The cultural economy of development in Egypt: Economic nationalism, hidden economy and the emergence of mass consumer society during Sadat's Infitah

Middle Eastern Studies

Volumn 44, Issue 4, 2008, Pages 571-583

  Shechter, Relli ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

CULTURAL ECONOMY; CULTURAL HISTORY; NATIONALISM;

AFRICA; EGYPT; NORTH AFRICA;

EID: 47549085208     PISSN: 00263206     EISSN: 17437881     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/00263200802120632     Document Type: Article

References (91)

1. For the narrative suggested see G. Abdel-Khalek, 'The Open Door Economic Policy in Egypt: Its Contribution to Investment and Its Equity Implications', in M.H. Kerr and E.S. Yassin (eds.), Rich and Poor States in the Middle East: Egypt and the New Arab Order (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1982), p.278
2. N.N. Ayubi, The State and Public Policies in Egypt Since Sadat (Reading, UK: Ithaca Press, 1991), p.77
3. S.S. Imam, Man yamliku Misr? (Cairo: Dar Misr al-Mahrusa, 2002, originally published 1986), pp.24-5, especially n.13
4. M. Zaalouk, Power, Class, and Foreign Capital in Egypt: The Rise of the New Bourgeoisie (London: Zed Books, 1989), pp.1-2.
5. See a chapter-long comparison of Nasser's and Muhammad Ali's economic projects in G.A. Amin, Egypt's Economic Predicament: A Study in the Interaction of External Pressure, Political Folly and Social Tension in Egypt, 1960-1990 (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1995), chapter 7.
6. Onthe Balta-Liman convention and its impact on the Ottoman Empire see Ö. Bülent, 'A Reassessment of 1838 Trade Convention', in K. Çiçek (ed.), The Great Ottoman-Turkish Civilization (Ankara: Yeni Turkiye, 2000), Vol.2, pp.230-41.
7. On Law 43 see J. Waterbury, The Egypt of Nasser and Sadat: The Political Economy of Two Regimes (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983), pp.131-2.
8. For a general discussion on the meaning of economic nationalism see D. Levi-Faur, 'Economic Nationalism: From Friedrich List to Robert Reich', Review of International Studies, Vol.23 (1997), pp.359-70. On economic nationalism in the contemporary age of globalization
9. see A. Pickel, 'Explaining, and Explaining with, Economic Nationalism', Nations and Nationalism, Vol.9, No.1 (2003), pp.105-27. For further discussion on economic nationalism in Egypt
10. see A.A. EzzelArab, European Control and Egypt's Traditional Elites - Case Study in Elite Economic Nationalism (Lewinston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 2002)
11. R. Owen, 'The Ideology of Economic Nationalism in its Egyptian Context 1919-1939', in M. Buheiry (ed.), Intellectual Life in the Arab East, 1890-1939 (Beirut: Center for Arab and Middle East Studies, American University of Beirut, 1981).
12. The term effendi designated, from the early nineteenth century, a modern/Western educated person who usually belonged to the Egyptian-Ottoman elite of the period. It became associated with a growing literate 'middle group' only after the First World War, hence the term new effendia, sometimes used in describing this stratum. The following discussion on the effendia is based on I. Gershoni and J.P. Jankowski, Rede?ning the Egyptian Nation, 1930-1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp.7-22
13. L. Ryzova, 'Egyptianizing Modernity through the "New Effendiya": Social and Cultural Constructions of the Middle Class in Egypt Under the Monarchy', in A. Goldschmidt, A.J. Johnson and B.A. Salmoni (eds.), Re-Envisioning Egypt, 1919-1952 (Cairo: AUC Press, 2005)
14. R. Shechter, Smoking, Culture and Economy in the Middle East: The Egyptian Tobacco Market 1850-2000 (London: I.B. Tauris Publishers, 2006), chapters 7 and 8.
15. For different manifestations of effendi political activity see M. Deeb, Party Politics in Egypt, the Wafd and Its Rivals 1919-1939 (London: Ithaca Press, 1979)
16. J.P. Jankowski, Egypt's Young Rebels: 'Young Egypt' 1933-1952 (Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, Stanford University, 1975).
17. For the notion and the somewhat exceptional use of the term effendiyya in this context see R. Shechter, 'From Effendi to In?tahi: Consumerism and Its Malcontents in the Emergence of Egyptian Market Society', British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies (forthcoming).
