MER Article Rolling Back Egypt's Agrarian Reform The publication in 1988 of the fifth Egyptian agricultural census, conducted mostly in January 1982, provides the most accurate and comprehensive description to date of the changing patterns of landholding and ownership of agricultural assets over the 20 years following President Nasser’s land refor Robert Springborg • 7 min read
MER Article Editor's Bookshelf During four months in Oxford last fall, I spent part of my time pursuing the charge of my editorial colleagues to seek out new and distinctively British approaches to the Middle East. My main finding is that British nostalgia for empire, which many North Americans came to know in the popular televis Joel Beinin • 4 min read
MER Article Editor's Bookshelf Dipesh Chakrabarty’s well-documented, theoretically informed, innovative history of the jute mill workers of Bengal, Rethinking Working-Class History: Bengal, 1890-1940 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), poses this central question: “Can…third-world countries like India…build democratic, Joel Beinin • 4 min read
MER Article Appropriate Health Technology in Egypt Over the past two decades, public health workers have successfully developed primary health care: basic preventive and curative services that address critical health problems and are available close to people’s homes. Primary health care includes immunizations; maternal care; education for health, h Norbert Hirschhorn • 8 min read
MER Article Medical Education: The Struggle for Relevance A recent World Health Organization report on the state of health practitioners in the Middle East suggests that the region now has a satisfactory number of physicians; some countries even have an excess. Yet health, as measured by standard indicators such as infant mortality, is hardly satisfactory. Cynthia Myntti • 11 min read
MER Article From the Editors (November/December 1989) When the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund met in Washington in September, President Husni Mubarak was on hand to speak about the Third World debt crisis. For more than a year, Cairo has been negotiating a new $500 million agreement with the IMF that would allow Egypt to reschedule $10 The Editors • 4 min read
MER Article Mitchell, Colonising Egypt Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). Barbara Harlow • 11 min read
MER Article Bedouins, Cassettes and Technologies of Public Culture Discotheques and taxicabs all over Egypt last January were playing the songs of a new pop star. No one knew exactly where “the Earthquake of ’88” (his biographer’s term) had come from, but everyone seemed to think Ali Hemida was a Bedouin. Some said he came from Sinai; others said Libya. His music w Lila Abu-Lughod • 16 min read
MER Article Goldberg, Tinker, Tailor and Textile Worker Ellis Goldberg, Tinker, Tailor and Textile Worker: Class and Politics in Egypt, 1930-1952 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1986). The critique of modernization theory that began in the late 1960s had an especially significant impact on a new generation of Western scholars who rejected Eric Davis • 4 min read
MER Article Egypt: A New Secularism? Arab political and social thought in the 1960s was dominated by secular conceptions, including Arab nationalism, Arab socialism and Marxism. Even after the 1967 war, when the attraction of these ideologies began to wane, the immediate “self-criticism after the defeat” (to cite the title of Sadiq al- Alexander Flores • 12 min read
MER Article Tucker, Women in Nineteenth-Century Egypt Judith Tucker, Women in Nineteenth-Century Egypt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). This is more than a general treatise about women in Egypt. It is a subtle and adroit analysis of gender and class during the transformation of Egyptian society in the nineteenth century and it is this un Cynthia Nelson • 5 min read
