
were
the
few
their
follow
this
and
commodities
were
the
few
Egypt
practice,
practice,
among
among
Egyptian
Egyptian
that were
were promoted
within and
the country.
deand outside
outside the
goods
goods that
successfully within
promoted successfully
country. Package
Package dein
also
took
their
the
forefront
of
commercial
art.
also
took
their
the
forefront
commercial
art.
signs
signs
place
place
contemporary
contemporary Egyptian
Egyptian
To sell
sell their
their expensive
manufacturers employed
elitist advertising.
The
brands, manufacturers
expensive brands,
advertising. The
employed elitist
their
the
consumer
would
their
the
consumer
would
that,
packages
cigarettes,
join
packages implied
implied that, by purchasing
purchasing
cigarettes,
join an
For
exclusive
this
the
included
banners
and
titles
For
exclusive group.
this
the
included
banners
and
titles
group.
purpose,
purpose,
cigarette
cigarette packages
packages
of their
and
their most
most distinguished
and
distinguished customers-European
customers-European
non-European
non-European nobility-to
nobility-to
whom
whom they
also
Manufacturers also
(see Figure
they provided
provided cigarettes
cigarettes "by
"by appointment"
appointment" (see
Figure 8). Manufacturers
branded
their
cigarettes
after
local
and
international
celebrities.
Dimitrino's
price
branded their cigarettes after local and international celebrities. Dimitrino's price list
list
included
the brands
brands Blum
included the
Blum Pasha,
Pasha, Lord
Lord Cromer,
Cromer, Lord
Lord Rosebery,
Rosebery, Lord
Lord Stanley,
Stanley, and
and
Prinz
Other brands
la Noblesse,
Noblesse, Pour
Heinrich. Other
brands were
were more
more generic:
generic: Pour
Pour la
Pour les
les Princes,
Princes,
Prinz Heinrich.
Baronne,
Duchesse,
Lords,
Royal
Court,
Hanem,
and
Le
Khedive.
One
manufacturer,
Baronne, Duchesse, Lords, Royal Court, Hanem, and Le Khedive. One manufacturer,
Selling
Selling Luxury
Luxury 69
FIGURE
FIGURE7.
Robert J. Baxter.
Baxter.
Simon Artz,
Port Said,
1900. Courtesy
Postcard,
Said, 1900.
Postcard, Simon
Artz, Port
Courtesy Robert
pot
Ta
FIGURE
8.
FIGURE8.
Avis
Avis mage
efts
olsdentAVIe
to
i
::•!:i
Dimitrino
and Giakoumakis,
and Melaclrino
Melachrino cigarette
Giakoumakis, History,
98).
Dimitrino and
(Haritatos and
History, 98).
packages (Haritatos
cigarette packages
Selling
Selling Luxury
Luxury 71
his own
own name,
even called
called his
his factory
and
Kiriacou, playing
name, even
George
George Kiriacou,
playing on his
factory King
King George
George and
received
to
name
one
of
his
after
received royal
name one
royal permission
permission
cigarettes
cigarettes after King
King George
George V.77
V.77
CONCLUSION
CONCLUSION
The
The vertical
vertical approach
this study
the luxury
handmade cigarette
faciliapproach employed
employed in this
study of the
luxury handmade
cigarette facilitated
tated the
the discussion
discussion on
on the
the interaction
interaction among
different players
the market-namely,
among different
players in the
market-namely,
and the
the state.
state. During
this period
economic growth
sellers, buyers,
producers,
producers, sellers,
buyers, and
During this
period of rapid
rapid economic
growth
in Egypt,
was usually
who established
established modem
industries to
Egypt, it was
usually foreign
foreign entrepreneurs
entrepreneurs who
modem industries
cater
cater to
to increased
increased local
local demand
demand for high-quality
the transitransihigh-quality modem
goods. Examining
Examining the
modem goods.
tion
tion from
from workshop
the crucial
crucial role
role that
that the
the colonial
colonial
workshop to factory
factory production
production exposed
exposed the
state
state played
in favoring
arrived tobaccomen
tobaccomen over
established merchants
merchants by
over established
played in
favoring newly
newly arrived
local cultivation
cultivation and
and changing
The discussion
discussion of
banning
banning local
changing tobacco-import
tobacco-import regulations.
regulations. The
this
this export-led
historical perspective
for today's
debates on
export-led industry
industry may
may provide
provide a historical
perspective for
today's debates
economic
in a globalizing
economic development
world by exposing
and exit
exit condicondidevelopment in
globalizing world
exposing past
past entry
entry and
tions
tions to international
international markets.
markets.
