Everyday Life and Consumer Culture in Eighteenth-Century Damascus.

• Author: Deguilhem, Randi
• Position: Book review

Everyday Life and Consumer Culture in Eighteenth-Century Damascus. By JAMES GREHAN. Publications on the Near East. Seattle: UNIVERSITY of WASHINGTON PRESS, 2007. Pp. xvi + 320. $50.

James Grehan's important and thought-provoking publication is the first book in English to focus expressly on consumer culture and consumption patterns in the Ottoman provincial capital of Damascus during the mid-eighteenth century. More specifically. Grehan's work concentrates on a period or" thirteen years (1750-63), which corresponds to his analysis of 1,000 probate estate inventories (tarikat) registered during those years with the Ottoman law courts in Damascus, which themselves constitute the main source of primary information for his study.

Using probate inventories for studying consumer culture is a judicious use of the source, but it is not an easy task; Grehan has made the most of a difficult undertaking not only in terms of reading the documents (not always very legible), but also in contextualizing them through the use of local chronicles and comparative sources. By their very nature, the empirical data obtained from the probate lists--which record different kinds of moveable or edible commodities, real-estate properties, and sums of money owned by deceased individuals--offer an estimate of the value of those material assets at a fixed place and point in time. Ranging from inexpensive objects to highly valuable possessions, these assets included items that needed immediate or near-immediate consumption (perishable foodstuffs) in addition to long-lasting possessions such as house utensils, furniture, different types of clothing, commercial and residential buildings, pieces of land etc.

Such information is, of course, tempered by the fact that the estates entered into these inventories are those belonging to persons whose heirs were in their minority or who were absent from Damascus or its environs or else to deceased persons who did not have any living heirs--exceptions such as that noted by C. Establet and J.-P. Pascual in their study of Damascene probate inventories notwithstanding (Families et fortunes a Damas: 450 foyers damascains en 1700 [IFEAD, 1994], 185), where they mention the registration in an inventory list of a woman's estate entered into the probate inventories even though she had two living majority-aged children.

In this author's study of consumer culture in mid-eighteenth-century Damascus, his use of unpublished manuscripts authored by the renowned Damascene intellectual 'ABd al-Ghani al-Nabulsi (thus in the volume) (consulted by Grehan in the Suleymaniye Library, Istanbul), which are contemporaneous with the inventories studied...