The attempt to estimate per capita income for Egypt from 1886/1887 to 1937, presented in this paper, is part of an effort to evaluate British colonial economic policyduring the period of the British occupation of Egypt. For such an evaluation national income estimates covering the whole period would be very helpful. National income estimates worth the name, however, go back only to 1935–1939, and for years earlier than the 1950s they are of very poor quality. Compared with so many other lessdeveloped countries, Egypt has relatively rich statistics extending backward to the decades before World War I; but they do not really suffice for building up a national income series from either the production or the expenditure side, and from the income side there is hardly any information. In this situation, which both development economists and economic historians know only too well, the problem is how to make maximal use of existing production and expenditure indicators in order to come out with some idea of what per capita income developments may have looked like. Apart from gauging per capita income in Egypt during half a century before World War II, the paper serves more generally to illustrate a methodology that may find application for other countries.

In this article, I argue that commercial legislation promulgated and implemented in Egypt during the first half of the 19th century was one of several factors that diminished the effect of merchants’ social networks, reduced merchants’ identity to a purely professional dimension, and made profit dependent upon association with the state. The transformation of merchants’ social roles was not part of a natural evolution toward modernization and the specialized division of labor. Rather, it resulted from interactions between state-building endeavors, pressures from established merchants who sought to parry threats to their position while profiting from new business opportunities, and an influx of merchants from outside the Ottoman sultanate, who could draw neither on personal connections nor on knowledge of local markets but instead had to depend on the protection of the European consulates and the influence of the growing Egyptian state apparatus.

The article explores the Zionist cultural economy in interwar Palestine, by studying the emergence of the field of consumption as an arena for political struggles among Jews and between Jews and Arabs. The Jewish nationalist movement employed dominant contemporary assumptions about economic nationalism in attempts to politicize the economy of British Palestine, including through campaigns advocating ethnonational separatism in consumption. Unlike other “buy local” movements around the world, these were not directed solely against imports; rather, they were often “buy Jewish” campaigns waged against the consumption of commodities produced by the rival ethnonational sector in Palestine. Using a variety of archival and media sources, the article tracks the development of Jewish separatist consumption campaigns in interwar Palestine, uncovering a gradual amplification of their ethnonational emphasis that paralleled the escalation of the Arab–Jewish conflict. The cultural mechanisms used to attribute ethnic qualities to objects and define them as either “Jewish” or “foreign” are analyzed with particular attention to the conceptual contradictions in the definitions of a Jewish product, which were shaped by economic conflicts and the diverse political conceptions of Jewish identity. The study of separatist consumption sheds new light on the “dual society” thesis, revealing the deep grip of separatist approaches across multiple layers of the Jewish middle class in the Yishuv.

In response to the outbreak of the Arab Revolt of 1936, a coterie of five prominent entrepreneurs and intellectuals in the Mandatory Jewish community formulated a capitalist binationalist resolution of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. This paper examines the genesis of and debate over the little-known Concord they proposed and compares it with better-known liberal and socialist binationalist plans. “The Five,” as they came to be known, were the only binationalists seeking to base political parity on economic integration. The occasion of their blueprint allows further exploration of the preconditions for an effective binationalist program, among them the structure of labor markets, political preferences of minorities and majorities in regard to sovereignty, and levels of mutual trust. Ultimately, binationalist resolutions of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict were precluded by the Labor Settlement Movement's separatist state-building strategy.

This article focuses on the writings and literary networks of the Egyptian intellectual and activist Sayyid Qutb during the late 1940s. Scholars have tended to explain Qutb's political radicalization and joining of the Muslim Brotherhood during the subsequent decade via aspects of his personality or personal life, such as his quick temper, conservatism, or frustration over unfulfilled aspirations to become a writer. Drawing on three periodicals published respectively by leftist, Islamist, and independent aspiring writers, I instead place Qutb's criticism of political, economic, and cultural elites in the context of an emerging generation of critical intellectuals. By shedding light on intellectual cooperation between Qutb, Muslim Brothers, Marxists, and independent writers, this article challenges established scholarly narratives that locate the Islamist project outside the Egyptian intellectual field.

