This paper investigates the controls on the currency flows in Anglo-Ottoman trade to expose how different actors at a central and local level in both empires confronted the challenges of international trade during a period in need of further study. Both British and Ottoman historians have recently chafed against what they perceive as unrealistic depictions of early modern state power. The actual implementation of controls on currency flows constraining the trade as well as the official regulation will be glimpsed through the Levant Company papers. The sources reveal how vying interest groups shaped debates over monetary flows in the Ottoman Empire and Britain. Then the paper examines the local institutions and social networks that determined their implementation. The British merchants were prohibited from exporting money from both the Ottoman and British states, a serious impediment in the face of a volatile and diminishing trade. In order to avoid a shortage in the money supply, the Ottoman state banned the sending of coins out of the empire. The Levant Company, to curry political approval, agreed also to prohibit its merchants from sending coin, bullion, and bills of exchange to the Ottoman Empire. The British merchants mostly seem to have adhered to these restrictions, although they complained about them bitterly. Their French competitors, however, regularly purchased Ottoman goods with French gold and, when necessary, could smuggle large amounts of money out of the Ottoman Empire. While the British traders were forced to barter, the French merchants adjusted to price and commodity fluctuations through the use of money, contributing to their success at the British merchants’ expense. The implementation of the Ottoman prohibition was incomplete and affected rival trade groups differently. To circumvent the Ottoman prohibition, the French merchants required the connivance of imperial or local officials. By contrast, the British merchants’ practices suggest a group of traders largely isolated from the Ottoman community. They were hesitant to engage in moneylending and selling on credit despite these being common business practices for British traders elsewhere. The British merchants’ inability to smuggle as their French competitors did, speaks to their political position and inferior local knowledge. Too often, studies rely on the tidy ambitions of states rather than their often messy and inconsistent implementation. By examining monetary flows in the 18th-century Ottoman Empire, this paper reveals how the implementation of ambitious state policies was socially, as well as economically and politically determined.

In the mid-17th century, the Mughal governor of Kabul, Ali Mardan Khan, built an arched bazaar at the heart of the city that was part of a series of spectacular architectural projects in the region sponsored by the Emperor Shah Jahan. Unlike Shah Jahan’s other legacies such as Delhi’s Taj Mahal or Lahore’s Shalimar Gardens, Kabul’s Char Chata bazaar no longer exists. It was first partly destroyed by the British army’s arson of Kabul in 1842 during the first Anglo-Afghan war, and then in 1949 the Afghan government replaced it with a boulevard as part of an urban modernization project. At the center of Char Chata bazaar was a square known as Chawk that still exists in Kabul. This square and the bazaar, in addition to their commercial roles, served as a medium of communication and a space of assembly. In exploring the communicative functions of Char Chatta and Chawk square, I will examine how, before the arrival printing press, this public space played as an alternative source of news circulation, producing a counter-narrative to the official news which were disseminated from the Royal Palace. Drawing on primary Afghan and British sources and informed by recent debates in spatial humanities on the dynamics of media and space, this paper contributes to critical media history of the Middle East by discussing the central role this public space played in the cultural and commercial lives of the city. Even today, despite the increasing importance of digital media technologies in our everyday lives, the revolts and revolutions taking place in city squares all over the world demonstrate the continuous significance of urban public spaces as tools of communication, organization, and assembly.

Only few micro and small enterprises (MSEs) in Egypt are able to upgrade and thereby become medium-sized companies. The World Bank’s influential Doing Business Reports (DBRs) attribute this phenomenon, which is characteristic of low and middle income countries, mainly to excessive bureaucracy and over-regulation preventing MSEs from formalisation and thereby from access to finance and permits that are prerequisites for company growth. The DBRs therefore claim a strong causal relationship running from regulatory reform to MSE performance and overall economic growth and therefore advocate reforms focussing on the reduction of the complexity and cost of regulatory processes. In contrast to such a viewpoint, we argue that much more comprehensive reforms would be needed to mobilise a larger number of MSEs in Egypt: for example, reforms in education and training policies, competition policies, economic governance, judicial procedures and many other fields. In order to test the thesis of the DBRs together with our own antithesis, we conducted ourselves a medium number of interviews with successful upgraders in Egypt and contrasted their characteristics and experiences with a comparator group of non-upgraders. In addition, we did the same exercise in India and the Philippines in order to know to what degree the Egyptian results are country-specific or hold for other lower middle-income countries as well. Our findings allow us to reject the thesis of the DBRs: For Egypt, India and the Philippines, we can show that the decision to formalise usually comes after a firm has upgraded already, i.e. when the entrepreneur perceives that the advantages of formalisation outweigh its disadvantages. Informality is no obstacle to MSE upgrading, and neither are bureaucracy and over-regulation (even though they are a hassle). MSE owners confirmed that they would be able to bear the high cost and length of administrative procedures if only they had an idea about the chances of a successful result. The main issue for them is thus the lack of security in their treatment by the public administration and judiciary, hence the lack in the rule of law. Other factors are that many entrepreneurs lack relevant skills and know-how in leading a company, readiness to take risks and access to capital, market information and well-trained, motivated workers. MSE promotion policies should thus include reforms on a very broad range of policy fields rather than just deregulation.