18. For the reception of Taylorism in Europe see C. Maier, 'Between Taylorism and Technocracy: European Ideologies and the Vision of Industrial Productivity in the 1920s', Journal of Contemporary History, Vol.5, No.2 (1970), pp.27-61.
19. C.M. Henry and R. Springborg, Globalization and the Politics of Economic Development in the Middle East (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 'Overview'
20. R. Hinnebusch, 'The Politics of Economic Liberalization: Comparing Egypt and Syria', in H. Hakimian and Z. Moshaver (eds.), The State and Global Change: The Political Economy of Transition in the Middle East and North Africa (Richmond, Surrey: Curzon, 2001)
21. R. Owen and Ş. Pamuk, A History of Middle East Economies in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 'Epilogue and Conclusion'
22. A. Richards and J. Waterbury, A Political Economy of the Middle East (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1996), chapter 9.
23. EzzelArab, European Control, chapter 4.
24. On Bank Misr see E. Davis, Challenging Colonialism: Bank Misr and Egyptian Industrialization, 1920-1941 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983)
25. R. Vitalis, When Capitalists Collide: Business Con?ict and the End of Empire in Egypt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995).
26. Vitalis, When Capitalists Collide.
27. See especially pp.42-4.
28. Jankowski, Egypt's Young Rebel, pp.11-12. For economic nationalism in the Egyptian cigarette industry
29. see Shechter, Smoking, Culture and Economy, pp.111-16.
30. M.L. Russell, Creating the New Egyptian Woman: Consumerism, Education, and National Identity, 1863-1922 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), pp.73-7.
31. See Mourad Wahba's discussion on ideology formation during the period preceding the revolution, in M. Wahba, The Role of the State in the Egyptian Economy, 1945-1981 (Reading, UK: Ithaca Press, 1994), pp.37-43.
32. On monopolistic conditions in contemporary Egypt see A.A.I. El-Gritli, 'The Structure of Modern Industry in Egypt', L'Egypte contemporaine Vol.38 (1947), pp.368-582
33. C. Issawi, Egypt at Mid-Century: An Economic Survey (London: Oxford University Press, 1954), pp.158-61. For business-state relations
34. see Vitalis, When Capitalists Collide.
35. On MESC see M.S. Ghali, Al-'alaqat al-iqtisadiyya bayn Misr wa-Baritanya, 1935-1945 (Cairo: Al-Hay'a al-Misriyya al-'amma li-l-kitab, 2001), chapter 5.
36. Robert Vitalis and Steven Heydemann make a clear case for the argument above in their 'War, Keynesianism, and Colonialism: Explaining State-Market Relations in the Postwar Middle East', in S. Heydemann (ed.), War, Institutions and Social Change in the Middle East (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000).
37. For a detailed study of the 1947 law see F. Karanasou, 'Egyptianisation: The 1947 Company Law and the Foreign Communities in Egypt' (Ph.D. dissertation, St. Antony's College, Oxford University, 1992).
38. On past failed attempts to bring such reforms see G. Baer, A History of Landownership in Modern Egypt, 1800-1950 (London: Oxford University Press, 1962), chapter 6.
39. R.L. Tignor, Capitalism and Nationalism at the End of Empire: State and Business in Decolonizing Egypt, Nigeria, and Kenya, 1945-1963 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998), chapters 4 and 5.
40. Y. Meital, 'The Aswan High Dam and Revolutionary Symbolism in Egypt', in H. Erlich and I. Gershoni (ed.), The Nile: Histories, Cultures, Myths (Boulder, CO: Lynne Reinner, 2000).
41. A.O. Hirschman, 'The Political Economy of Import-Substituting Industrialization in Latin America', The Quarterly Journal of Economics, Vol.82, No.1 (1968), pp.1-32.
42. For the political economy of the period see Waterbury, The Egypt of Nasser and Sadat, chapters 5-7.
43. Wahba, Role of the State, pp.181-8.
44. See also S. Soliman, 'State and Industrial Capitalism in Egypt', Cairo Papers in Social Science, Vol.21, No.2 (Summer 1998), p.3.
45. Shechter, 'From Effendi to In?tahi'.
