Oriental water pipes called huqqas (from Persian for “coconut” because they used to be made from coconut shells) or narghiless (in Turkish) are thought to have originated in India, from where they spread to Iran and reached the Ottoman Empire in the 17th century. They later became popular in the Balkans too.

Dhows, traditional wooden Arabian sailing vessels, could be of various types. Those generally used for pearl fishing were called sambuk.

In North Africa, as in the Middle East, coffee was imported in the 19th century from European colonies in the West Indies. According to Thomas MacGill, a Scottish merchant who visited Tunisia in 1811, by then Tunisians were already using much more coffee from Martinique, one of France’s West Indian colonies, than from Yemen.

Ever since the 16th century, the Regency of Algiers licensed the rights for fishing coral in its coastal waters to French companies. After the French Revolution of 1789, France decided to give up its monopoly over coral fishing in Algeria and so fishing rights also began to be granted to other Europeans, such as the British and the Italians.

After Algeria became a French colony, most of its coffee was imported from the West Indian colonies of France, whose commercial vessels paid lower custom duties than vessels from other countries for coffee shipments.

Two years after the conquest of Algiers (1830), the French authorities established a set of rules for coral fishing in Algeria. Foreign companies were accepted but had to pay fees for fishing coral, while French boats were exempt from any taxes.

Silk became in the 19th century the main agricultural produce of Mount Lebanon, most of it being exported to France. In 1841, three French entrepreneurs – Nicolas, Joseph and Antoine Fortuné Portalis – founded the first silk factory in Mount Lebanon, which was built in Btater, and European spinners were brought to teach the locals the European method of spinning silk threads.

In the 19th century, the consumption of Yemeni coffee was replaced in the Ottoman Empire with that of coffee brought in from the French and British colonies in the West Indies, which had lower costs due to the use of slave labour. For the port of Smyrna, coffee was one of the principal imported products.

Pearl exports constituted the principal source of income for the Arab emirates on the western coast of the Arab-Persian Gulf until the beginning of the 20th century, when the Japanese discovered how to produce cultured pearls.

According to this document, in 1868 Venice imported from Egypt 377,200kg of raw cotton. In the 19th century, cotton became Egypt’s leading export after French textile engineer Louis Alexis Jumel, who had been hired by Viceroy Muhammad ‘Ali to manage a textile factory in Cairo, developed a new type of cotton. With the support of Muhammad ‘Ali, the extensive cultivation of Jumel long-staple cotton began in the 1820s.

Although sugar cane grew in the Middle East and North Africa, refined sugar was imported from France and Britain, which obtained sugar from their West Indian colonies. In Egypt, however, during the reigns of Muhammad ‘Ali and his grandson Isma‘il Pasha, the cultivation of sugar was extended and sugar refineries were founded (the first in 1818 by an Englishman). By the late 19th century, Egypt produced enough sugar to become an exporter of raw and refined sugar.

In the 1840s, French silkworms were infected with a new disease called pébrine, which then spread to the rest of Europe and the Middle East, affecting both European and Arab and Ottoman silk industries. In 1865, the French government assigned chemist Louis Pasteur to find the cause of the disease. After studying pébrine for five years, Pasteur discovered a cure that stopped the epidemics in all regions it had reached.

The biggest Palestinian cotton growing and processing centres were Acre during the 19th century and later the hill region Jabal Nablus, both situated in the north of Palestine. The raw cotton and the cotton yarn they produced were imported mainly by France for its textile industry.

In the 19th century the cultivation of cotton was expanded in the northern districts of Palestine (the territory of present-day Israel and Palestine, which was then part of the Ottoman Empire). Cotton became the main European import from the region, but by the 1870s the lack of industrialisation led to a decline of cotton production and trade.

Although Yemen lost supremacy in the coffee trade because of coffee produced in the West Indies and commercialised by the British and the French, exports of Yemeni coffee to Europe did not completely cease thanks to its good quality, which had made it famous. And it was still consumed within the Arabian Peninsula, where inhabitants used a traditional coffee pot (dallah) to prepare it.

Even under the British protectorate, pearl fishing was regulated in the Arab sheikdoms on the east coast of the Arabian Peninsula by the local authorities and was practised only by locals. Furthermore, the British government forbade the exploitation of pearl fisheries by British and foreign companies.