The Cambridge History of Egypt, vol. 2: Modern Egypt from 1517 to the End of the Twentieth Century.

• Author: Cuno, Kenneth M.
• Position: Reviews of Books

The Cambridge History of Egypt, vol. 2: Modern Egypt from 1517 to the End of the Twentieth Century. Edited by M. W. DALY. Cambridge: CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS, 1998. Pp. xiv + 463. $100.

In this, the first Cambridge History devoted to modern Egypt, the contributions of fifteen leading scholars offer a perspective on the state of the field as much as on the past five centuries of Egyptian history. In the past twenty-five years the history of modern Egypt has become more contested, and hence more lively, owing to new research and the re-thinking of what until recently were the canonical interpretations and narratives. The present volume reflects this development both in the extent to which many of the authors have departed from those canons, and in the extent to which they offer contrasting perspectives. One can identify three major shifts represented here, albeit incompletely and unevenly. The first is the abandonment of a "modernization" or "westernization" paradigm and its corollary, the decline-and-awakening thesis. The second is a movement away from writing history within a "national" framework. Third, there is a continuing shift toward writing about social, economic, and cultural phenomen a as they were experienced by different elements in the population.

The gradual and sometimes grudging abandonment of the "modernization" paradigm and its corollary thesis of decline and-awakening has been most important in studies of the four Ottoman centuries (1517-1914). Michael Winter, in an otherwise excellent and informative chapter on the first of those centuries, is the sole author to detect a relative "cultural stagnation and decline" (p. 25), partly attributable to the Ottoman conquest. In contrast, Jane Hathaway opens her chapter on the seventeenth century by referring the reader to an ongoing "critical reexamination of the so-called decline paradigm" (p. 34). The changes of this period have come to be understood rather in terms of the end of Ottoman expansion and an adjustment of state priorities. Daniel Crecelius' argument that the economy was strong and the country prosperous through the middle decades of the eighteenth century also contradicts the traditional decline paradigm, though I wonder whether he hasn't succumbed to the counterfactual temptation. To show that the Ottoman period was not one of steady economic decline is not the same thing as proving that it was one of prosperity.

The thesis of Nelly Hanna's entirely original...