Workers on the Nile: Nationalism, Communism, Islam, and the Egyptian Working Class, 1882-1954

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American Univ in Cairo Press, 1998 - Business & Economics - 488 pages
In this reissue of a book that was hailed as groundbreaking almost as soon as it was published, the authors examine the role of trade unionism and the working class in the development of Egyptian nationalism during the first half of the twentieth century. Beinin and Lockman examine "the dialectic of class and nation [and] the formation of a new class of wage workers as Egypt experienced a particular kind of capitalist development ... and these workers' adoption of various forms of consciousness, organization, and collective action in a political and economic context structured by the realities of foreign domination and the struggle for national independence." "This work breaks new ground in contemporary Western scholarship on the Middle East and challenges Orientalist assumptions that classes do not exist, or play only an insignificant role. The authors' careful and comprehensive account of the workers and their unions is obviously understanding of, and sympathetic to, the working class. Yet it is free of the rather mechanistic and reductionist analyses of earlier writings on the subject." -- Nazih Ayubi, MESA Bulletin.
 

Contents

Introduction
3
The Formation of the Egyptian Working Class
23
The Emergence of Labor Activism 18991914
48
The Unions the Left and the Wafd 19201924
121
Workers Effendis Pashas and a Prince
171
Toward an Independent Workers Movement
218
The Formation of an Industrial Proletariat
257
The Struggle for the Trade Unions During the War
285
Communist Factionalism and the Workers Movement
327
The Workers Committee for National Liberation
335
Problems and Prospects
342
Repression and Reorganization
349
The Strike Wave Continues
359
Muslim Brothers and Communists in Shubra alKhayma
366
The Muslim Brothers Vision of a Moral Economy
376
The Labor Movement and the Crisis of the Old Regime
395

Abbas Halim Returns to the Labor Movement
303
Communism and the Egyptian Workers Movement
310
Workers in the Electoral Arena
321
The Free Officers and the Labor Movement
418
Conclusion
448
Copyright

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About the author (1998)

Joel Beinin is professor of Middle East history at Stanford University. His latest book is Workers and Peasants in the Modern Middle East (2001). He was president of the Middle East Studies Association of North America in 2001-02.

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