Workers and Peasants in the Modern Middle East


Book Description

Joel Beinin's book offers a survey of subaltern history in the Middle East.




Workers and Peasants in the Modern Middle East


Book Description

The working people, who constitute the majority in any society, can be and deserve to be subjects of history. Joel Beinin's state-of-the-art survey of subaltern history in the Middle East demonstrates lucidly how their lives, experiences, and culture can inform our historical understanding. Beginning in the eighteenth century, the book charts the history of the peasants and the modern working classes across the lands of the Ottoman Empire and its Muslim-majority successor-states. Inspired by the approach of the Indian subaltern Studies school, the book presents a synthetic assessment of the scholarly work on the social history of the region for over thirty years. Students will find it rich in detail, and accessible in presentation.




A History of the Modern Middle East


Book Description

A History of the Modern Middle East offers a comprehensive assessment of the region, stretching from the fourteenth century and the founding of the Ottoman and Safavid empires through to the present-day protests and upheavals. The textbook focuses on Turkey, Iran, and the Arab countries of the Middle East, as well as areas often left out of Middle East history—such as the Balkans and the changing roles that Western forces have played in the region for centuries—to discuss the larger contexts and influences on the region's cultural and political development. Enriched by the perspectives of workers and professionals; urban merchants and provincial notables; slaves, students, women, and peasants, as well as political leaders, the book maps the complex social interrelationships and provides a pivotal understanding of the shifting shapes of governance and trajectories of social change in the Middle East. Extensively illustrated with drawings, photographs, and maps, this text skillfully integrates a diverse range of actors and influences to construct a narrative that is at once sophisticated and lucid. A History of the Modern Middle East highlights the region's complexity and variation, countering easy assumptions about the Middle East, those who governed, and those they governed—the rulers, rebels, and rogues who shaped a region.




Workers on the Nile


Book Description

In this reissue of a book that was hailed as groundbreaking almost as soon as it was published, the authors examine the role of trade unionism and the working class in the development of Egyptian nationalism during the first half of the twentieth century. Beinin and Lockman examine "the dialectic of class and nation [and] the formation of a new class of wage workers as Egypt experienced a particular kind of capitalist development ... and these workers' adoption of various forms of consciousness, organization, and collective action in a political and economic context structured by the realities of foreign domination and the struggle for national independence." "This work breaks new ground in contemporary Western scholarship on the Middle East and challenges Orientalist assumptions that classes do not exist, or play only an insignificant role. The authors' careful and comprehensive account of the workers and their unions is obviously understanding of, and sympathetic to, the working class. Yet it is free of the rather mechanistic and reductionist analyses of earlier writings on the subject." -- Nazih Ayubi, MESA Bulletin.




Industrial Sexuality


Book Description

Introduction. Townspeople, company people, and textiles : a woven history -- Pt. I. Gendered experiences -- 1. Competing masculinities : docile workers, aggressive afandiyya, and the mechanization of the modern subject -- 2. Urbanizing masculinity : workers, weavers, and futuwwat in violent alliances and fluid identities -- 3. Mechanizing women : industrial workers or women adrift? -- 4. Ladies in urban times : work, property, and gender in the modernity of the poor -- Pt. II. Industrial sexuality -- 5. Sexually speaking : unveiling the harassment of women, child molestation, homosexuality, and hetero-intimacy in industrial-urban space -- 6. Striking and sex-working : living with tuberculosis, syphilis, and other monsters -- Conclusion. The anxiety of transition




Justice Interrupted


Book Description

The Arab Spring uprising of 2011 is portrayed as a dawn of democracy in the region. But the revolutionaries were—and saw themselves as—heirs to a centuries-long struggle for just government and the rule of law. In Justice Interrupted we see the complex lineage of political idealism, reform, and violence that informs today’s Middle East.




Contending Visions of the Middle East


Book Description

This second edition considers how the 'global war on terror' has changed the way the West views the Islamic world.




The Modern Middle East


Book Description

This hugely successful, ground-breaking book is the first introductory textbook on the Modern Middle East to foreground the urban, rural, cultural and women’s histories of the region over its political and economic history. Ilan Pappé begins his narrative at the end of the First World War with the Ottoman heritage, and concludes at the present day with the political discourse of Islam. Providing full geographical coverage of the region, The Modern Middle East: opens with a carefully argued introduction which outlines the methodology used in the textbook provides a thematic and comparative approach to the region, helping students to see the peoples of the Middle East and the developments that affect their lives as part of a larger world includes insights gained from new historiographical trends and a critical approach to conventional state- and nation-centred historiographies includes case studies, debates, maps, photos, an up-to-date bibliography and a glossarial index. This second edition has been brought right up to date with recent events, and includes a new chapter on the media revolution and the effect of media globalization on the Middle East, and a revised and expanded discussion on modern Iranian history.




Workers and Thieves


Book Description

Since the 1990s, the Middle East has experienced an upsurge of wildcat strikes, sit-ins, and workers' demonstrations. Well before people gathered in Tahrir Square to demand the ouster of Hosni Mubarak, workers had formed one of the largest oppositional movements to authoritarian rule in Egypt. In Tunisia, years prior to the 2011 Arab uprisings, the unemployed chanted in protest, "A job is a right, you pack of thieves!" Despite this history, most observers have failed to acknowledge the importance of workers in the social ferment preceding the removal of Egyptian and Tunisian autocrats and in the political realignments after their demise. In Workers and Thieves, Joel Beinin corrects this by surveying the efforts and impacts of the workers' movements in Egypt and Tunisia since the 1970s. He argues that the 2011 uprisings in these countries—and, importantly, their vastly different outcomes—are best understood within the context of these repeated mobilizations of workers and the unemployed over recent decades.




The Middle East and the Making of the Modern World


Book Description

In The Middle East and the Making of the Modern World, Cyrus Schayegh takes up a fundamental problem historians face: how to make sense of the spatial layeredness of the past. He argues that the modern world’s ultimate socio-spatial feature was not the oft-studied processes of globalization or state formation or urbanization. Rather, it was fast-paced, mutually transformative intertwinements of cities, regions, states, and global circuits, a bundle of processes he calls transpatialization. To make this case, Schayegh’s study pivots around Greater Syria (Bilad al-Sham in Arabic), which is roughly coextensive with present-day Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, and Israel/Palestine. From this region, Schayegh looks beyond, to imperial and global connections, diaspora communities, and neighboring Egypt, Iraq, and Turkey. And he peers deeply into Bilad al-Sham: at cities and their ties, and at global economic forces, the Ottoman and European empire-states, and the post-Ottoman nation-states at work within the region. He shows how diverse socio-spatial intertwinements unfolded in tandem during a transformative stretch of time, the mid-nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries, and concludes with a postscript covering the 1940s to 2010s.