The Challenge of Social History

This edited volume is a welcome addition to the literature on the subaltern strata of the Middle East. Its distinctive character is that the chapters range over a long chronological period, from the 15^th to the 20^th centuries, and cover the entire expanse of territory from Morocco to Iran (and even Greece). Moreover, they discuss a very diverse variety of social groups: urban crowds, women, workers, the unemployed, peasants, slaves, gypsies, shantytown dwellers, and Roma. There are no chapters on religious minorities and tribal peoples; but everything cannot be included in one volume.

The editor and the authors of the various chapters are committed to a variety of methods of ‘history from below’. As a group, the essays bear some resemblance to what was once known as ‘new left social history’. The use of the term ‘subalterns’ in the title suggests a certain affiliation with the Indian Subaltern Studies school and an intellectual lineage stemming from Antonio Gramsci via Ranajit Guha. As Guha intended, subaltern is taken very broadly to mean ‘groups who possess a subordinate social, political, economic or ideological status’ (p.2). But the volume is eclectic and does not adhere rigidly to the methods of the Subaltern Studies school which has itself become split between the original social history impulse pioneered by Guha and later post-structuralist and post-colonialist textually base studies exemplified by the work of Partha Chaterjee and Dipesh Chakrabarty.

The introduction to the volume by Stephanie Cronin makes somewhat larger theoretical claims for the originality of the volume than it deserves. This is curious, because many of the pioneering works of Middle East social history are cited in the footnotes. However, a number of important works are missing, including one of the earliest social histories, Yehoshua Porath’s ‘The Peasant Revolt of 1858–1861 in Kisrawan’, Asian and African Studies 2 (1966), and more synthetic works such as Haim Gerber, The Social Origins of the Modern Middle East (Boulder, CO: Rienner, 1987), Ehud Toledano, Slavery and Abolition in the Ottoman Middle East (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1997), Donald Quataert, Workers, Peasants, and Economic Change in the Ottoman Empire, 1730–1914 (Istanbul, 1993). Other works are cited but not discussed substantively. Among them are Ervand Abrahamian’s pioneering essay, ‘The Crowd in Iranian Politics, 1905–1953’, Past and Present 41 (December 1968), Judith Tucker’s Women in Nineteenth Century Egypt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1985), which is the first English language monograph on the modern history of women in any Middle Eastern country, and very respectable literature on labour history, including a recent book by John Chalcraft, who is also a contributor to the volume under review, and my own Workers and Peasants in the Modern Middle East (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). That is to say, the field has a richer historiography than Cronin suggests, and she does not fully synthesise it or establish the basis for a new departure.

Nonetheless, both Cronin and John Chalcraft (in the introduction to his essay on ‘Popular Protest, the Market, and the State in Nineteenth and Early Twentieth-Century Egypt’) are correct in arguing that because of the abiding influence of Orientalism and modernisation theory, history from below came late to Middle East studies and was less of a force in scholarship on this region than elsewhere. One might argue that the extraordinary success of Edward Said’s debunking of Orientalist scholarship undermined social history by opening the way to a new, rich and exciting intellectual approach, post-colonial cultural studies. Consequently, after the appearance of a number of important works in the late 1970s and 1980s, Middle East social history lost steam by the 1990s.

What then are the principal conceptual arguments of this volume? As Cronin asserts, most subaltern collective action is defensive in nature. This point is well illustrated by James Grehan’s chapter on ‘Street Violence and Social Imagination in Late-Mamluk and Ottoman Damascus (c. 1500...