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Inactive Askari Street -- Hala Fattah

Hala Fattah

The Decline of the Shoe Industry in Iraq.

Once, not so long ago, you could visit a skilled shoemaker in Baghdad who would take your foot measurements and design shoes to your liking. The shoes were always made from fine Iraqi leather, usually kid leather, and were every bit as supple and comfortable as Italian or Spanish shoes today. However I am told that those days are gone. In the wake of the American entry in Baghdad, tanners, who worked animal hides (usually that of sheep, goats or water buffalo)into leather, have been more or less ruined by the creation of a tax-free economy; they have watched foreign entrepreneurs move to Iraq and pay higher prices for the raw material necessary for making good shoes. Of course, skilled craftsmanship has been on the wane in Iraq for quite some time. Still, the Iraqi shoe industry struggled through thick and thin to preserve its traditions and continue production throughout the lean Baathist years, so it’s a loss for all of us that it has succumbed to the imperatives of globalization.

In the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a similar situation developed in the Iraqi provinces of the Ottoman Empire. The impact of the world market on Ottoman Iraq, as in all the Ottoman provinces, is well known. Take any important commodity and chart its course over time and the first thing that you’ll notice is that the commodity in question gets priced out of reach for the local merchant. But the wealthy export merchants, or those Iraqis or Syrians or Egyptians who tied themselves to the European market, end up comfortable in both worlds. For instance, Sarah Shields’s excellent book tackles the shoe industry’s transformation, from inexpensive slippers made for the local market to shoes and boots, using not Iraqi but French leather, and bought exclusively by the rich Mosulis. However, and this is a key argument, she contends that rather than this being a linear development, in which Iraqi foreign-affiliated merchants subverted the local economy by selling off local commodities to Europeans, thus making the same commodities too exorbitant for local taste, the European-allied merchant himself was so stitched in to the rich fabric of local/regional society that he basically buffered the “impact” of the world market. Because the Iraqi middleman was himself dependent on the local economy for supplies of both raw and finished goods, he had two clienteles that he was forced to attend to: the regional supplier in the villages of northern Iraq, and the European merchant and/or shipper. If he did not appease the regional supplier, he could not sell to the European merchant.

Fast forward to the twenty-first century. With Iraq’s economy just getting off the ground, it is worthwhile to ask: who are the local suppliers that could rein in the Iraqi middleman today? Where is the counterbalance to selling off the Iraqi economy, lock, stock and barrel? How can Iraq produce a relatively strong and independent tanners’ or leather producers’ association in a short enough time to forestall the sale of this particular commodity? I’m not an economist but I’d sure like to hear from those who are on what to do.

Posted on Wednesday, July 14, 2004 at 12:31 PM | Comments (3) | Return

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