2024/12/17 by Omar Youssef Cheta · 1 voice
Arts and Humanities · Social Sciences · #Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis #Multiculturalism, Politics, Migration, Gender #Vietnamese History and Culture Studies
paper · doi:10.1093/ahr/rhae537
openalex publication_date 2024/12/17 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/29
New historical scholarship usually aims to fill historiographical gaps and revise widely held assumptions about the past. Aaron G. Jakes’s Egypt’s Occupation: Colonial Economism and the Crises of Capitalism fulfills both objectives, but only as a step toward achieving a third, more ambitious, goal: a framework that could transform how we understand the British rule of Egypt during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It also establishes the global financial crisis of 1907 as a defining moment in Egyptian history. The book offers historians of the colonial and postcolonial Middle East a model for how to meaningfully combine knowledge of material conditions with an examination of discourse. Egypt’s Occupation opens with a clear presentation of “colonial economism.” The concept, which is the author’s reworking of “an unfamiliar term that already carries a complex and freighted history” (11), captures the discursive field that the British colonial administrators inhabited when thinking about and acting on their new imperial possession of Egypt from the occupation of 1882 until World War I. Colonial economism entailed that colonial subjects (Egyptian peasant smallholders) were solely motivated by narrow material gains. Therefore, the goal of the government (British colonial administration) should be to channel those narrow motivations toward “a greater public good” (5). So versatile was the concept that its transmutations equally served liberal and conservative policies, as well as anti-colonial nationalist programs. For example, in the early years of the occupation, the British Consul General, Evelyn Baring (Lord Cromer), took the concept in a liberal direction, expanding Egyptian smallholders’ access to credit. In the aftermath of the 1907 financial crisis, which witnessed the collapse of credit networks, his successor, John Eldon Gorst, used the same economistic logic to restrict access to credit and impose new forms of conscripted labor in the countryside. This policy shift overlapped with a wave of Egyptian economic nationalism that struggled to imagine a postcolonial future free of economism.