In the Ottoman cities of what was later to become the state of Syria, premodern guilds survived well into the 1920s. By that time, too, the infant trade union movement was beginning to take shape. Three laws shaped the transition from craft guilds to trade unions as the dominant institutions for organizing labourers in Syria. The first was the law on craft associations of 1912, issued after a group of modernist Ottoman army officers, called the Young Turks, had toppled Sultan Abdülhamid II in a revolution in 1908; the second law, on professional associations, was issued in 1935 during the French Mandate over Syria; and the third was the Labour Code, one of the very first laws issued after Syria gained independence from France in 1946. Three states—three laws. While my PhD project focuses on this period of change and the relationship between these two very different forms of organization, guilds and trade unions, the aim of my visit to the National Archives in London was to find out more about the period just before that—about the late nineteenth century and the profound changes the Ottoman guilds underwent in the wake of the capitalist penetration of the regional economy.
In order to understand the transitional phase of workers’ organization in Syria in the first half of the twentieth century, it is important to consider the changes that the Ottoman guilds in Syria had seen in the course of the nineteenth century. After Napoleon Bonaparte had occupied Egypt from 1798–1801 and was finally ousted, the new ruler of the Ottoman Province of Egypt, Mohammed Ali Pasha, embarked on an economic development programme that aimed to fund his expanding army. This was based on import substitution and state monopolies, coupled with administrative centralization. In 1830 Mohammed Ali invaded the Syrian provinces of the Ottoman Empire, introducing state reform measures there as well. By the time the High Porte in Istanbul re-established control over the Syrian provinces in 1840, the Ottoman central state had also embarked on a reform programme, the Tanzimat, focusing on centralization. But it went hand in hand with mainly British pressure to open the Ottoman economy to the world market. This first attempt to introduce Tanzimat reforms in the Syrian provinces between 1840 and 1860 led to the perception among the Muslim majority in the province that it was the Christian minorities who benefited from the reforms and the opening of trade to European imports. In 1860, anger and prejudice led to the massacre of the Christian minorities in Damascus and the destruction of the city’s Christian quarters. After this physical and economic catastrophe, the Ottoman state tried to show that its reforms benefited broader sections of the population and began restoring the city and its industries, while furthering the reform programme in the province and its economic integration into the world market.
Orientalist historiography has often referred to this process as the decline of the craft economy under pressure from European imports, and with it the decline of the guilds. In reality, the Ottoman craft economy did not decline; it adapted to the new circumstances, although this did in fact mean that its guilds lost their relevance precisely because they adapted and their crafts survived. This meant that the Ottoman textile sector, for example, was able to grow after the 1870s.1 While my PhD thesis includes barbers’ guilds and shoemakers’ guilds, tanners, and copper-smiths, for this blog article I focus on the textile sector as one of the largest industries in the Levant. And not only did it produce textiles, but also the largest amount of historical source material of all the craft sectors in Syria.

One major source for the history of the guilds in Egypt is the qadi law court registers.2 But since Syrian archives remain hard to access in 2024, the main alternative sources for the social and economic history of Syria in the nineteenth century are diplomatic correspondence and consular reports.3 Reports from the British consuls in Aleppo and Damascus were usually sent annually or quarterly to the British ambassador in Istanbul or to the Foreign Office in London. Unfortunately, the consuls showed little interest in the affairs of ordinary urban dwellers, such as craftsmen and the increasing number of non-guild-organized female wage workers, and were more concerned with the economic sphere of circulation than with the circumstances of production. Trade and commerce, prices and tariffs, transport and infrastructure were usually mentioned more frequently in the consular reports than working conditions, modes of production or labour organization. International trade was of much greater interest to the British consuls, who represented the economic interests of British capital in the Middle East.
Because the British consular reports focused on trade and commerce, workers and craftsmen come to the fore here mostly when unusual events occurred, such as when the system ceased to run smoothly. One such anomaly, and the one I would like to highlight here because it reveals some details about craftsmen and their collective organization as a group, was strike action.