Even
Even more
more important,
manufacturers of luxury
were among
the first
first in
important, manufacturers
luxury cigarettes
cigarettes were
among the
and adapt
and advertising
schemes
Egypt
Egypt skillfully
skillfully to adopt
adopt and
adapt contemporary
contemporary retailing
retailing and
advertising schemes
from
from Europe
and the
the United
United States.
Their activities
States. Their
activities testify
wider process
ecoEurope and
testify to a wider
process of economic
than
discussed
nomic integration
which not
not only
the use
use of commodities
commodities
earlier, in which
integration than discussed earlier,
only the
and
and services
but also
services but
also their
their promotion
and selling
became global.
This article,
article,
promotion and
selling practices
practices became
global. This
our
with
therefore,
the political
therefore, complements
political economy
complements our knowledge
knowledge of the
economy of integration
integration with
information
information on the
the practicalities
the impact
and the
the role
role
practicalitiesof marketing,
marketing,the
impact of advertising,
advertising, and
of consumers
consumers in this
this process.
for future
future research,
remains for
examine the
the
research, however,
however, to examine
process. It remains
extent
extent to which
which these
these early
markets influenced
influenced retailing
and
early developments
developments in high-end
high-end markets
retailing and
local mass
mass markets.
markets.
advertising
advertising in local
The
of
the
The history
the Egyptian
one way
which capitalism
develhistory
Egyptian cigarette
cigarette suggests
suggests one
way in which
capitalism develin
but
also
elsewhere. The
The
with, but also separately
from, capitalism
oped
conjunction
oped locally
locally
conjunction with,
separately from,
capitalism elsewhere.
this local
local capitalism
reflected transitions
transitions in the
the market,
manifested in
market, manifested
development
development of this
capitalism reflected
the
the tensions
tensions and
and connections
connections between
between pre-existing
introduced commercial
and newly
commercial
pre-existing and
newly introduced
To
a
it
was
the
colonial
state
that
dictated
was the colonial state that dictated this
this development.
extent,
practices.
practices. To large
large extent,
development.
Thus,
market transformations
transformations in Egypt
were embedded
embedded in Egyptian
and social
social
Thus, market
Egypt were
Egyptian political
political and
life.
at
the
same
market
transformations
did
about
a
life. However,
However, at the same time,
time, market transformations did bring
bring about significant
significant
The presence
increased in
change
change in contemporary
contemporary Egyptian
Egyptian lifestyles.
lifestyles. The
presence of cigarettes
cigarettes increased
new
where
novel
forms
of
and
new spheres
attracted
commodity
spheres where novel forms
commodity representation
representation and advertising
advertising attracted
attention.
new
markets
new
interactions
between consumconsumMoreover, new markets promoted
public
public attention. Moreover,
promoted new interactions between
ers and
and commodities.
commodities. These
These new
new consumption
transformed local
local ways
consumption practices
practices transformed
ways of
and
In
this
markets
and
this sense,
influsense, markets gradually
creating
creating meaning
meaning and identity.
identity.
gradually penetrated
penetrated and influin
enced
in
more
than
the
Future
research
enced society
markets should
should
many
society
many more ways
ways than the past.
past. Future research on markets
contribute
contribute to a better
better understanding
the ways
the interplay
which the
econunderstanding of the
ways in which
interplay among
among econand
culture
the
colonial
and
of
omy,
omy, society,
society, and culture shaped
shaped the colonial and post-colonial
post-colonial history
history
Egypt.
Egypt.
NOTES
NOTES
Author's
thank Juan
IJMES
Note: I thank
JuanR.
R. I.
I. Cole
Coleand
andthe
the four
fouranonymous
anonymous
IJMESreviewers
reviewersfor
for their
theirmost
mostuseful
useful
Author'sNote:
comments.
"The
A
comments.This
This article
articleis
is based
basedon
on my
my dissertation,
dissertation,
"TheEgyptian
EgyptianCigarette:
Cigarette:
A Study
Studyof
of the
the Interaction
Interaction
72
72 Relli
Relli Shechter
Shechter
between
in Egypt,
and Marketing
between Consumption,
1850-1956" (Harvard
Production, and
(Harvard University,
Cambridge,
University, Cambridge,
Marketing in
Egypt, 1850-1956"
Consumption, Production,
and Robert
Robert Vitalis,
debt to my
and to Robert
Robert Tignor
owes a great
Mass.,
Vitalis,
Owen, and
Mass., 1999).
1999). It owes
Tignor and
my supervisor,
supervisor, Roger
Roger Owen,
great debt
who
dissertation.
who read
read and
and improved
on the
the dissertation.
improved on
'I have
of markets
markets from
from Karl
Karl Polanyi,
and the
the intellectual
intellectual inspiration
for the
the study
have borrowed
borrowed this
this phrase
Polanyi,
inspiration for
study of
phrase and
The
Beacon Press,
1957
Political and
and Economic
Economic Origins
Time (Boston:
The Great
Great Transformation:
The Political
Our Time
Press, 1957
(Boston: Beacon
Origins of Our
Transformation: The
[1944]).
