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Bruce Masters, The Origins of Western Economic Dominance in the Middle East: Mercantilism and the Islamic Economy in Aleppo, 1600–1750 (New York University Studies in Near Eastern Civilization 12) (New York and London: New York University Press, 1988). Pp. 240.

Central among the significant and timely problems tackled by this monograph is the historical definition of an Islamicly administered and ajudicated economy. By concentrating on Aleppo, the leading transit trade entrepot of the Ottoman Empire from the 16th through mid-18th centuries, Masters skillfully follows patterns of trade, capital accumulation, and investment through phases of prosperity and decline, observing the directives of the state, the behavior of merchants, and the interplay of Muslim/Ottoman and non-Muslim/European systems. The crucial commodity was silk, brought by huge overland caravans from Iran to Aleppo and transhipped from there to destinations around the Mediterranean and to England. This trade prospered and then quite suddenly halted in the mid-18th century. Masters addresses a broad audience of, of course, both Ottomanists and Arabists, but also Islamicists, Mediterraneanists, Early Modernists, and World Systems historians. He investigates "how a state policy emerged in the empire as a whole that was diametrically opposed to those of contemporary Europe" (p. 191). He asks how and why Aleppo declined in the age of mercantilism from a world trade metropole to a dependent economy, from winner to loser in the modern global hierarchy, a state from which it has yet to recover. Masters's chief theoretical interlocuters are Immanuel Wallerstein and Neils Steensgaard, both of whom he admires but nonetheless takes to task, the first for historical determinism, the second for underestimating the resiliency of the Middle Eastern caravan trade in Asian trade. There is fascinating new material on the role of women in the economy in Chapter 5, and Chapters 3 and 4 are likely to be useful and original contributions to the history of Armenian and Jewish trading diasporas, and bedouin history, respectively. With reference to the former, for example, Masters convincingly demonstrates the marked economic autonomy and initiative of Muslim women and the fact that Christian women often pursued their interests through the Muslim courts. While Europeans decided that Iskenderun would be the first of the colonial port cities in the Ottoman Empire, the Armenian trading diaspora was indispensable to the interior trade because of its links into enemy territory in Iran. To sustain their position the Armenians successfully lobbied for special status concessions in taxation and representation from both the Iranians and the Ottomans. From the point of view of urban studies, we learn of the powers of the Muslim courts in enforcing order and principle in the marketplace and of the checks and balances instituted by the state through the naming of the naqib al-ashraf as administrator for the askeri estates and the gradual militarization of the office of shahbandar. We also learn of the ways in which ethnicity and economic interest could overlap to create factions. I was surprised to learn that a peasant could gain his "freedom" by residing in Aleppo for 15 years, after which time he could no longer be held responsible for corporate village tax debts. The fact