Al-Ahram Weekly | Books Supplement

		Al-Ahram Weekly Online 11 - 17 April 2002 Issue No.581
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Labour's loves lost
Workers and Peasants in the Modern Middle East, Joel Beinin, Cambridge University Press, 2001. pp207
One of the questions most historians of the Middle East eventually find themselves forced to address, no matter how indirectly, is that of capitalist development and, more specifically, why capitalist take-off neither sprang sui generis from this part of the world, nor proved adaptable in the unproblematic manner modernisation theory had postulated. They are not alone in facing this constraint: as Bryan Turner put it in Orientalism, Postmodernism and Globalism (1994), "one of the formative questions of classical sociology [was:] why did industrial capitalism first emerge in the West?"
No matter how convoluted the route, it will invariably lead back to that question -- which, it often seems, is just a way of paraphrasing the far more pressing problem of why we are where we are today (no matter who "we" may happen to be). Some scholars choose to ignore the one-way signs and trace the path whence it came, searching for the origin of the West's exceptionality; yet that option offers no exit from the teleological assumption that inevitable causality led us here (and them there). Essentialising answers have ranged from the cultural (the Ataturk school of thought, recently restated by a Turkish graduate student, who claimed in all sincerity that it had been impossible for Turkey to advance triumphantly toward progress as long as its alphabet contained four different letters to signify the same "h" sound) to the religious (Islam, unlike Protestantism, encourages no ethic of production and accumulation), the geographical (this part of the world was destined to remain agricultural) and even the climatic (heat induces lethargy).
On the flip side, these categories remain unchanged: their content is merely turned inside out, and adduced as proof that nothing inherent in culture, religion, geography, or climate (among others) doomed this part of the world to underdevelopment. More recently (although today, once again, the tide is turning), several historians went further, arguing for instance that an indigenous capitalist revolution was in fact underway in Egypt, as evidenced by transformations in intellectual life, agriculture, manufacturing and commerce, yet that Mohamed Ali's accession to power (elsewhere hailed as the harbinger of modernity) stifled it and hastened Egypt's subordinate integration into the world economy.
Joel Beinin seeks to distance himself from the confines of this debate, although his subject would appear firmly inscribed within its conceptual parameters. It is difficult to speak of workers and peasants, let alone mention them in the same title, along with the potentially incendiary terms "modern" and "Middle East," without addressing the question of capitalist development; and it is equally arduous to address that question without succumbing to the lure of comfortable categories. Beinin's approach, however, is exceptional in that it combines self-reflexive sensitivity with the ability to arrive at conclusions beyond the preface's cautionary statements.
If dissertations that eventually make it onto the shelves of bookstores lurk in wait for the general reader, that innocent and mythical figure, who will pick them up on a whim -- self-improvement, most likely -- and trudge through pages of impressively erudite analysis before throwing them down in a fit of pique or self-hatred, such books as Joel Beinin's have a different set of dilemmas to deal with. Books designed in the first place for the general reader, they must avoid both the didacticism of the academic text and the generalities of the tourist guide (the latter pitfall all the more likely when it is a tour through time, and not through space alone, that the author proposes). They must, in other words, inform without instructing.
Workers and Peasants in the Modern Middle East sets itself a challenging agenda in this respect, stating on the first page of the introduction that it "synthesizes and develops" much of what Beinin has taught at Stanford University in his graduate colloquium on Economic and Social History of the Modern Middle East for over a decade, while operating on the assumption that the material covered will interest an audience outside that relatively specialised field. In large part, this material has to do with the working people of the region, whose unrecorded lives Beinin sets out to retrieve in a broad framework stretching geographically from Anatolia to greater Syria, the Nile valley, the Tigris-Euphrates valley and the coasts of the Arabian peninsula, and historically from 1750 to the present day. While principally concerned with sketching out broad swathes of historical evolution, Beinin shifts focus to zoom in on the workers and peasants "who constitute the majority of every society," who "can and deserve to be historical subjects."
A principal obstacle facing any effort to survey the modern and contemporary history of this region on the basis of recent findings is the fragmented nature of new scholarship. The younger generation of historians studying the Ottoman Sultanate and its successor states can find it difficult to test their theoretical assumptions given the relative paucity of empirical data; for the immense archival wealth generated by the bureaucracies of this region will take several decades, and armies of dedicated researchers, to uncover and decode -- assuming that history, hardly a lucrative passion to begin with, remains relevant in a shrink-wrapped era of globalisation.