[1944]).
1740-1858
Peasants: Land,
and Economy
2Kenneth M.
M. Cuno,
The Pasha's
Land, Society,
Pasha's Peasants:
Lower Egypt,
Cuno, The
Egypt, 1740-1858
Economy in Lower
Society, and
1760Peter Gran,
Islamic Roots
Roots of Capitalism:
Gran, Islamic
Press, 1992);
1992); Peter
Capitalism: Egypt,
Egypt, 1760University Press,
(Cambridge:
(Cambridge: Cambridge
Cambridge University
1840
and the
the
Huri Islamoglu-Inan,
The Ottoman
Ottoman Empire
1840 (Austin:
Texas Press,
Press, 1979);
ed., The
1979); Huni
(Austin: University
Islamoglu-Inan, ed.,
Empire and
University of Texas
and
The Ottoman
Ottoman Empire
Kasaba, The
Press, 1987);
1987); Relat
Empire and
World-Economy
CambridgeUniversity
University Press,
World-Economy (Cambridge:
(Cambridge:Cambridge
Regat Kasaba,
the
New York
York Press,
the World
State University
World Economy:
The Nineteenth
Nineteenth Century
Press, 1988);
1988); Roger
Roger
Economy: The
Century (Albany:
(Albany: State
University of New
East in the
1800-1914 (London:
The Middle
Middle East
the World
World Economy,
Owen,
Tauris, 1993);
Pamuk,
Owen, The
1993); ?evket
(London: I.
Economy, 1800-1914
I. B. Tauris,
Sevket Pamuk,
The
and Production
Production (Cam1820-1913: Trade,
The Ottoman
Ottoman Empire
and European
Investment, and
Trade, Investment,
(CamEuropean Capitalism,
Capitalism, 1820-1913:
Empire and
Press, 1987).
1987).
bridge:
bridge: Cambridge
University Press,
Towns and
and
in the
the Arab
Arab world,
3For past
past research
research on
on different
of markets
markets in
see Suraiya
different aspects
world, see
aspects of
Suraiya Faroqhi,
Faroqhi, Towns
Townsmen
1520-1650 (Cambridge:
and Food
Food Production,
Townsmen of
Ottoman Anatolia:
Anatolia: Trade,
Trade, Crafts,
Production, 1520-1650
Crafts,and
of Ottoman
(Cambridge:Cambridge
Cambridge
5. D. Goitein,
of California
California
Mediterranean Society
Goitein, A Mediterranean
Press, 1984),
1984), chap.
Society (Berkeley:
(Berkeley: University
University of
University
University Press,
chap. 2; S.
IsamailAbu
1600: The
Abu Taqiyya,
in 1600:
The Life
and Times
Times of lsamail
Press,
1967), chap.
Hanna, Making
Press, 1967),
Taqiyya,
Making Big
Big Money
Money in
Life and
chap. 3; Nelly
Nelly Hanna,
in
M. Lapidus,
Muslim Cities
Cities in
N.Y.: Syracuse
Ira M.
Merchant (Syracuse,
Press, 1998);
1998); Ira
Egyptian
Lapidus, Muslim
Egyptian Merchant
Syracuse University
University Press,
(Syracuse, N.Y.:
the
Abraham Markus,
1984 [1967]),
the Later
Later Middle
Middle Ages
Markus,
Press, 1984
[1967]), chap.
chap. 4; Abraham
Ages (Cambridge:
(Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press,
the Eighteenth
The
Middle East
Eve of Modernity:
York: Columbia
Columbia UniverUniverThe Middle
East on
on the
the Eve
(New York:
Modernity: Aleppo
Aleppo in the
Eighteenth Century
Century (New
Dominance in
the Middle
Middle
The Origins
WesternEconomic
Bruce Masters,
in the
Economic Dominance
Press, 1989),
5; Bruce
Masters, The
Origins of
of Western
1989), chap.
sity
chap. 5;
sity Press,
East:
York: New
New York
York University
1600-1750 (New
East: Mercantilism
Mercantilism and
and the
the Islamic
Islamic Economy
(New York:
Economy in Aleppo,
Aleppo, 1600-1750
University
vol. 1
Artisans et commer~ants
au Caire
Caire au
au XVIII'
Andre Raymond,
Press,
siecle, vol.
(Damas:
Press, 1988),
1988), chap.
Raymond, Artisans
chap. 4; Andre
XVIIfI'sikcle,
1 (Damas:
commergants au
Institut
Institut Franqais
Damas, 1973).
1973).
