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De-coca-colonizing Egypt: globalization, decolonization, and the Egyptian boycott of Coca-Cola, 1966–68*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 February 2014

Maurice Jr M. Labelle
Maurice Jr M. Labelle*
Affiliation:
University of Saskatchewan E-mail: [email protected]
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Abstract

In the middle of the twentieth century, many Egyptians welcomed the arrival of Coca-Cola.Yet the Egyptian embrace of Coke drastically declined when, in April 1966, the firm consented to the opening of a bottling franchise in Israel. This article explores the de-coca-colonization of post-independence Egypt. The Coca-Cola Company's reluctance to revoke its commercial extension into Israel obliged the Egyptian government to reject the multinational corporation's discourse of development, view Coke as a political threat, vote in favour of an Arab League boycott, and ultimately close its borders to Coca-Cola. By doing so, the Cairo government did not reject either cultural globalization or economic modernization, nor was it disconnected from the global flow of capital, people, ideas, and goods, but it chose to concentrate its support on one of these processes: decolonization.

Keywords

Arab–Israeli conflictCoca-ColadecolonizationEgyptmodernization
Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Global History , Volume 9 , Issue 1 , March 2014 , pp. 122 - 142
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2014 

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Footnotes

*

I would like to thank Petra Goedde, Waleed Hazbun, Sean Byrnes, Lema Chemini, Jake Hogan, and the editors of the Journal of Global History, as well as the two anonymous reviewers for their help as I wrote this article. I would also like to thank Salim Yaqub for suggesting the title.

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