The Pasha's Peasants: Land, society, and economy in Lower Egypt, 1740-1858
Synthetic audio, Automated braille
Summary
This book presents a revisionist view of the eighteenth-and nineteenth-century rural origins of modern Egypt. By adopting a long-term perspective it offers an alternative to most intrepretations of Egypt’s past which, in my view, draw too sharp a distinction between… the “Ottoman” and “modern” periods. I have abandoned the view of modern Egypt as Sleeping Beauty, according to which the country’s “awakening” as a modern nation was the result of contact with Europe. I do not claim to have a new theoretical approach, but merely a sensible one that permits us to see a greater degree of continuity in Egyptian rural history than traditional views admit, and to identify areas of genuinely significant change that heretofore have been overlooked or not well under¬stood.