Franqais de Damas,
A Review
in Acknowledging
Review of
4Ben Fine,
"From Political
Political Economy
Fine, "From
Consumption: A
Acknowledging Consumption:
Economy to Consumption,"
Consumption," in
New
and Ellen
Ellen Leopold,
The
See also
also Ben
Fine and
New Studies,
ed. Daniel
Daniel Miller
Miller (London:
Ben Fine
Studies, ed.
(London: Routledge,
1996). See
Leopold, The
Routledge, 1996).
World
World of Consumption
1993).
(London: Routledge,
Consumption (London:
Routledge, 1993).
see Daniel
Daniel Miller,
"Con'For
of consumption
of production,
a good
account of
of the
the study
Miller, "Constudy of
consumption independent
independent of
production, see
good account
5For a
24 (1995):
The study
of consumpAnnual Review
Review of Anthropology
141-60. The
and Commodities,"
Commodities," Annual
(1995): 141-60.
Anthropology 24
study of
consumpsumption
sumption and
Donald Quataert,
in the
startedto
to gain
tion
the Middle
Middle East
East has
has only
with Donald
most notably
tion in
Quataert,
momentum, most
notably with
only recently
recently started
gain momentum,
Studies and
and the
the History
An Introduction
Introduction (Albany:
the Ottoman
Ottoman Empire,
1550-1922: An
ed.,
ed., Consumption
ConsumptionStudies
History of the
(Albany:
Empire, 1550-1922:
State
New York
York Press,
in the
However, II argue
the Middle
Middle
that research
research on
on consumption
State University
Press, 2000).
2000). However,
University of New
consumption in
argue that
East
demand in conjunction
with supply.
East should
should from
from the
the outset
outset consider
consider demand
conjunction with
supply.
"The Egyptian
of the
the socio-cultural
of smoking,
6For
6For a more
more complete
socio-cultural meaning
see Shechter,
complete analysis
Shechter, "The
analysis of
Egyptian
meaning of
smoking, see
Cigarette."
Cigarette."
F. W.
7'n
Persian
remarks that
that the
the Persian
Associations (London,
W. Fairholt
Fairholt remarks
Tobacco: Its
Its History
and Associations
1876), 204,
204, F.
(London, 1876),
History and
7In Tobacco:
in Tabacologia
source in
was first
first described
Western source
described by
(1622).
Tabacologia (1622).
(narghile) was
by aa Western
waterpipe (narghile)
waterpipe
8EdwardWilliam
Livres
and Customs
William Lane,
An Account
the Manners
Manners and
Customs of the
the Modern
Modern Egyptians
Account of the
(Cairo: Livres
Egyptians (Cairo:
Lane, An
8Edward
de France,
141.
1978 [1836]),
de
France, 1978
[1836]), 141.
271.
9James Morris
Rebel Reefer
'James
Morris Morgan,
Recollections of a Rebel
1917), 271.
(Boston: Houghton
Reefer (Boston:
Houghton Mifflin,
Morgan, Recollections
Mifflin, 1917),
'OAthanase
G. Politis,
2:333.
moderne (Paris:
Librairie Felix
Felix Alcan,
'oAthanase
Alcan, 1930),
1930), 2:333.
Politis, L'Helldnisme
(Paris: Librairie
L'Hellinisme et lEgypte moderne
l'Egypte
"This survey
Akhar Sa'a
Sa'a al-Musawwira,
"This
was reprinted
"Al-Tadkhin 'Ind
'Ind al-Kuttab
al-Kuttab wa-al-Sahafiyyin,"
al-Musawwira,
wa-al-Sahafiyyin," Akhar
survey was
reprinted in "AI-Tadkhin
2 June
June 1934,
31-32.
1934, 31-32.
York: Greenwood
Greenwood Press,
1718 to 1918
1918 (New
The Ottoman
Social History
Ottoman Lady:
12Fanny
Davis, The
Press,
(New York:
History from
Lady: A Social
from 1718
2Fanny Davis,
The Private
Private World
World of Ottoman
Ottoman Women
Women (London:
1986), 165-66;
Goodwin, The
Books, 1997),
165-66; Godfrey
(London: Saqi
1997),
1986),
Saqi Books,
Godfrey Goodwin,
177.
177.
in Davis,
Ottoman
in Turkey
York: n.p.,
as quoted
M. J. Garnett,
Home Life
276-77, as
Davis, Ottoman
Garnett, Home
(New York:
1909), 276-77,
Turkey (New
'3Lucy M.
13Lucy
n.p., 1909),
Life in
quoted in
165-66.
Lady, 165-66.
Lady,
'4CharlesIssawi,
1800-1914 (Chicago:
14Charles
The Economic
Economic History
Press,
Issawi, The
History of Turkey,
Turkey, 1800-1914
University of Chicago
Chicago Press,
(Chicago: University
1980),
249.
