Summary
The characterization, following Anouar Abdel Malek and Roger Owen, of Egypt’s social formation from the mid-nineteenth century until 1956 — Chapter 9’s alternative to the Egyptian nationalist school’s comprador/national-bourgeoisie model in The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 4188-4213).
Details
- Following ‘Asim Disuqi and Eric Davis, the large landholders were not feudalists (Chapter 9, note 29): cotton cultivation was integral to the capitalist world economy — private ownership, commodity production for a market, commodification of labor, rational profit calculation, capital accumulation — and many of the first Muslim and Coptic industrialists, including most initial Bank Misr investors, emerged from the large cotton growers (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 4188-4213).
- The Misr group was not an incipient national bourgeoisie seeking to challenge foreign capital: Robert Vitalis, reading Davis against the grain, shows Tal’at Harb collaborating with foreign capital throughout — the Crédit Foncier Egyptien board (1924), the Egyptian Federation of Industry (1925), foreign directors admitted to Bank Misr enterprises (1927), the Misr Cotton Export Company with Hugo Lindemann (1929), and British joint ventures of 1931–38 (notes 31–33). Vitalis distinguishes investors with an international horizon (Sir Ernest Cassel) from investors who lived in Egypt and depended on its future — a local bourgeoisie, closely linked to large landowners and foreign capital, not particularly democratic, but key to Egyptianizing firms (note 35) (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 4188-4213).
- There was consequently no unified bloc of Jewish capital: Thomas Philipp’s Table 1 shows Jews holding 15.4 percent of joint-stock company directorships in 1943, declining to 12.7 percent in 1947–48, 8.9 percent in 1951 and 0.5 percent in 1960, and all Egyptian businessmen of 1880–1960 adopted a similar strategy of collaborating with foreign capital, relying on the state, diversifying, and by the 1940s assuming a major share of control over many foreign-capital enterprises (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 4235-4295).
- Capitalist development in Egypt increased productivity and promoted limited industrialization while the economy remained subordinate internationally and highly unequal; the nationalist approaches explain the pain as attributable to Egypt’s capitalists’ economic or ethnic deficiencies — “It is much less satisfying, and at the end of the twentieth century perhaps also less hopeful, to argue that this is in the nature of capitalism” (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 4188-4213).
Related pages
The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, Egyptian Sugar Company, Mutamassirun, Anis Mustafa Kamil