NY Times May 28, 2011 The Weak Foundations of Arab Democracy By TIMUR KURAN
Durham, N.C. A less powerful business sector also hindered democracy. The Middle East reached the industrial era with an atomistic private sector unequipped to compete with giant enterprises that had come to dominate the global economy. Until then, Arab businesses consisted exclusively of small, short-lived enterprises established under Islamic partnership law. This was a byproduct of Islam’s egalitarian inheritance system, which aimed to spread wealth. Successful enterprises were typically dissolved when a partner died, and to avoid the consequent losses Arab businessmen kept their enterprises both small and transitory. Arab businesses had less political clout than their counterparts in Western Europe, where huge, established companies contributed to civil society directly as a political force against arbitrary government. They also did so indirectly by supporting social causes. For example, during industrialization, major European businesses financed political campaigns, including the mass education and antislavery movements. full: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/29/opinion/29kuran.html --- http://www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/4932/new-texts-out-now_nelly-hanna-artisan-entrepreneur New Texts Out Now: Nelly Hanna, Artisan Entrepreneurs in Cairo and Early Modern Capitalism (1600-1800) Apr 04 2012 by Nelly Hanna Nelly Hanna, Artisan Entrepreneurs in Cairo and Early Modern Capitalism (1600-1800). Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2011. Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book, and what particular topics, issues, and literatures does it address? Nelly Hanna (NH): The book is part of a large body of literature that deals with the artisans and guilds of the Ottoman Empire. Scholars have written about artisans in Istanbul, Bursa, Aleppo, and Jerusalem (including Suraiya Faroqhi, Abdul Karim Rafeq, Haim Gerber, and others). More specifically, my work on with the artisans in Cairo follows the same tradition as the work of two other scholars, namely Andre Raymond, whose work was fundamental in showing the socio-economic status of artisans and their changing relations to the Mamluk class, and Pascale Ghazaleh. One of the issues the book tackles is how to study artisans and guilds, not only in the context of a traditional society and economy, but rather in the context of a period which was undergoing significant changes (1600-1800), due to both local and to regional conditions. The approach it uses is that of “history from below,” since one of the questions that it addresses is how to define a role for these artisans and guilds in the context of the prevailing commercial conditions of the period, but also as a source of developments in the nineteenth century. The book also addresses the core-periphery model of the world systems approach and attempts to include artisans in this model. In other words, rather than discuss the core-periphery model solely in relation to merchants and commercial activity, it incorporates artisans and their products into the model. Thus on the one hand it deals, at a micro level, with the individual lives of artisans, following the lives of a few artisan families over several generations, focusing on their work and on their relations to guilds and the economy, as well as to their families and colleagues. At the macro level, these artisans are placed in the context of the broad global and regional changes of the period 1600-1800, namely the greater world trade and more intensive commercial exchanges taking place worldwide. By combining these two different levels, links could be made between the local and the global, between the artisans who worked their product and the expanding horizons of international trade. The question around which the book revolves is how these artisans fared in the light of these conditions. The book comes up with the idea of “trade without periphery,” a term to describe the period as one during which the region as a whole underwent a certain level of commercialization, but did not undergo the peripheralization of its economy, as happened in the nineteenth century. The same concept could be applied to other regions, such as other parts of the Ottoman Empire or India, which experienced similar conditions, and where commercialization brought about a certain social mobility, both upwards and downwards. (clip) _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