249.
1980),
'5MishalMurqas,
Murqas,Zira'at
Zira'at al-Tibghfi
Lubnan(Beirut:
24-25; Donald
Donald
al-Tibghfi Lubnan
(Beirut: Manshurat
Manshurat Markaz
al-Abhath, 1974)
1974) 24-25;
Markaz al-Abhath,
'SMishal
Quataert,
Quataert, "Ottoman
"Ottoman Reform
Reform and
and Agriculture
Agriculture in
in Anatolia,
Anatolia, 1876-1908"
1876-1908" (Ph.D.
(Ph.D. diss.,
diss., University
University of
of CaliforCalifornia,
nia, Los
Los Angeles,
Angeles, 1973),
1973), 262-63.
262-63.
the following
'This and
and the
following information
information on
on the
the Regie
Regie is
is taken
taken from
from Donald
Donald Quataert,
Quataert, Social
Social Disintegration
Disintegration
'6This
Selling
Selling Luxury
Luxury 73
and
and Popular
Resistance in
in the
the Ottoman
Ottoman Empire,
1881-1908: Reactions
Reactions to European
Economic Penetration
Penetration
Popular Resistance
Empire, 1881-1908:
European Economic
York: New
New York
York University
14-17.
(New
(New York:
Press, 1983),
1983), 14-17.
University Press,
"2This
number suggests
that these
these "factories"
"This large
in reality
"factories" were
were in
small workshops.
large number
suggests that
reality small
workshops.
"Arnold
and H.
A. Cartwright,
"Arnold Wright
H. A.
Twentieth Century
ed., Twentieth
Wright and
of Egypt
(London: Lloyd's,
Cartwright,ed.,
Century Impressions
Impressions of
Egypt (London:
Lloyd's,
485.
1909),
1909), 485.
Economic History,
Les Puissances
and Dambmann,
Puissances etrangeres
le
'9lssawi,
History, 60,
60, citing
Dambmann, Les
dans le
citing Verney
Verney and
etrangkres dans
IgIssawi, Economic
Levant,
Palestine (n~p.,
183-84.
Levant, en Syrie
1900), 183-84.
Syrie et en Palestine
(n.p., 1900),
from Her
Her Majesty's
and Turkey,
on Regulations
Greece, and
20"Report
20"Report from
Majesty's Representatives
Representatives in Egypt,
Egypt, Greece,
Turkey, on
Regulations Affecting
Affecting
the Importation
and Sale
of Haschisch,"
House of
of Commons
vol. 89
Sale of
the
Haschisch," House
Commons Parliamentary
89 (1893-94),
(1893-94),
Importationand
ParliamentaryPapers,
Papers, vol.
Alexander Ki"Commercial and
and Customs
Customs Convention
2-12;
Convention between
between Greece
Greece and
and Egypt,"
FO 881/4939;
Ki2-12; "Commercial
881/4939; Alexander
Egypt," FO
The Greeks
Greeks in Egypt
and Class
Class (London:
Ithaca Press,
troeff,
98.
troeff, The
1919-1937, Ethnicity
Press, 1989),
(London: Ithaca
Egypt 1919-1937,
Ethnicity and
1989), 98.
'IBetween
and 1881-90,
the share
share of
of tobacco
tobacco leaf
leaf exported
rose from
1859-80 and
Greece to
from Greece
to Egypt
1881-90, the
from
21Between 1859-80
exported from
Egypt rose
14.82
14.82 percent
41.24 percent
the total
total volume
volume of tobacco-leaf
tobacco-leaf exports.
In the
the later
later period,
tobacco
percent to 41.24
percent of the
exports. In
period, tobacco
P. Labrianidis,
were higher
than to any
other country:
Lois P.
Labrianidis,"Industrial
"Industrial Location
in CapitalLocation in
exports
exports to Egypt
Egypt were
any other
higher than
country: Lois
Capitalist Societies:
Societies: The
The Tobacco
Tobacco Industry
1880-1980" (Ph.D.
London School
School of
of Economics
Economics
Greece, 1880-1980"
diss., London
(Ph.D. diss.,
Industry in Greece,
and Political
Political Science,
116.
Science, 1982),
and
table 3.3.3,
3.3.3, 116.
1982), table
22Yusuf
Misr wa-Zira'at
al-Dukhan (Cairo:
Matbacat al-Balagh,
A French
French version
version of
22Yusuf Nahhas,
of
Nahhas, Misr
wa-Zira'at al-Dukhan
(Cairo: Matba'at
1926), 9. A
al-Balagh, 1926),
the
the same
same book
book was
was published
1915.
published in 1915.
10.
23Ibid.,
23Ibid., 10.
the archives
archives of the
the Greek
Greek consulate
in Alexandria.
