The Importance of Qusayr in the Late Eighteenth Century

Abstract

Qusayr' s brief rise to significance in the last several decades of the eighteenth century illustrates clearly the interrelationships among geography, economics, and politics. Without even safe or deep harbor, for few years in the late eighteenth century Qusayr took on considerable significance as native merchants began using it in preference to Suez for the import of coffeeEgypt's major item of Red Sea trade and Europeans proposed to use it to pass the goods of India and the East on their way to Mediterranean destinations. It was not because of any inherent advantages that Qusayr suddenly assumed such prominence, but combination of economic and political factors that temporarily made Suez, the natural port of entry for the bulk of Egypt's Red Sea trade, unattractive to both native and foreign merchants. When the English explorer James Bruce visited Qusayr in 1769 he found it a small mudwalled village, built upon the shore, among hillocks of floating sand. . . . The port, if we may call it so, is on the south-east of the town. It is nothing but rock which runs out about four hundred yards into the sea, and defends the vessels. . . . l He remarked that only three small cannons defended the town from the bedouins and that few items, except coarse Indian goods, were imported. He did see, however, caravan of thousand camels, escorted by four hundred camel -mounted Ababde tribesmen, come to Qusayr with wheat for Mecca.2 Indeed, it was Qusayr's major function to pass the agricultural produce of Upper Egypt to the holy cities of the Hijaz. To understand how this small and isolated