Check out Political Economy Project member Sherene Seikaly's recently published Men of Capital: Scarcity and Economy in Mandate Palestine (Stanford University Press, November 2015). For more information or to purchase visit the book's page on the Stanford University Press website.

Book Description:

Men of Capital examines British-ruled Palestine in the 1930s and 1940s through a focus on economy. In a departure from the expected histories of Palestine, this book illuminates dynamic class constructions that aimed to shape a pan-Arab utopia in terms of free trade, profit accumulation, and private property. And in so doing, it positions Palestine and Palestinians in the larger world of Arab thought and social life, moving attention away from the limiting debates of Zionist–Palestinian conflict.

​Reading Palestinian business periodicals, records, and correspondence, Sherene Seikaly reveals how capital accumulation was central to the conception of the ideal "social man." Here we meet a diverse set of characters—the man of capital, the frugal wife, the law-abiding Bedouin, the unemployed youth, and the abundant farmer—in new spaces like the black market, cafes and cinemas, and the idyllic Arab home. Seikaly also traces how British colonial institutions and policies regulated wartime austerity regimes, mapping the shortages of basic goods—such as the vegetable crisis of 1940—to the broader material disparities among Palestinians and European Jews. Ultimately, she shows that the economic is as central to social management as the political, and that an exclusive focus on national claims and conflicts hides the more complex changes of social life in Palestine.

About the Author:
​
Sherene Seikaly is Assistant Professor of History at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Check out Political Economy Project member Joel Beinin's recently published Workers and Thieves: Labor Movements and Popular Uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt (Stanford Briefs, November 2015). For more information or to purchase visit the book's page on the Stanford University Press website.

Book Description:

Since the 1990s, the Middle East has experienced an upsurge of wildcat strikes, sit-ins, and workers' demonstrations. Well before people gathered in Tahrir Square to demand the ouster of Hosni Mubarak, workers had formed one of the largest oppositional movements to authoritarian rule in Egypt. In Tunisia, years prior to the 2011 Arab uprisings, the unemployed chanted in protest, "A job is a right, you pack of thieves!"

Despite this history, most observers have failed to acknowledge the importance of workers in the social ferment preceding the removal of Egyptian and Tunisian autocrats and in the political realignments after their demise. In Workers and Thieves, Joel Beinin corrects this by surveying the efforts and impacts of the workers' movements in Egypt and Tunisia since the 1970s. He argues that the 2011 uprisings in these countries—and, importantly, their vastly different outcomes—are best understood within the context of these repeated mobilizations of workers and the unemployed over recent decades.

About the Author:

Joel Beinin is the Donald J. McLachlan Professor of History at Stanford University. He has written or edited ten books, most recently Social Movements, Mobilization, and Contestation in the Middle East and North Africa, co-edited with Frédéric Vairel (Stanford, 2013) and The Struggle for Worker Rights in Egypt(2010). His articles have been published in leading scholarly journals, as well as The Nation, Middle East Report, The Los Angeles Review of Books, South Atlantic Quarterly, Le Monde Diplomatique, and others.

Watch the first edition of City Talks below! Political Economy Project member Timothy Mitchell discusses his latest work on urban political economy and his term capitalization with Political Economy Project member Omar Jabary Salamanca and Nasser Abourahme. Visit Jadaliyya for more information.

City Talks: Timothy Mitchell on the Materialities of Political Economy and Colonial History

Theme and Time Markers: 
00:00:07 | Representation, colonialism and the city
00:01:54 | Political economy, capitalization and the city
00:14:35 | Capitalization vs. renterism or rent economies
00:21:14 | Provincializing materiality
00:26:09 | The “material turn” and colonialism
00:32:47 | Methodological encounters with the archive
00:39:43 | Reading the archive in non-representational ways
00:43:15 | Arab Uprisings and public space
00:50:26 | Urban (and rural) informality 

Check out Political Economy Project member Melani Cammett's recently published, fourth edition of A Political Economy of the Middle East (Westview Press, February 2015). For more information or to purchase visit the book's page on the Westview Press website.​

Book Description:

"A Political Economy of the Middle East is the most comprehensive analysis of the political economy of development in the contemporary Middle East over the past several decades, examining the interaction of economic development processes, state systems, state policies, and social actors in the Middle East.

The fourth edition, with new authors Melani Cammett and Ishac Diwan, has been thoroughly revised, with two new introductory chapters that provide an updated framework with which to understand and study the many changes in demography, education, labor markets, urbanization, water and agriculture, and international labor migration in the recent years. The new edition also includes: a new chapter that charts the political economy of the Gulf states and in particular the phenomenal growth of oil economies; a new chapter on the growth of the private sector and its effects in the region; a new chapter on the rise of “crony capitalism;” and increased coverage of the changes in civil society and social movements in the region including an exploration of the causes, dynamics, consequences, and aftermath of the Arab uprisings."

About the Authors:

MELANI CAMMETT is professor of government at Harvard University. She is the author of Compassionate Communalism: Welfare and Sectarianism in Lebanon, and the co-editor of The Politics of Non-State Welfare.

ISHAC DIWAN is a visiting researcher at the Paris School of Economics and directs the Economic and Political Transformation Program at the Economic Research Forum. He is the author of Understanding the Political Economy of the Arab Uprisings.

ALAN RICHARDS is professor of economics and environmental studies, emeritus, at the University of California at Santa Cruz.

JOHN WATERBURY is William Stewart Tod Professor of Politics and International Affairs, Emeritus, at Princeton University.

Read the following message and join us for the Political Economy Project Inaugural Reception at MESA on Saturday, November 21st!

Please join us for Political Economy of the Middle East: Continuities & Discontinuities in Teaching & Research on Friday 6 November 2015 at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia. 

Sherene Seikaly interviewed by Ottoman History Podcast. Listen to the interview here.

"In Episode #206 of Ottoman History Podcast, we had the opportunity to talk to Dr. Seikaly about this new work and explore how her analysis of class formation in Palestine in the 1930s and 1940s helps diagnose the current moment of interrupted Arab revolutions. While many Zionists alleged that Palestinians had not done enough to build their own state, Seikaly’s protagonists—her “men of capital” and “women of thrift”—suggest otherwise. Without access to the state apparatuses, she argues that Palestine’s Arab population could never be proper political subjects under British colonial rule in the same way as the yishuv. Instead, Palestinian capitalists made politics in the realms left available to them: personal profit and, in the case of Fuad Saba, funding the armed struggle against the mandate."

Click the image below to view the book details

Political Economy Project member and Jadaliyya Co-Editor Ziad Abu-Rish discusses the history of electricity in Beirut during the early independence period with the Lebanese Center for Policy Studies.