In the 19th century, gold thread, which was used in adorning traditional garments, was imported by Algeria from Europe, especially from Lyon.

For the manufacturing of swords, blades were imported in 19th-century Morocco from Syria, but also from Toledo, where blades whose steel was considered comparable in quality to Damascus steel were produced by the Royal Manufactory built in 1780 outside the city in the valley of the river Tagus.

Apart from the garments and cloths it imported from Western Europe, Tunisia also purchased gold and silver threads, as well as articles of passementerie, which were used in the ornamentation of traditional clothes.

In the 19th century, members of the Moroccan upper classes purchased items of furniture made in Western Europe. Italian producers were among the most appreciated.

Gold and silk threads were imported by Tunisia, as well as by Algeria, mostly from Lyon, a French city famous for its production of textile gildings (dorures) and articles of passementerie until the 1920s.

In the late 19th century, as Moroccan Sultan Hasan I took measures to increase the military capacity of his sultanate, he also deemed it necessary to modernise the army’s weaponry. Firearms and artillery were therefore purchased from Western Europe, mostly from the UK and France, but from other countries too.

After Algeria became a French colony, its large cork oak forests began to supply France’s cork factories while at the same time French entrepreneurs engaged in the local production of Algerian handmade corks, much appreciated in Europe for their quality. To increase production, in the second half of the 19th century the French brought to Algeria a machine for cutting corks already in use in Europe, which soon replaced traditional cork making.

In the 19th century, Italians were Egypt’s main foreign community after the Greek one. Some Italians had set up successful businesses such as the furniture factory of Giuseppe Parvis, who settled in Cairo in 1859 and whose products were very popular with wealthy Egyptians.

The imperial tile factory in Istanbul, which produced high-quality European-style ceramics for the Ottoman market, was built following the plans of Italian architect Raimondo Tommaso D’Aronco. It functioned between 1895 and 1936, using technology similar to that found in the French porcelain factory of Sèvres and employing both Turkish and European artisans.

At the beginning of the 20th century, Morocco’s war fleet comprised a cruiser and two troopships. The cruiser, Bascir, was bought from Italy in 1890 and its first captain and mechanical engineers were Europeans.

The porcelains produced by the Yıldız factory with local materials and traditional Turkish designs, but using European techniques, were destined for the Turkish court and upper classes, in an attempt to reduce ceramics imports from Europe.

In 1826 the fez, worn in the Greek islands and already in use among North African Muslims, replaced the turban in Ottoman army uniforms, becoming in 1829 compulsory for male civilians too. Fezzes were imported from Austro-Hungary until 1908, when its annexation of Bosnia-Herzegovina triggered an Ottoman boycott of Austrian goods. In 1925 wearing a fez was forbidden by Kemal Ataturk (first President of the Turkish Republic) because fezzes were considered a reminder of the old regime.

Even though flintlocks had been manufactured in the Ottoman Empire since the end of the 16th century, three centuries later the Ottoman army was being equipped with handguns imported from Western Europe, whose weapons industry was significantly more advanced than the Ottoman one.