When World War I ended and the political map of the Middle East was redrawn, the ruler-straight borders separating the Fertile Crescent countries were not determined wholly in Europe, when the mandates were divided between Britain and France, as is commonly believed. The border between Syria and Iraq was determined between 1918 and 1920, when Iraqi officers serving in the Syrian army brought about the annexation of regions originally designated for British-occupied Iraq to Faysal 's Arab government in Syria.

The oil price increases in the 1970s caused a transfer of wealth from importers to exporters and resulted in three major consequences. It led to a series of shocks in the economies of the industrial countries. It reduced further the slow pace of growth in the non-OPEC LDCs, and it distorted the sectoral growth in OPEC itself. Such unwarranted results have attracted the attention of both scholars and decision makers.

This article, which draws largely from Arabica press sources from 1885 to 1900, seeks to sharpen our view of social attitudes reflected in the activities of local Freemasons in Egypt and Syria during the last decades of the Ottoman Empite. A number of earlier historians have attached considerable importance to pre- and post-1908 masonic orders and Ottoman politics. Too few, however, have tried to analyze ways in which essential social themes, some widely recognized as having importance across international and intercultural lines, were viewed through the perspective of late 19th-century Freemasonry. A first task in this introduction, therefore, will be to see how Masons in Europe and the Middle East viewed, or were presumed to view, a number of such social themes in general terms. We will then turn to one specific issue which clearly assumed more than passing importance as a propagandistic cause pursued by a small but influential group of Masons in Syria and Egypt over nearly two decades' time. We may tentatively suggest that the purpose of such endeavors was to encourage majority acceptance of the relevance and value of a cause espoused for the body politic as a whole, without necessary reference to its original, here clearly minority, proponents.

At the dawn of the 21st century the “War on Terror” ushered in an era in which some were besieged by wars and others by war-related imagery. For the fortunate who live outside of war zones, mostly in the Global North and West, the experience of war has been primarily a mediated one. With the advent of digital imagery and its many evolving and developing technological transmutations, the possibilities of reproduction, representation, manipulation, and circulation have grown exponentially in the past twenty years. Yet in the grand scheme of human communication history, the “pictorial turn” is a relatively recent phenomenon that requires further analysis. In this article, I unpack and analyze some of the key media moments from the vast visual lexicon and iconography of the “War on Terror” to reveal its scaffolding and machinations and offer counterstrategies of resistance. I argue that the “War on Terror” is the orchestrated sum of literal and figurative imagery, a coordinated public relations disinformation media campaign designed to hide real wars and their true destruction and costs.

This article explores the performative politics of devotional soundscapes at Coptic Christian mūlid festivals. Echoing the state's reformist efforts in the 1990s to transform Muslim saint festivals into utilitarian spaces and their goers into “modern” Egyptian citizens, today the Coptic Church works to refashion these popular festivals from places of debauchery into morally productive spaces. Aided by affluent Cairene-based volunteers, church choirs travel from Cairo's poshest neighborhoods to these festivals to actively sing, disseminate, and teach popular religious songs (taratīl) in an effort to develop poorer Christian pilgrims into modern, pious, and more audible “citizens of heaven.” Through the analysis of one church choir's taratīl ministry at the mūlid, I illustrate how middle-class spiritual volunteers disrupt and, at times, reinscribe the Coptic Church's disciplinary efforts on the festival's poorer pilgrims, particularly as they look to modernize popular festivity into grounds of Christian ethical transformation.

There is a stock argument on whether Iraq is an “artificial” creation of colonial power or a “real” entity with historical and psychological depth and identity. It is a futile question because all nation–states, in one form or another, are historical creations. The processes of their creation are diverse and lead to different outcomes in the degree of coherence and permanence. Our thinking on the subject has been highly influenced by the seminal concepts advanced by Benedict Anderson on the “imagining” of the nation, which is, in turn, underlined by the socioeconomic processes of modernity. The state, often superimposed from above, is a principal actor in this process. Educational systems, tied to qualifications and employment, for instance, are powerful means of enforcing a unified national language and, in turn, the medium of literacy, the press and media, and the means of imagining the nation. The state makes the nation, more or less successfully. The intelligentsia are the cadres of these processes. They and the state class, with which they overlap, are subject to the vagaries of political conflicts and struggles and, in the case of Middle Eastern states, to the repression and violence of the state and militant sectors of the population. In the case of Iraq these troublesome manifestations are particularly evident. The books under review are concerned with these processes and in particular with the role of the ideological cadres and institutions in their unfolding.