24Politis,
consulate general
Alexandria. Nahhas,
24politis, L'Helldnisme,
L'Hellinisme, 348,
348, citing
citing the
general in
Nahhas,
Misr
Misr wa-Zira'at,
also mentions
mentions that
that a group
tobacco merchants
merchants petitioned
the Egyptian
11-12, also
wa-Zira'at, 11-12,
group of tobacco
petitioned the
Egyptian governgovernment
ment in 1887
1887 and
and 1888
1888 for
for an
an increase
increase in tax
tax on
on local
local tobacco.
tobacco. It may
well be
be that
that both
both Nahhas
Nahhas and
and Politis
Politis
may well
are
are referring
the same
same group.
See also
also Alfred
Alfred Chamass,
"La Culture
Culture do
du tabac
tabac et
et du
du tombac
tombac en
en Egypte,"
Chamass, "La
referring to the
group. See
Egypte,"
Almanach
Almanach de la soci'dtde'
socie'te'sultanienne
sultanienne d'agriculture
l'Institut Franqais
(Cairo: Imprimerie
d'agriculture (Cairo:
Imprimerie de l'Institut
Franqais d'Archeologie
d'Archeologie
188.
Orientale,
Orientale, 1916),
1916), 188.
Misr wa-Zira'at,
12.
wa-Zira'at, 12.
2'Nahhas,
25Nahhas, Misr
26Achille
26Achille Sdkaly,
"La Culture
du tabac
Culture do
tabac au
au point
vue de l'6conomie
Sekaly, "La
point de vue
L'Egypte contemporEgyptienne," L'Egypte
contemporl'6conomie Egyptienne,"
Annee (January
fn. 1,
Ph. Gelat,
de la
la legislation
aine,
et de
de
aine, Cinquie'me
357, fn.
Gelat, Repertoire
1914), 357,
(January 1914),
citing Ph.
Repertoire de
1, citing
legislation et
Cinquibme Annde
l'administration
vol. 2
2 (n.p.).
1882-1892, vol.
Egyptiennes, 1882-1892,
(n.p.).
l'administration Egyptiennes,
354-55.
21Ibid.,
27Ibid., 354-55.
215ee
28See ibid.,
Misr wa-Zira'at,
Muhammad Zayn
alibid., 356-62;
356-62; Nahhas,
Nahhas, Misr
wa-Zira'at, 16-17;
16-17; Isma'il
al-Din, Al-Zira'at
Zayn al-Din,
Isma'il Muhammad
Al-Zira'at al'Ahd al-Ihtilal
al-Ihtilal al-Britani
al-Britani (Cairo:
li-l-Kitab, 1995),
119-21.
Misriyya
(Cairo: Al-Haya
Misriyya fi 'Ahd
1995), 119-21.
Al-Haya al-Misriyya
al-Misriyya al-'Amma
al-'Amma li-l-Kitab,
2'On
the revision
revision in tobacco
in this
tobacco taxation
taxation in
this and
290n the
and subsequent
see Ministere
Ministere des
des Finances,
Direction
Finances, Direction
subsequent years,
years, see
de la statistique,
283
Annuaire
Annuaire Statistique
283
(hereafter,
Annuaire
1914),
(Cairo,
(hereafter,
(Cairo,
Statistique).
Statistique de I'Egypte,
statistique, Annuaire
Statistique).
1914),
l'Egypte,
30Annuaire
30Annuaire Statistique
table 16,
432.
1914, table
16, 432.
Statistique 1914,
31Cf.
31Cf. Annuaire
Annuaire Statistique
table 2, 39,
with table
table 3, 40.
40.
1909, table
39, with
Statistique 1909,
32See
tables 2-5,
for data
data and
32See ibid.,
and discussion
discussion regarding
in government
ibid., tables
2-5, 39-43,
39-43, 64-67,
64-67, for
revenues
regardingchanges
changes in
government revenues
between 1880
1880 and
and 1908.
1908.
between
33The
five leading
manufacturerswere
were Gianaclis,
who arrived
arrivedin
Greek cigarette
Gianaclis, who
33The five
in Egypt
in 1864;
Vafiadis,
1864; Vafiadis,
leading Greek
cigarettemanufacturers
Egypt in
who
who established
established his
his business
business in 1870;
in Egypt
who arrived
arrived in
in 1873;
whose business
business
1870; Melachrino,
1873; Kiriazi,
Kiriazi, whose
Egypt in
Melachrino, who
was
was already
and Dimitrino,
his business
in 1886:
who opened
business in
Manos Haritatos
1886: Manos
Haritatos and
and PenelPenel1874; and
Dimitrino, who
already running
running in 1874;
opened his
the Greek
Greek Cigarette
Hellenic Literary
and Historical
Historical Archive,
Giakoumakis, A History
ope
(Athens: Hellenic
History of the
Archive,
ope Giakoumakis,
Cigarette (Athens:
Literary and
159.
