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.

There have been a number of studies on craftsmen, artisans and guilds in recent years. Court records are full of information about the numerous guilds that functioned in towns and cities of the Ottoman Empire in the early modern period. One major trend in recent scholarship has been to study guilds as part of institutional history, with a focus on the way that guild heads were appointed; the elaboration of guild rules; the various ways that they managed conflict. Another trend has explored guild relationships with state, a subject which has remained controversial and about which the views are very diverse. The present paper proposes to consider guilds in relation to the regional and global changes of the 17th and 18th centuries, which witnessed major commercial transformations as different parts of the world were tied to each other by regular maritime links. Using Cairo as an example, the paper will address the issue of whether guilds and production were influenced by the growing intensification of trade and commercialization of certain dimensions of society. Although artisans and craftsmen were closely linked to their guilds, we can see that in the period covered, that their production activities were neither entirely guild centered nor were they always following guild rules. We can link the kind of economic activities that certain craftsmen undertook, small business ventures, partnerships with other artisans or with merchants and so on, with this growing commercialization. Hence, in addition to the local context of artisans and guilds, there is also a regional and global context that could be explored. The paper will offer a few examples from recent research on this subject.

Middle Eastern history and Egyptian history have long been influenced by the understanding that the world is inherently connected. A few seminal texts have taken this understanding further and attempted to show Egypt and the Middle East’s engagement with the World. However, the study of Egyptian and Middle Eastern history in terms of a world historical methodological approach has yet to be done so sufficiently. Particularly, economic history is an entry point in which the role of global forces or the role of global forces and influences impact Egyptian history. The two texts under analysis illustrate the role of Egyptian Economic History as a potential model to study economic history in the field of world history. Particularly these texts attempt to systematize a socio-economic landscape of the early modern and modern periods. Although these works focus specifically on a bounded nation state, the lack of regional and local engagement in world history beckons for a meta/micro-historical interchange. Simultaneously, this paper will show that the two texts under analysis would benefit greatly from meta-narrative historical analysis in order to tie Egyptian economic history to both the region and the world, since economics is an inherently global phenomenon.