Friday's Read: The Pasha's Peasants: Land, Society and Economy in Lower Egypt, 1740-1858

 
















Cuno, Kenneth. The Pasha's Peasants: Land, Society and Economy in Lower Egypt, 1740 - 1858. (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993)
Kenneth Cuno’s The Pasha's Peasants: Land, Society and Economy in Lower Egypt, 1740-1858 (1996) represents an interesting challenge to commonly-held assumptions surrounding the conventional periodizations of the modern Middle East, which posit that the combination of Napoleon’s arrival in Egypt and Muhammad Ali Pasha’s extraordinary 19th century governmental reforms signaled a rapid shift from a stagnant, uneventful Ottoman period to the dynamic throes of modernity and revolution. In particular, Cuno’s carefully sourced thesis – including shariah court records, land tax registries, fatwas, and cadastral surveys - argues that peasant villages were neither isolated nor insular. Instead, villages were deeply involved in rural-urban trade, moneylending, and adaptive to market signals at the international level. Moreover, he refutes the notion that private property was not an Ottoman concept, spending some time tracing the sources of this misconception in an epilogue. Cuno’s study also sheds light on the complexities of rural Egyptian life during the course of his study by detailing variation in Egyptian courts and the roles of various functionaries. When examined in tandem with several more recent studies from the readings, it calls into question many of the conventional assumptions about the functioning of the Ottoman economy relative to the European market system.