Six large shops of Indian piece-goods: French cloth, cashmere shawls,
&c. belonging to respectable merchants, whose clerks here sell by
retail. Almost all the principal merchants carry on also a retail
business in their own houses, except the great Indian merchants
established here, who deal in nothing but Indian piece-goods. The other
merchants of Djidda engage in every branch of commerce. I once saw the
brother of Djeylany quarrelling with a Yembo pedlar about the price of a
mellaye, worth about fifteen shillings; but this is the case also in
Egypt and Syria, where the most wealthy native merchants sell in retail,
and enter into all the minute details of business, and yet without
keeping any large establishment of clerks or accomptants, which their
mode of conducting business renders little necessary. A Turkish merchant
never keeps more than one accompt-book; into this he copies from a
pocket-book his weekly sales and purchases. They have not that extensive
correspondence which European merchants are obliged to keep up; and they
write much less, though perhaps more to the purpose, than the latter. In
every town with which they traffic, they have one friend, with whom they
annually balance accounts. Turkish merchants, with the exception of
those living in sea-ports, generally pursue but one branch of trade;
maintaining a correspondence with the town only from whence they obtain
their merchandize, and with that to which they transport it. Thus, for
instance, the great Baghdad merchants of Aleppo, men with from thirty to
forty thousand pounds in capital, receive goods from their friends at
Baghdad, and then send them from Aleppo to Constantinople. I have known
many of them who kept no clerk, but transacted the whole of their
business themselves. At Cairo, the Syrian merchants trade in the stuffs
of Damascus and Aleppo, and