Little has been written about the economic history of Egypt prior to its incorporation into the European capitalist economy. While historians have mined archives and court documents to create a picture of the commercial activities, networks, and infrastructure of merchants during this time, few have documented a similar picture of the artisans and craftspeople. Artisans outnumbered merchants, and their economic weight was considerable, yet details about their lives, the way they carried out their work, and their role or position in the economy are largely unknown. Hanna seeks to redress this gap with Artisan Entrepreneurs in Cairo and Early Modern Capitalism (1600–1800) by locating and exploring the role of artisans in the historical process. Offering richly detailed portraits as well as an overview of the Ottoman Empire’s economic landscape, Hanna incorporates artisans into the historical development of the period, portraying them in the context of their work, their families, and their social relations. These artisans developed a variety of capitalist practices, both as individuals and collectively in their guilds. Responding to the demands of expanding commercial environments in Egypt and Europe, artisans found ways to adapt both production techniques and the organization of production. Hanna details the ways in which artisans defied the constraints of the guilds and actively engaged in the markets of Europe, demonstrating how Egyptian artisan production was able to compete and survive in a landscape of growing European trade. Deftly synthesizing a wide range of economic and historical theory, Hanna reinvigorates the current scholarship on early Ottoman history and provides a persuasive challenge to the largely shallow perception of artisans’ role in Egypt’s economy.

Aiming to place Egypt clearly in the context of some of the major worldwide transformations of the three centuries from 1500 to 1800, Nelly Hanna questions the mainstream view that has identified the main sources of modern world history as the Reformation, the expansion of Europe into America and Asia, the formation of trading companies, and scientific discoveries. Recent scholarship has challenged this approach on account of its Eurocentric bias, on both the theoretical and empirical levels. Studies on India and southeast Asia, for example, reject the models of these regions as places without history, as stagnant and in decline, and as awakening only with the emergence of colonialism when they became the recipients of European culture and technology. So far, Egypt and the rest of the Ottoman world have been left out of these approaches. Nelly Hanna fills this gap by showing that there were worldwide trends that touched Egypt, India, southeast Asia, and Europe. In all these areas, for example, there were linguistic shifts that brought the written language closer to the spoken word. She also demonstrates that technology and know-how, far from being centered only in Europe, flowed in different directions: in the eighteenth century, French entrepreneurs were trying to imitate the techniques of bleaching and dyeing of cloth that they found in Egypt and other Ottoman localities. Based on a series of lectures given at the Middle East Center at Harvard, this groundbreaking book will be of interest to all those looking for a different perspective on the history of south-north relations.

Aiming to place Egypt clearly in the context of some of the major worldwide transformations of the three centuries from 1500 to 1800, Nelly Hanna questions the mainstream view that has identified the main sources of modern world history as the Reformation, the expansion of Europe into America and Asia, the formation of trading companies, and scientific discoveries. Recent scholarship has challenged this approach on account of its Eurocentric bias, on both the theoretical and empirical levels. Studies on India and southeast Asia, for example, reject the models of these regions as places without history, as stagnant and in decline, and as awakening only with the emergence of colonialism when they became the recipients of European culture and technology. So far, Egypt and the rest of the Ottoman world have been left out of these approaches. Nelly Hanna fills this gap by showing that there were worldwide trends that touched Egypt, India, southeast Asia, and Europe. In all these areas, for example, there were linguistic shifts that brought the written language closer to the spoken word. She also demonstrates that technology and know-how, far from being centered only in Europe, flowed in different directions: in the eighteenth century, French entrepreneurs were trying to imitate the techniques of bleaching and dyeing of cloth that they found in Egypt and other Ottoman localities. Based on a series of lectures given at the Middle East Center at Harvard, this groundbreaking book will be of interest to all those looking for a different perspective on the history of south-north relations.

Paul M. Love, Jr. explores the history of the minority Ibadi Muslim community in Cairo from the seventeenth to the early twentieth centuries. Using a unique range of sources, Love both illuminates the events of Egyptian history and highlights the role of the Ibadis in shaping political, religious, and commercial life in Ottoman-era Cairo.

This book examines the reasons behind the Great Divergence. Kaveh Yazdani analyzes India’s socio-economic, techno-scientific, military, political and institutional developments. The focus is on Gujarat between the 17th and early 19th centuries and Mysore during the second half of the 18th century.

The first volume of The Cambridge Economic History of the Modern World traces the emergence of modern economic growth in eighteenth century Britain and its spread across the globe. Focusing on the period from 1700 to 1870, a team of leading experts in economic history offer a series of regional studies from around the world, as well as thematic analyses of key factors governing the differential outcomes in different parts of the global economy. Topics covered include population and human development, capital and technology, geography and institutions, living standards and inequality, international flows of trade and labour, the international monetary system, and war and empire.

Is it possible to generate "capitalist spirit" in a society, where cultural, economic and political conditions did not unfold into an industrial revolution, and consequently into an advanced industrial-capitalist formation? This is exactly what some prominent public intellectuals in the late Ottoman Empire tried to achieve as a developmental strategy; long before Max Weber defined the notion of capitalist spirit as the main motive behind the development of capitalism. This book demonstrates how and why Ottoman reformists adapted (English and French) economic theory to the Ottoman institutional setting and popularized it to cultivate bourgeois values in the public sphere as a developmental strategy. It also reveals the imminent results of these efforts by presenting examples of how bourgeois values permeated into all spheres of socio-cultural life, from family life to literature, in the late Ottoman Empire. The text examines how the interplay between Western European economic theories and the traditional Muslim economic cultural setting paved the way for a new synthesis of a Muslim-capitalist value system; shedding light on the emergence of capitalism—as a cultural and an economic system—and the social transformation it created in a non-Western, and more specifically, in the Muslim Middle Eastern institutional setting. This book will be of great interest to scholars of modern Middle Eastern history, economic history, and the history of economic thought.