This presentation intends to establish, define, and map (socially and spatially) the ‘Uqaylat, that is, the mercantile classes and trade networks of the settled communities of the Najd (Central Arabia). The socioeconomic composition and activities of these 'Uqaylat will be surveyed from roughly the 1700s until 1930s. As an attempt to complicate sweeping narratives of national history the presentation will enable an understanding of smaller actors and regional units which interacted in a larger geographical and political space. A study of these ‘Uqaylat reveals the kinds of social and economic organization that existed prior to Saudi control over Arabia—which the Saudis tapped into to enable their rise—as well as the measures that other powers, such as the Ottomans or Rashidis, made to ally with or challenge the Najd’s sociopolitical actors. The evidence used to uncover the ‘Uqaylat and substantiate their activities within the Najd, Gulf, wider Ottoman Empire, and even India is drawn from the traditional sources for Saudi history—Arabic chronicles and European travelogues—but also government records from the Ottoman archives in Istanbul and Egyptian archives from the Mehmet ‘Ali period that detail the employment of and/or intelligence on the ‘Uqaylat, as well as memoirs and oral reports. In tracing the above issues the presentation will argue that while the Wahhabi mission (or “Wahhabism”) did play an important role in the region, there were many other forces at work that explain political and social developments in the Najd. For example, urbanites (called “settled” or hadar), who were the predominant component of these ‘Uqaylat, had important interdependent socioeconomic relationships with the nomadic Bedouin which also explains political actions over the centuries. Furthermore, these ‘Uqaylat were critical links in global networks that brought goods, currency, ideas, and political influence inward and outward from the Najd; ‘Uqaylat also often looked to outside powers as possible allies in their political aspirations or as means to ensure continuation of their economic interests. In this regard the presentation will argue that the Najd should be included as part of the frontier zone of the Ottoman Empire. Furthermore, these ‘Uqaylat have been a critical part of historical and socioeconomic developments of the Najd, and select locations such as Kuwait, Iraq, and Syria, yet they have remained hitherto unknown and invisible in the historiography. Finally, identifying these ‘Uqaylat clearly demonstrates that the Najd was incorporated into the global economy earlier than previously assumed.

There is a growing body of literature on sectarian violence against religious minorities in the aftermath of the Arab revolts. This paper seeks to make a conceptual and empirical contribution to understanding sectarian violence affecting religious minorities from a political economy lens and through a comparative country case study of Egypt and Libya. It identifies particular contextual factors such as the emergence of a security vacuum in both Egypt and Libya, the struggles over governance in the aftermath of the revolts as creating the enabling environment for the thriving of political and criminal groups and networks that targeted Copts economically. The paper argues that the economic modalities of targeting Copts in both Egypt and Libya included similar tactics of encroachment on livelihoods, imposition of levies, and in particular hostage taking in return for ransoms. While the paper acknowledges that the entire populations of Egypt and Libya became vulnerable to criminal assaults on account of the breakdown of law and order, however, it is possible to identify through cross-country comparisons (i)the specifics of the pattern in which Copts were targeted (ii)the nature of the intra-group and inter-group dynamics that increased their vulnerability, and (iii) distinct community responses both from within and outside religious minority membership. The research is based on fieldwork undertaken in Egypt with (i) Copts in rural and urban locations in Upper Egypt between 2011-2014 using interviews, focus groups and case studies and (ii) Coptic returnees from Libya through interviews and case studies undertaken in 2015. This is complemented with broader literature review of the historical, political economy and security situation of Egypt and Libya. The contribution of the research is (i) to go beyond ideologically reductionist understandings of sectarian violence by exposing the plurality of interests and drivers in particular in the economic realm (ii)expose the importance of intersecting identities (class, gender, geographic location etc.) in understanding the power dynamics of the political economy of targeting religious minorities such as the Copts (iii) address the near absence of rigorous academic scholarship on the experiences of Coptic labour migrants (who roughly numbered 300,000 in Libya) in the aftermath of the revolts (iv) unpack through a long duree perspective the nature of power configurations at historical junctures that expose religious minorities to specific economic patterns of vulnerability