The politics of trade and power: Dahir al-.umar and the making of early modern palestine

When Shaykh Dahir al-.Umar al-Zaydani died in 1775, he had ruled large parts of Palestine for over half a century. Capitalizing on the forward economy introduced by the Dutch merchant "gone native," Paul Maashoek (d. 1711), Dahir created a politics of trade and power that brought about the economic flourishing of Palestine and the prosperity of its population for most of the eighteenth century. From his urbanization of the Galilee's main villages, Tiberias, Nazareth, Acre and Haifa, sprang the merchant class whose subsequent active trading with the West helped quicken the pace of Palestine's integration into the Europe-dominated world economy.