In considering the trajectory of knowledge production, it is often useful to take note of the broader circumstances which propelled it or retarded it as later scholarly efforts inevitably build from what went before. Such knowledge is thus useful. This paper considers two examples in which the writing of economic history appears to have been affected by the rise and fall of the Development Revolution of the Post-War period; one of these examples is drawn from the study of modern Egyptian economic history and the other from pre-modern Egyptian economic history In the case of the study of modern Egyptian economic history , the Development Revolution spurred the development of the field. Thus, for example, the production of Egyptian cotton stimulated a considerable interest not only in government circles but among those in academia as well although interestingly by the 1970’s cotton as a commodity was less important than it had been a generation or so earlier. What had come and gone was the Development Revolution; this appears to have been the driving force behind this economic history. The subsequent economic development of the country did not result in the production of works on modern economic history of the same sort. The new economy based on petro-chemical exports, tourism and diversified agriculture seemed to result in economic history mutating into business history. The Development Revolution apparently had the opposite impact on the study of pre modern economic history. Where as for the modern period the two went hand in hand, for the study of Ottoman Egypt for the period 1945-1970, a few administrative studies were what one finds. Toward the end, one finds the early pioneering articles of Andre Raymond. However the real explosion of Ottoman economic, social and political history comes in the 1980’s and beyond. It is as if the Development Revolution with its ties to the Western economies had frozen the kind of inquiry needed to study the trends in local production and trade much less a possible movement toward capitalism in this earlier period. In trying to make this set of correlations into more of an argument, the paper considers some recent works in Arabic and English.