Celebrated for its ancient water wheels the town of Hama is located on Syria's longest river
the Orontes. Ottoman Hama was a stopover on the major north-south road of Syria as well as the
center of a local economic zone of its own. Intertwined social networks linked townspeople to
the peasants and pastoral nomads of Hama's hinterland. By the early twentieth century a few
elite and notable families had come to dominate the political and economic life of Hama and its
outlying villages setting the stage for the city's dramatic entry into Syrian national life
during the French Mandate and post-colonial periods. Based principally on local judicial
archives this book is a social history of Hama during the last two centuries of Ottoman rule.
It examines the social and economic structures that defined people's lives and that conditioned
their participation in the historical changes of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Dramatis personae include men and women commoners and notables merchants and artisans and
others who taken together represent a cross-section of a Middle Eastern society as they
entered the world of global markets European empires and modern states.