46. Although the more common term used is 'informal', I use 'hidden' when discussing such development to emphasize the fact that it was mostly absent at the time from accounts on economic transitions. On the informal hidden economy see, N. Choucri, 'The Hidden Economy: A New View of Remittances in the Arab World', World Development, Vol.14, No.6 (1986), pp.977-85
47. I.M. Oweiss, 'Egypt's Economy: The Pressing Issues', in Ibrahim M. Oweiss (ed.), The Political Economy of Contemporary Egypt (Washington, DC: Center for Contemporary Arab Studies, Georgetown University, 1990), pp.13-18
48. D. Roy, 'The Hidden Economy of Egypt', Middle Eastern Studies, Vol.28, No.4 (1992), pp.689-711. For informal housing
49. see A.M. Soliman, 'Tilting the Sphinxes: Locating Urban Informality in Egyptian Cities', in A. Roy and N. AlSayyad (eds.), Urban Informality: Transnational Perspectives from the Middle East, Latin America, and South Asia (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2004). For women's participation in the informal economy of the Middle East
50. see R.A. Lobban Jr. (ed.), Middle Eastern Women and the Invisible Economy (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 1998). For a general discussion on informal economy
51. see A. Portes and W. Heller, 'The Informal Economy', in N.J. Smelser and R. Swedberg (eds.), The Handbook of Economic Sociology (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005).
52. D. Singerman, Avenues of Participation: Family, Politics, and Networks in Urban Quarters of Cairo (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995)
53. D. Singerman and H. Hoodfar (eds.), Development, Change, and Gender in Cairo: A View from the Household (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996)
54. U. Wikan, Tomorrow, God Willing: Self-made Destinies in Cairo (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).
55. See, in addition to the sources on informality above, G. Filer, 'Scope and Some Effects of Remittances of Egyptian Migrant Workers in the Arab Oil-Producing Countries, 1973-1984', Asian and African Studies, Vol.21 (1987), pp.305-25
56. A. Lesch, 'Egyptian Labor Migration', in Ibrahim M. Oweiss (ed.), The Political Economy of Contemporary Egypt (Washington, DC: Center for Contemporary Arab Studies, Georgetown University, 1990)
57. S.E. Ibrahim, The New Arab Social Order: A Study of the Social Impact of Oil Wealth (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1982), chapter 4.
58. Both Ikram and Waterbury emphasize that the in?tah and Law 43 caught the Egyptian government quite unprepared for the magnitude of contemporary change. K. Ikram, The Egyptian Economy, 1952-2000: Performance, Policies, and Issues (London: Routledge, 2006), p.22
59. Waterbury, The Egypt of Nasser and Sadat, p.154. The same was true for the opposition and its critique of the open-door policies, which recommended statist solutions in an economic reality increasingly beyond state control.
60. See, for example, I. al-'Issawi, Fi islah ma afsadahu al-in?tah (Cairo: Kitab al-Ahli, 1984)
61. F. Mursi, Hadha al-in?tah al-iqtisadi (Cairo: Dar al-Thaqafa al-Jadida, 1976).
62. S. Kuznets, Modern Economic Growth: Rate, Structure, and Spread (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1966).
63. This is true for virtually all the literature quoted above on the impact of the in?tah on daily life. Moreover, contemporary ethnographies mostly took women and their plight under socio-economic conditions as their main interest, thus further emphasizing a double marginality of their subjects who faced both contemporary economic hardships and relative social exclusion from public life. See, in addition to the above, A.E. Macleod, Accommodating Protest: Working Women, the New Veiling, and Change in Cairo (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991).
64. For a brief description of the food riots and their outcomes see R.A. Hinnebusch Jr., Egyptian Politics under Sadat: The Post-Populist Development of an Authoritarian-Modernizing State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp.71-2.
