The Growth of European Enterprise 69
sharp decline in English trade in favour of France. While the
English cloth had the highest reputation, the French was lighter and
better suited to the climate, It was, moreover, loper cent, cheaper;
and when English clothiers did produce a thinner and cheaper cloth
its quality was so inferior that the Levant merchants would not
touch it. It was said that the Turks of Istanbul 'could neither be
clothed, at the price and in the manner they wished, nor have coffee
to drink5 without buying from the French.l French trade with the
Levant increased with extraordinary rapidity, and on the eve of
the French Revolution was three times as great as the volume of
English trade to those countries. Between 1778 and 1791 the
English Levant Co. was compelled to close down its four factories
in Syria, leaving the French in full possession of the trade. Politic-
ally also France was acknowledged by the Sultan as protector of all
the Catholics within his Empire.
In Persia and Iraq however, the commercial situation in the
eighteenth century was far different. The French East India Co.
was ill-organized and ill-supported from Paris; and consequently
the decline of the Dutch left the English to enjoy the bulk of the
Persian Gulf trade through the prosperous factories which it re-
opened at Bandar Abbas and Basra. As a result of the internal
anarchy in Persia which followed on the Afghan invasion of 1722,
however, most of the European factories in that country had
eventually to be closed, and in 1761 the main seat of British trade
was shifted to Basra, where the East India Co/s resident was raised
to the rank of consul. In 1766 the Company lent the Pasha of
Baghdad six ships to deal with unruly tribesmen in Lower Iraq, and
in 1780 it helped Sulaiman Pasha the Great to secure his succession
to the pashaliq and so won his friendship. Britain's commercial
position in the Gulf was now pre-eminent, and she was acquiring
through it a growing political influence also. In 1798 the Com-
pany's Resident at Bushire, which had become the principal
station on the Persian coast after the closing of Bandar Abbas, was
asked to arbitrate in a dispute between the Pasha of Baghdad and
the Sultan of Oman.
Like the Chinese, the rulers and inhabitants of the Ottoman
Empire continued, long after their civilization and power had
passed its peak, to regard the European strangers in their midst as
1 They had made a trade treaty with the Governor of Mokha in 1709, and in
1738 temporarily occupied the port in a dispute over debts to French traders.