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Until recently, the historiography of Middle Eastern economic elites during the first globalization has ignored the significant role played by Muslim tujjār (big merchant-entrepreneurs). Foreign firms and local minorities were considered the prime agents of economic change and the initiators of economic growth. The 12 studies in this volume show that the Muslim tujjār played a major economic role in various regions of the Middle East during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Their investments, mainly in commercial agriculture, resulted in economic growth and changed economic structures and social relations in many Middle Eastern communities. They were also involved in polit...
Like other regions within the Ottoman Empire, Palestine at the turn of the nineteenth century underwent extensive economic and social changes. These encompassed the demography, society and economics of the various ecological groups of the population. The articles in this volume present different aspects of this long and complex process. They fall thematically into four groups. The first, which includes articles by U.O. Schmelz and Ruth Kark, focuses on demographic and urban developments. the second, with articles by Ya'akov Firestone and Yossi Ben-Artzi, offers various views of changes in the village and in agriculture in Palestine. The third part, containing articles by Shmuel Avitsur, Walt...
State and Peasant in the Ottoman Empire studies the dynamics of Ottoman peasant economy in the sixteenth century. First, it shows that contrary to the conventional wisdom about the 'stationariness'of the Asian agrarian economies, Ottoman peasant economy witnessed substantial growth in response to population increase, urban commercial expansion and to increased taxation demands. Second, the book argues that economic development did not take place independently of political structures, of the state. This meant that in the light of the fiscal and legitimation concerns of the Ottoman state and contrary to the assumptions of the models of economic development, changes in population and in commercial demand did not result in the disruption of the integrity of the small peasant holding as the primary unit of production. The book develops these arguments in the context of a detailed empirical study of the economic trends, of the state rules or institutions that embodied the relations of revenue extraction, and of exchange in Ottoman Anatolia.
In a timely reminder of how the past informs the present, Baruch Kimmerling and Joel Migdal offer an authoritative account of the history of the Palestinian people from their modern origins to the Oslo peace process and beyond. Palestinians struggled to create themselves as a people from the first revolt of the Arabs in Palestine in 1834 through the British Mandate to the impact of Zionism and the founding of Israel. Their relationship with the Jewish people and the State of Israel has been fundamental in shaping that identity, and today Palestinians find themselves again at a critical juncture. In the 1990s cornerstones for peace were laid for eventual Palestinian-Israeli coexistence, inclu...
"Der Band behandelt das geographische Syrien im 18. und 19. Jh. Dieser Zeitraum war von tiefgreifenden wirtschaftlichen Veranderungen gepragt, insbesondere der allmahlichen Integration des Osmanischen Reiches in den Weltmarkt. Die hier vorgestellten neuen Fragen und Forschungsrichtungen, die zu einem differenzierteren Bild der osmanischen Herrschaft beitragen, beziehen wesentliche Impulse aus sozial- und wirtschaftsgeschichtlichen Ansatzen. ... Je ein Index fur Personen- und Ortsnamen sowie Begriffe runden den Band ab. Man kann nur hoffen, daa diese Art der sozial- und wirtschaftshistorischen Nahostforschung, die sich bislang weitgehend im anglo-amerikanischen und arabischen Raum entwickelt hat, auch in Deutschland weitere Verbreitung finden wird." Orientalistische Literaturzeitung "athe book is a major contribution to the study of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Syria. The authors, the editors, and the publisher are to be commended for producing this important publication." Journal of Near Eastern Studies . (Franz Steiner 1998)
Focused on three Egyptian revolutions—in 1919, 1952, and 2011—this edited book argues that each of these revolutions is a milestone which represents a meaningful turning point in modern Egyptian history. Revolutions are typically characterized by a fundamental change in political and social infrastructures as well as in the establishment of new values and norms. However, it should be noted that this may not be entirely applicable when examining the context of the three Egyptian revolutions: the 1919 revolution failed to liberate Egypt from British colonial hegemony; the 1952 revolution failed to rework the country’s social and economic systems and unify the Arab world; and the "Arab Sp...
With new and existing evidence being reconsidered, this edited collection takes a multidisciplinary approach to discussing the Qajar system within the context of the wars that engulfed it and the periods of peace that ensued. It throws new light on the decision-making processes, the restraints on action, and the political exigencies at play during the Qajar years.
Scholars have long thought that, following the Muslim Golden Age of the medieval era, the Ottoman Empire grew culturally and technologically isolated, losing interest in innovation and placing the empire on a path toward stagnation and decline. Science among the Ottomans challenges this widely accepted Western image of the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Ottomans as backward and impoverished. In the first book on this topic in English in over sixty years, Miri Shefer-Mossensohn contends that Ottoman society and culture created a fertile environment that fostered diverse scientific activity. She demonstrates that the Ottomans excelled in adapting the inventions of others to their own ...
Electricity is an integral part of everyday life—so integral that we rarely think of it as political. In Electrical Palestine, Fredrik Meiton illustrates how political power, just like electrical power, moves through physical materials whose properties govern its flow. At the dawn of the Arab-Israeli conflict, both kinds of power were circulated through the electric grid that was built by the Zionist engineer Pinhas Rutenberg in the period of British rule from 1917 to 1948. Drawing on new sources in Arabic, Hebrew, and several European languages, Electrical Palestine charts a story of rapid and uneven development that was greatly influenced by the electric grid and set the stage for the conflict between Arabs and Jews. Electrification, Meiton shows, was a critical element of Zionist state building. The outcome in 1948, therefore, of Jewish statehood and Palestinian statelessness was the result of a logic that was profoundly conditioned by the power system, a logic that has continued to shape the area until today.