In Praise of Books: A Cultural History of Cairo's Middle Class. Sixteenth to the Eighteenth Century.

• Author: Cuffel, Alexandra
• Position: Book review

In Praise of Books: A Cultural History of Cairo's Middle Class, Sixteenth to the Eighteenth Century. By NELLY HANNA. Syracuse: SYRACUSE UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2003. Pp. viii, 219. $19.95 (paper).

In In Praise of Books Nelly Hanna artfully addresses intersections of the educational, literary, cultural, and economic history of Ottoman Cairo, while positing a series of new approaches to these subjects and to Ottoman history in general. She asserts that Ottomanists have tended to focus their energies on Istanbul, Anatolia, and the Balkans, to the point that the Arabic-speaking regions of the Ottoman Empire have been relatively neglected and not well integrated into the larger canvas of Ottoman history. Attempts to generalize about Aleppo, Damascus, or Cairo based on practices in Istanbul are misleading, according to Hanna, for they fail to take into account the nuances of local culture and instead portray these cities as "bad copies" of the "original" Istanbul (p. 18). This geographically skewed approach likewise fails to take into consideration the dynamic relationship between the Arab lands of the Ottoman world and the rest of the empire, or to explore the ways in which international trends are reflected in, and affected, local history and vice versa. However, Hanna also recognizes the particular obstacles facing Ottomanists wishing to do local history; the sheer volume of local court records pushes many into examining the minutiae of a particular locality without being able to place their discoveries into the larger context of Ottoman history and culture. Despite this difficulty, she underscores the value of doing a detailed examination of a particular, very clearly defined area, in her case, Cairo, based on the records and literary accounts pertinent to the region, while at the same time being willing to cast the discoveries yielded by these documents into the context of concurrent trends in the Ottoman and European world.

To do this, she draws upon a series of heretofore unedited or generally ignored chronicles, biographies, and treatises written by merchants and tradesmen in Cairo from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, in conjunction with works by a variety of modern political and social theorists, and cultural historians of early modern Europe. From the latter, she gleans much of her theoretical approach and information about developments in early modern Europe that parallel her findings for Ottoman Cairo.

The central issue of her...