The Medina Trade Is Therefore
Merely For Home Consumption, And To Supply The Neighbouring Bedouins
With Articles Of Dress And Provisions.
These are received by way of
Yembo, and come almost exclusively from Egypt.
No great merchants are
settled in Medina: the trade is merely retail; and those who possess
capital, generally invest it in goods, as usual throughout Syria and
Egypt, there not being any public institution like banks, or trading
societies, or national funds, from which the capitalist might derive
interest for his money. The Turkish law rigorously forbids the taking of
interest; and even if it were otherwise, there is not any government nor
any class of men to which the people would intrust considerable sums.
The investment of capital in landed property is also liable to great
risk. [By a decree of Mohammed Aly in 1813, the purchase of land in Egypt
is rendered impracticable; for it orders all the Moltezims (or landed
proprietors who shared in the possession of villages and grounds, and
who formed a class living on their rents in the country towns,) to
receive their yearly revenue from the Pasha's treasury, where they
suffered every kind of humiliation and injustice; and the whole of the
soil was declared to be the property of government, or in other words of
Mohammed Aly himself, who leaves the cultivation of it to the fellahs on
his own terms. It happened lately that the Fellahs, who farmed five
thousand acres belonging to the village of Damkour near Cairo, were
deprived of their leases on the land being declared public property,
because the Pasha wished to sow clover for his cavalry upon the soil
that the Fellahs had possessed.
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