152, 159.
131, 142,
147, 152,
142, 147,
1997), 131,
1997),
331.
34Ibid.,
34Ibid., 152;
152; Politis,
Politis, L'Helldnisme,
L'Hellinisme, 331.
TheAmerican
31Information
Owen. See
See also
also Laurence
LaurenceR.
in Cairo:
R. Murphy,
American University
35Information supplied
Cairo:
Roger Owen.
suppliedby
by Roger
Murphy, The
University in
1919-1987
1919-1987 (Cairo:
American University
Cairo Press,
Herbert W.
W. Vandersall,
Press, 1987),
Reminis(Cairo:American
1987), 14,
Vandersall, ReminisUniversity in Cairo
14, citing
citing Herbert
cences Regarding
cences
AUC Property,
staff conference,
October 1947,
AUC History
American University
conference, 29 October
1947, AUC
file, American
Regarding AUC
Property, staff
History file,
University
in Cairo
Cairo archives,
Caravan (Cairo),
December 1950.
1950.
archives, Campus
(Cairo), 1
Campus Caravan
1 December
16Around
Frederic Courtland
Courtland Penfield
Penfield (Present-Day
York: Century
36Around 1899,
1899, Frederic
[New York:
(Present-Day Egypt
Egypt [New
1899],
Century Company,
Company, 1899],
76),
76), estimated
estimated that
that nearly
nearly one
one hundred
hundred export
export establishments
establishments operated
operated in
in Cairo.
Cairo. See
See also
also Baron
Baron A. Forgeur,
Forgeur,
"L'Industrie
"L'Industrie de
de cigarettes
en Egypt,"
cigarettes en
Egypt," (n.p.,
(n.p., n~d.),
n.d.), 2,
2, quoted
quoted in
in Pierre
Pierre Arminjon,
Arminjon, La
La Situation
Situation dconomique
dconomique
et
(Paris:
Librairie
gendrale
do
droit
et
de
jurisprudence,
1911),
318;
et financihre
financibre de
de l'Egypte
(Paris:
Librairie
du
droit
et
de
jurisprudence,
1911),
318; Al-NashraE
Al-Nashra
l'Egypte
gen6rale
al-Iqtisadiyya
al-Misriyya, 8
8 August
August 1920,
1920, 303.
303.
al-Iqtisadiyya al-Misriyya,
3'Annuaire
1914, table
9, 306-307.
37Annuaire Statistique
Statistique 1914,
table 9,
306-307.
74 Relli
Relli Shechter
Shechter
38Jan
38JanRogozinski, Smokeless Tobacco in
the WesternWorld, 1550-1950. (New York: Praeger, 1990),
51-52.
485.
39Politis,
L'Hellenisme,
39politis,
L'Hellinisme,333; WrightandCartwright,
Twentieth-Century
Impressions,
40"BrightOutlookForseenby TurkishCigarette
40"Bright
Expert,"Tobacco(New York),24 April1924,29, 37.
andGiakoumakis,
41Haritatos
History,159.
42Ibid.,
42Ibid.,131.
Mackenzie,SublimeTobacco(New York:Macmillan,1958),265-66; RobertSobel,They
43Compton
Satisfy:The Cigarettein AmericanLife (GardenCity,N.Y.:AnchorBooks, 1978), 11-13; NannieMay
Tilley,TheBright-Tobacco
Industry,1860-1929 (ChapelHill:Universityof NorthCarolinaPress,1948),
506.
44B.
44B.W.E. Alford,W D. andH. 0.
of the U.K.TobaccoIndustry,1786-1965
O. WillsandtheDevelopment
(London:Methuen,1973), 150.
SublimeTobacco,281.
45Mackenzie,
in India:EarlyGrowthin the
46Howard
46Howard
Cox, "International
Business,the Stateand Industrialization
IndianCigaretteIndustry,1990-1919,"IndianEconomicandSocialHistoryReview27 (1990):292, citing
0.
IndianEconomicand SocialHistoryReview22 (1985):225.
O. Goswami,"ThenCamethe Marwaris,"
506-507.
Bright-Tobacco,
47Tilley,
4'Haritatos
andGiakoumakis,
48Haritatos
History,172.
EdwardLockman,"A Historyof the Originand the Developmentof EgyptianCigarettes,"
49George
Tobacco,24 April1924, 13.
andCartwright,
Twentieth
491.
CenturyImpressions,
50Wright
5oWright
51Haritatos
andGiakoumakis,
siHaritatos
History,171; RobertK. Heimann,Tobaccoand Americans(New York:
507.
