Where Have All the Craftsmen Gone

For well over a century, Yemen was forcibly politically and economically isolated from the modernizing Middle East region surrounding it. The large-scale and hurried exodus of the Jewish population of craftsmen in 1949 inadvertently provided the impetus and the means to internationalize the consumer economy in Yemen. According to trade data from the British colony of Aden, in the years immediately following the Jewish exodus, there was a significant increase in the imports of goods normally associated with the community of Jewish craftsmen. Funded by a concurrent increase in purchasing power acquired from the property of the departing Jews, Yemeni Arabs were able to replace the lost Jewish craftsmanship monopoly with imported alternatives, finally drawing Yemen into the global economy, albeit several decades behind the rest of the region

Archaeology · Economics · Economy · Geography · Judaism · Market economy · Monopoly · Political science · Population · Power (physics · Purchasing power · Sociology · Global Maritime and Colonial Histories · Middle East and Rwanda Conflicts · Socioeconomic Development in MENA