65. On the notion of social contract in the Middle East see J. Waterbury, 'From Social Contract to Extraction Contracts: The Political Economy of Authoritarianism and Democracy', in J.P. Entelis (ed.), Islam, Democracy, and the State in North Africa (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1997), chapter 7.
66. Russell, Creating the New Egyptian Woman, pp.89-92
67. N.Y. Reynolds, 'Commodity Communities: Interweavings of Market Cultures, Consumption Practices, and Social Power in Egypt, 1907-1961' (Ph.D. dissertation, Stanford University, CA, 2003), pp.291-304.
68. C.A. Bayly, 'The Origin of Swadeshi (Home Industry): Cloth and Indian Society, 1700-1930', in Arjun Appadurai (ed.), The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986).
69. For the evaluation of a contemporary marketing expert see S. Saddik, 'An Analysis of the Status of Marketing in Egypt', European Journal of Marketing, Vol.7, No.2 (1973), pp.77-81. For similar evaluations a decade into the in?tah
70. see A.B. El-Haddad, 'An Analysis of the Current Status of Marketing', in E. Kaynak (ed.), International Business in the Middle East (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1986)
71. G. Rice, 'Marketing Management in Egypt', Management Decision, Vol.22, No.4 (1984), pp.3-14.
72. For an overview of contemporary arguments against consumption see F. Ajami, 'The Open-Door Economy: Its Roots and Welfare Consequences', in G. Abdel-Khalek and R. Tignor (eds.), The Political Economy of Income Distribution in Egypt (New York: Holmes & Meier Publishers, 1982), pp.501-11
73. Waterbury, The Egypt of Nasser and Sadat, pp.134-8.
74. Ayubi, The State and Public Policies, p.25.
75. G. Amin, Whatever Happened to the Egyptians? Changes in Egyptian Society from 1950 to the Present (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 2000), pp.105-8.
76. R. Shechter, 'Glocal Mediators: Marketing in Egypt during the Open-Door Era (in?tah)', Enterprise and Society (forthcoming).
77. K.H. Bach, 'The Vision of a Better Life: New Patterns of Consumption and Changed Social Relations', in N.S. Hopkins and K. Westergaard (eds.), Directions of Change in Rural Egypt (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 1998)
78. P. Weyland, Inside the Third World Village (London: Routledge, 1993).
79. The term 'new Egyptian man' emerged at a symposium on this topic, 'Bina' al-insan al-Misri al-jadid', organized by the Ahram Centre for Political and Strategic Studies, in which some of the most prominent Egyptian intellectuals participated. See a report on the symposium in al-Ahram 9 Oct. 1976. The term 'new social order' was often used in discussing social transformations of the time, and is best associated with
80. S.E. Ibrahim's The New Arab Social Order: A Study of the Social Impact of Oil Wealth (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1982).
81. On higher education as a source of social mobilization see Waterbury, The Egypt of Nasser and Sadat, pp.234-41.
82. Such consumerism is common in periods of rapid economic transition and sudden enrichment in other parts of the world. See part two in P.N. Stearn's Consumerism in World History: The Global Transformation of Desire (London: Routledge, 2001).
83. The analysis is based on Shechter, 'From Effendi to In?tahi'.
84. On the notion of the 'new public' and the cinema of the in?tah see D. Sharaf al-Din, al-Siyasa wa-alsinima ? Misr, 1961-1981 (Cairo: Dar al-Shuruq, 1992), pp.169-213.
85. Homa Hoodfar's ethnography well illustrates the arguments made above. See her Between Marriage and the Market: Intimate Politics and Survival in Cairo (Cairo: The American University in Cairo Press, 1999.
86. First published in 1997 by the University of California Press), chapter 7. The notion of 'industrious' is borrowed from J. de Vries 'The Industrial Revolution and the Industrious Revolution', The Journal of Economic History, Vol.54, No.2 (June 1994), pp.249-70.
87. For discussions on urban adjustments to the new economic realities and local agency in the process see Hoodfar, Between Marriage; Singerman, Avenues of Participation
88. Singerman and Hoodfar (eds.), Development, Change, and Gender
89. Wikan, Tomorrow, God Willing. For the same agency among those living in the countryside
90. see Hopkins and Westergaard (eds.), Directions of Change
91. Weyland, Inside the Third.