During the final years of Ottoman rule and the three decades of British rule, Palestine witnessed the emergence of a community of professionally trained Palestinian Arab doctors. This study traces the evolution of the medical profession in Palestine against the background of the shifting cultural and symbolic capital of an expanding urban middle class and the educational possibilities that enabled this development. Palestinian Arab doctors are examined through a number of interconnected prisms: their activity in social, political, and professional regional networks, their modus operandi under British colonial rule, their response to Zionism and its accompanying influx of immigrant Jewish doctors, and their ability to mobilize collectively under a shared national vision.

Consider the data from the painstaking economic analysis of contemporary camel transport in Pakistan done by Alan Heston and several Pakistani associates in 1985 (see Table 1). It shows the typical annual costs and income in rupees of someone earning his livelihood by renting out a pack camel.

The Arab Rebellion in Palestine began with sporadic outbursts of terrorism on April 19, 1936. The ensuing disorders and the Arab general strike that followed were in retaliation against the British refusal to grant three demands first put by the Arab leadership of Palestine to the Mandatory in November, 1935. The three demands were: (a) total cessation of Jewish immigration into Palestine; (b) prohibition of all sales of Arab land to Jews; and (c) the granting of independence to Palestine and the ending of the Mandate.

Research on the Copts of Egypt has developed especially rapidly in new directions during the past twenty years. Having started as a corollary of Egyptology, it is advancing from the study of the early Christian centuries to include medieval, early modern, and contemporary Coptic Studies. Concurrently, Coptic issues are being inserted into studies of Egypt in general. Publications on the 19th century mostly ignored Copts, but they were given stereotypical cameo appearances in the prolific research on the profound transformations in 20th-century Egyptian society.

United States diplomatic historians have traditionally claimed that American foreign-policy makers employed the Open-Door principle in the Middle East after World War I merely to defend American rights from the Allied efforts to achieve economic hegemony over Turkey and other parts of the old Ottoman Empire. However, William Appleman Williams — supported by the works of several younger scholars — has asserted that Woodrow Wilson used the, Open Door to promote American economic expansion. Williams maintains that the Open Door was not an ad hoc policy, fashioned simply to meet the immediate postwar challenge of the Allies — as the traditional historians have alleged. Nor was it British-inspired, idealistic policy that received only sporadic support during the twentieth century, as George F. Kennan has asserted. According to Williams, the Open Door was an American-designed tactic that diplomats used continuously throughout the first half of the twentieth century for the express purpose of promoting American expansion, with a view to creating an American economic empire, a process that resulted in the extension of American political and economic influence.

The new states of Africa encounter particularly difficult problems of reconciling pressures for rapid socio-economic change with the orderly transfer of power to new leadership. A number of recent commentaries on the discontinuities and crisis of developing countries have challenged the notion, in large part derived from Western political experience, that some sort of incremental reconciliation between the social effects of development and the political restructuring of society will steadily occur. The models used in comparative politics admit conflict, but they do not go very far in telling us how these forces interact in the policy machinery of a developing country. Moreover, while the primacy of politics continues, it is doubtful if new social and economic forces in the society are welcomed, and sometimes even recognized, by the existing élite.

What is the relationship among gender, embodiment, and consumption? How does the media constitute consumers, desires, and subjectivities? How are we to conceptualize the role of media representations in the making of bodies and selves without granting these representations a deterministic power? These questions were central to my anthropological work on the embodiment of femininities and masculinities in a low-income neighborhood in northern Cairo.

When the Prophet Muhammad died on 7 June 632, the larger part of Arabia had already accepted Islam. In fact, Islam had created a solid Arab community that dominated Arabia and was ready to begin its amazing expansive movement in world history. The Arab conquests put an end to the Sassanid Empire and deprived the Byzantine Empire of its Asiatic dominions up to the Taurus and all its African possessions. Muslim troops crossed Gibraltar and subdued almost all the Iberian peninsula. In brief: with their conquests in the seventh and eighth centuries (634–751) the Arabs became the neighbors of the Franks and Byzantines on the other side of the Mediterranean. In Asia the subjection of Persia brought them into northern India and the Turkish vassal states of China in Central Asia.