![]() Despite the lack of settled conceptual or geographic definitions for the region, certain patterns can be discerned.įew zones of the world have been so riven by opposition, real or imagined, for as long as Europe and the Middle East. To chart the historical terrain, this essay tracks the making and unmaking of social compacts and state formations in the Middle East and North Africa ( mena), amid changing political-economic conditions, across five broad chronological periods: the tail end of the Ottoman and Persian empires, the colonial interlude, the era of political independence, the infitah years of economic opening, and the current upheaval of unrest and militarization. Though the actors have changed since Tahtawi and Amin discussed the relation of emerging social formations to state building, the debates over the prospects for regional order, popular cohesion, and political rejuvenation remain largely unaltered. footnote 3 Qasim Amin’s The Liberation of Women and The New Woman appeared not long after. Writing in 1869, Rifa’a al-Tahtawi hoped that the development of labour in Egypt and other Muslim states might speed ‘the advancement of societies’. Today, not coincidentally, Egypt lags behind other middle-income states in industrial capacity, as well as being the world’s largest importer of wheat.Īmid these nineteenth-century efforts at geopolitical renewal, Egyptian intellectuals attempted a synthesis of Islamic political thought and European political economy. footnote 2 It was not until the rule of Gamal Abdel Nasser that such statist attempts would occur again in North Africa, to be met once more with external military response. Egypt experienced rapid under-development, becoming an exporter of raw commodities and an importer of European manufactures for the next century. Under duress, Ali signed a series of capitulations which opened Egyptian markets, dismantled its manufacturing base and defanged its military. Eventually, British and Austrian navies cut off Egyptian supply lines and entered Alexandria’s waters. ![]() The Ottoman Sultan could do little about it. Ali’s troops marched on Palestine, Syria and then Greece, claiming territory and stationing men. A veteran of the Napoleonic wars, the Wahhabi revolt and the Greek rebellion, Ali administered Egypt as a province of the Sublime Porte in name only in reality he was forging a Mediterranean Prussia. footnote 1 The Albanian-born governor of Ottoman Egypt, Mehmed Ali, had spent the past two decades building up a formidable industrial and military capacity in his assigned territories. I n 1840, a coalition of European powers decided to take on an alarming problem to their south.
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