McGraw-Hill,
1960),206; Tilley,Bright-Tobacco,
52
MauriceCorina,Trustin Tobacco:TheAnglo-American
52Maurice
Strugglefor Power(London:MichaelJoseph,
1975),62-63.
53Heimann,
Tobacco,210.
54Haritatos
andGiakoumakis,
54Haritatos
History,172.
Trustin Tobacco,62.
55Corina,
56
SublimeTobacco,281.
56Mackenzie,
Mackenzie,
57Robert
Relations,192357Robert
CareyGoodmanIII, "TheRole of the TobaccoTradein Turkish-American
1929"(master'sthesis,Universityof Richmond,1987),6-9.
5'Jordan
Goodman,Tobaccoin History:TheCultureof Dependence(London:Routledge,1993),10358Jordan
104.
is basedon addressesof cigaretteoutletsprintedin advertisements
andon cigarette
59Thisinformation
Anothersourceis touristand otherguidebooksto Egypt.See also
packages,pricelists, and stationery.
HaritatosandGiakoumakis,
History.RobertBaxter,a memberof the BritishCigarettePacketCollectors
club who specializesin Egyptianbrands,furthersuppliedme with a very helpfullist of manufacturers,
theirbrands(includingdatesof manufacture),
andthe locationof theiroutlets.
60Karl
Baedeker,Egypt:HandbookforTravellers
(New York:CharlesScribner'sSons, 1908),36.
6'Al-Hilal7 (1 September1899),691-92.
62E.R. J. Owen,Cottonand the EgyptianEconomy.
Economy,1820-1914:A Studyin Tradeand Development
(Oxford:Clarendon
Press,1969),298, citingJaridatal-Tijaraal-Misriyya,22 October1906,4-5.
63The
advertisement
63Thespellingof theseplacenamesis as theyoriginallyappearedin the manufacturer's
in TheLandsof Sunshine,a PracticalGuideto Egyptand the Sudan(Cairo:Whitehead,Morris,1908),
80.
64The
64TheSphinx,30thanniversary
issue, 1933,as quotedin HaritatosandGiakoumakis,
History,152.
65HaritatosandGiakoumakis,
History,152.
66G.
PierreRoger,1925),79.
66"G.Lecarpentier,
L'Egyptemoderne(Paris:Librairie
U.K.TobaccoIndustry,table41, 335. Followingthe originalquote,priceswererecordedin
67Alford,
pre-1971Britishpounds.Each such poundcontainedtwentyshillings
shillingsand each shilling
shillingtwelve pence
(referred to as d). For the conversion of the older pound to current prices, see: http://www.eh.netlhmitl
http://www.eh.net/hmit/
ppowerbp/.
6In 1897,
68In
1897, 8 percent of male and 0.2 percent of female Egyptians were literate. In 1907, 8.5 percentof
male and 0.3 percent of female Egyptians were literate:The Census of Egypt Takenin 1907 (Cairo, 1909),
97.
Selling
Selling Luxury
Luxury 75
21 October
October 1896,
6'Al-Muqattam, 21
1896, 2.
6'Al-Muqattam,
70Ibid.,10
10 April
1897, 3.
7oIbid.,
April 1897,
"This analysis
71This
is based
based on
on examining
The Egyptian
analysis is
in January
and February
Gazette in
examining The
Egyptian Gazette
1895, 1900,
1900, 1905,
January and
1905,
February 1895,
and 1913.
1913.
1910,
1910, and
72Information on
on Ed
Ed Laurans
Laurans in
in Lands
Lands of Sunshine,
and Cartwright,
Twentieth Century
Sunshine, 91-94;
91-94; Wright
Wright and
Cartwright, Twentieth
Century
485-94.
Impressions,
Impressions, 485-94.
7'Haritatos
7'Haritatos and
and Giakoumakis,
82.
History, 82.
74For
74For samples
of Ottoman
Ottoman packages,
see ibid.,
112-27.
samples of
ibid., 112-27.
packages, see
75The analysis
based on
on packages
from Robert
Robert Baxter,
analysis is based
The Cigarette
Baxter, Mysteries
packages from
Mysteries of Egypt,
Packet,
Egypt, The
Cigarette Packet,
Haritos and
and Giakoumakis,
issue, 1996;
special
special Egyptian
1996; Haritos
Egyptian issue,
Giakoumakis, History.
History.
76Thomas
The Commodity
76Thomas Richards,
Culture of Victorian
Victorian England,
Richards, The
and Spectacle,
1851-1914
Commodity Culture
England, Advertising
Advertising and
Spectacle, 1851-1914
Calif.: Stanford
Stanford University
(Stanford,
195.
(Stanford, Calif.:
Press, 1990),
1990), 195.
University Press,
77Haritatos and
and Giakoumakis,
146.
History, 146.

Jewish Tobacco Workers in Salonika

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