Until further study makes some measure of certainty possible, overviews are condemned to suggesting fruitful theoretical directions and summing up conventional wisdom on a relevant topic. Traditional historiography, however, cannot buttress the conclusions new theories imply, whether with regard to methodology or content. This is partly because it is tricky to weave a consistent narrative from often contradictory findings, which, even when they are not actively critical of each other for generational, ideological or methodological reasons, simply present very local realities that cannot be accommodated to a more sweeping region-wide tableau. By grouping them together in themes (peasants; artisans...), one runs the risk of glossing over the conflicts that have sometimes led to their existence in the first place, and creating the illusion of a seamless storyline which arouses a sense of dislocation in the reader. Often, too, only one study exists on a certain topic, and must serve as representative of a general, long-term or region-wide process.
Any discomfort one may feel while reading Beinin's introduction, and searching in vain for explicit statements of purpose, or hints at conclusions to come, may therefore be attributed to the fissures it reproduces, and which run through the field itself. Because social historians of the Middle East, like many of their counterparts engaged in the study of Europe, have investigated very circumscribed objects -- a village, a city, a religious or ethnic community, a social group (women, slaves...), it is very difficult to fit these neatly into the traditional political historiography, which teaches in terms of chronology, rulers and events. Shifting back and forth between the macropolitical and the microsocial, it is not always possible to locate and reveal the links between various processes or, if there are none, explain why that is so and how it can be.
Another problem that arises when Beinin tries to reconcile the evidence offered by old theories to the trends suggested by new ones is that he is often left without a conclusion. Thus, while he recognises astutely that nationalist historians agree with traditional Western historiography on Egypt regarding the criteria by which "progress" should be measured -- and they are the criteria determined by the West's historical experience -- he does not really suggest an alternative conceptual framework. Instead, he suggests only that "these early industrial efforts can be assessed in different terms." Then he restates the conclusions other scholars have arrived at, but without framing them in a language of success or failure.
Such remarks do not imply that any conclusion is necessary or even possible, of course; it is one of history's more engaging (or, depending on one's point of view, maddening) characteristics stubbornly to elude neat categories and satisfying denouements.
Once beyond this general overview, Beinin tackles the more detailed, complex aspects of his topic energetically. His analytical acuity is especially evident in the last three chapters: "Fikri al-Khuli's journey to Mahalla al-Kubra," "Populist nationalism, state-led development, and authoritarian regimes, 1939-1973," and "Post-populist reformation of the working class and peasantry." Of these, the first contrasts a textile worker's account of his experience in a spinning and weaving mill with the elite's utopian vision of industrialisation and its benefits. Rather than drawing simplistic conclusions, Beinin convincingly outlines the interests, privileges and perceptions that contributed to shaping two largely contradictory narratives of a single process. It is as a historian of labour movements (and, as here, of the human beings who constitute them) that his intellectual prowess and academic skill are deployed most fully.
He is equally incisive when explaining how capitalist relations of production could and did coexist with precapitalist forms of surplus extraction -- indeed, that the former were predicated on the latter: "In the specific semi- colonial situation of Egypt, 'modern' institutions and practices -- such as the cultivation and export of cotton for the world market or the local manufacture of cotton goods -- depended heavily on the persistence of 'premodern' institutions and practices -- such as the 'izba system, with its extra-economic means of surplus extraction..." Similarly, the reader interested in mid-20th century Egypt and accustomed to more usual accounts of the era's politics will be provoked by Beinin's assertion that Arab Marxists "unwittingly collaborated with the authoritarian-populist regimes in simultaneously empowering and disempowering workers and peasants."
In bringing to light such paradoxical processes, Beinin may well be mapping out an approach at odds with the rubric of social history under which he places this work. Rather, Workers and Peasants in the Modern Middle East can be seen as a successful attempt to reinsert the labouring classes within a chronological framework long dedicated to the chronicling of wars, state reforms and regime changes. Traditional historiography, when it mentioned workers and peasants, tended to present them largely as instruments, or passive recipients, of change imposed and guided from above. The top-down perspective thus robbed entire populations after death of a place in history from which their social subordination had already displaced them during their lives.
By definition, the disenfranchised have no voice in the dominant narrative, whether one weaves it from annual state budgets, political reports, deeds of property purchase or probate inventories. In Europe, microhistorians have sought to read some of these documents, and especially the accounts of court trials, against the grain, to restore the voices of those history silenced twice; in Egypt, and more generally in the Arab world, such attempts are only beginning. Having established a solid theoretical framework, what Beinin has done, then, is to locate and emphasise the focal points where more detailed investigation could reveal hitherto unsuspected elements -- elements that could change the bigger picture permanently. And if he refrains from "making the subalterns speak," it is largely because, as Beinin himself points out, at this stage in the history of Arab historiography, such an effort would almost inevitably be reduced to an exercise in ventriloquism.
Reviewed by Pascale Ghazaleh

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