Egyptian textile workers: from craft artisans facing European competition to proletarians contending with the state

In the last 20 years voluminous scholarship on Egypt and other Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire has undermined the traditional Orientalist thesis that the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were a period of economic, political and cultural stagnation and decline. ¹ Nonetheless, this thesis persists as the default explanation for why there was no industrial revolution, no development of modern science and technology, and other absences compared to the presumed normative case of Europe (which usually means England). For example, David Landes's global economic history relies on crude culturalist arguments to explain the failure of the Arab Middle East to follow the developmental trajectory of Europe. He argues, anticipating the title of a highly touted book by Bernard Lewis, that 'History had gone awry.' ²