In his annual report for the year 1878, the British vice consul to Damascus, Thomas Sampson Jago, goes into a little more detail when describing craftsmen and workers in their activities as a group. Jago reports that the Damascus silk weavers had just ended a four-week strike.4 He states: ‘[a]n example of the resuscitation of native industry, judged of course by the strictly Oriental standard which alone prevails, may be found in the strike just terminated’.5 I read this with surprise, since I expected him (not least because of the orientalist, racist qualification of his statement) to think of strikes as signs of chaos and lack of control—not as indicators of a thriving economy. The strike was caused by the masters of the trade attempting to reduce their craftsmen’s wages—despite a good economic situation—from 16 piastres to 13 piastres per piece of 9 arshin.6 Piecework wages amounted to weekly earnings in the silk weaving sector of about 10 to 12 British shillings. He reported that about 3,000 silk weavers—men, as he says, and as is likely, since guild-organized labour tended to be male in the Syrian provinces—closed the workshops in which they worked for their master weavers. They then turned to the other silk weaving workshops, which were not involved in the wage dispute, and forced them to close their businesses as well in order to prevent masters and workshop owners from colluding and circumventing the strike. They cut the threads on the looms to force all silk weavers to down their tools. Finally, Jago states that in the 1870s, such strikes were very common in the silk weaving sector of Damascus. Another account from this time, Iliya Qudsi’s description of the Damascus guilds of 1883, also details these kinds of strikes. He notes that, during the strikes, it was often men who held the guild title of the ‘Shawish’, who organized and coordinated the walkout. Protests against the exploitation of craft workers were thus organized from within the traditional guild framework.
Another Damascus weavers’ strike—and hence another occasion for the British consul to report on the craftsmen—came along in 1901; but this time, it involved both silk and cotton weavers. Again, workmen downed their tools to prevent their wages from being lowered by their employers. Damascus weaving entrepreneurs sold their goods on the Egyptian market, but when silk prices suddenly dropped from £3l 5s. 6d. to £2 17s. 1d., they were left with stocks of silk to spin, bought at old prices. Because their competitors were now able to produce cheaper goods, at lower raw material costs, business owners in Damascus had to cut costs elsewhere in order to remain profitable, and they lowered their workmen’s pay.
Both of these strikes occurred in the context of the international market. The incorporation of the Ottoman Empire into the world market had gained pace during the nineteenth century. The Great Depression after the stock market crisis of 1873 and the price crash on the Egyptian market at the beginning of the twentieth century both caused weaving entrepreneurs in Damascus to lower wages, prompting weavers to strike. Both of these strikes indicate disruptions within the social constitution of the crafts and their guilds. The premodern guild ideal of relative equality between masters and journeymen gave way to the development of distinct group interests: on the one hand, masters and entrepreneurs tried to keep their businesses alive amid the competition on the market by reducing labour costs, while on the other, their workers, craftsmen, and journeymen tried to obtain what they perceived as fair wages. Also, the strike of 1878 in particular shows that the old guilds were taking over what European observers would have labelled as the typical role of trade unions. What we observe here, therefore, is the genesis of class relations within the crafts and their traditional institutions, the guilds.
Featured Image: The Khan al-Harir (silk khan), built in 1573/4 by the Ottoman governor of Damascus, Darwiş Paşa, with an upper gallery once covered by domes. Photo by Dosseman, 2008. Published under the Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike 4.0 licence.
- Donald Quataert, ‘Ottoman Manufacturing in the Nineteenth Century’, in Donald Quataert (ed.), Manufacturing in the Ottoman Empire and Turkey, 1500–1950 (New York, 1994), 87–121. [↩]
- See Abdul-Karim Rafeq, ‘Craft Organization, Work Ethics, and the Strains of Change in Ottoman Syria’, Journal of the American Oriental Society, 111/3 (1991), 495–511. [↩]
- Much of the research on the nineteenth-century social and economic history of Syria relies heavily on British and French consular reports. See e.g. Roger Owen, The Middle East in the World Economy 1800–1914 (New York, 1981); as well as Charles Issawi, An Economic History of the Middle East and North Africa (London, 1982). [↩]
- On this strike, see the three articles by Sherry Vatter, ‘Militant Journeymen in Nineteenth-Century Damascus: Implications for the Middle Eastern Labor History Agenda’, in Zachary Lockman (ed.), Workers and Working Classes in the Middle East: Struggles, Histories, Historiographies (Albany, NY, 1994), 1–20; ‘Militant Textile Weavers in Damascus: Waged Artisans and the Ottoman Labor Movement, 1850–1914’, in Donald Quataert and Eric Jan Zürcher (eds.), Workers and Working Class in the Ottoman Empire and the Turkish Republic (London, 1995), 35–57; and ‘Journeymen Textile Weavers in Nineteenth-Century Damascus: A Collective Biography’, in Edmund Burke and David Yaghoubian (eds.), Struggle and Survival in the Modern Middle East, 2nd edn. (Berkeley, 2006), 64–79. [↩]
- Accounts and Papers (1879): Commercial. No. 13 (1879). (Trade reports.) Reports from Her Majesty’s consuls on the manufactures, commerce, &c., of their consular districts. Part II. Command Papers (London, 1879) , 70. [↩]
- One Russian arshin equals 28 inches or 71 cm. The Turkish arshin differed slightly from the Russian arshin. [↩]
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Felix Wessel (March 3, 2025). The End of the Guilds in Syria. German Historical Institute London Blog. Retrieved March 25, 2025 from https://doi.org/10.58079/13equ