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English edition
Sep
2011
256 pp.
Hardbound
15X23 cm
$29.95
LE 150.00
ISBN
978 977 416 479 8
For sale only in the Middle East
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Artisan Entrepreneurs in Cairo and Early Modern Capitalism 1600–1800
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Nelly Hanna
The role and economy of craftspeople in early modern Egypt
While historians have mined archives and court documents to create a picture of the commercial activities, networks, and infrastructure of merchants in Egypt prior to its incorporation into the European capitalist economy, 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 is largely unknown. Nelly Hanna seeks to redress this gap by locating and exploring the role of artisans in the historical process.
These artisans developed a variety of capitalist practices, both as individuals and collectively in their guilds. Hanna details how they 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.
NeIly Hanna is professor and chair of the Department of Arabic Studies at the American University in Cairo. She is the author of In Praise of Books (AUC Press, 2004) and Making Big Money in 1600 (AUC Press, 1998).
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Reviews
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“An extremely important and original book that fills a black hole not only in Egyptian social history but also that of Ottoman history in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.”—Huri Islamoglu, editor of Constituting Modernity: Private Property in the East and West
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