ABSTRACT
Like many parts of the world in the last two hundred years or so the Middle East has gone through a process of deindustrialization followed by reindustrialization. The decline of the handicrafts continued until well after the First World War. By then another development was under way: the growth of a modern factory industry, which started around the 1890s, gathered momentum in the 1920s and 30s, and since the Second World War has proceeded at a rapid pace. However, it was probably not until the 1920s or 30s that rising employment in factories offset the decline of the handicrafts, and that the proportion of the population employed in industry began to grow instead of decreasing.
