Smoking Culture And Economy In The Middle East

In this original and thought-provoking book, Relli Shechter examines the emergence of 'modern' markets in the complex social environment of the Middle East. Focusing on the tobacco market in Egypt, he looks at how markets interact with the society, politics and culture of the region. The history of Egypt's smoking habits - from the water pipe to the Marlboro - closely mirrors wider socio-economic developments in the country. Shechter begins his story by looking at the entrepreneurial Ottoman elite who produced luxury cigarettes for export worldwide. He then looks at the role of tobacco products in forming class consciousness in the domestic market, based on the idea that "you are what you smoke". Finally he looks at the politics of smoking in the context of contemporary economic globalisation. Shechter engages energetically with cutting-edge social and economic theories in telling the story of Egypt's tobacco markets. The result is a fascinating book which contains a wealth of newly uncovered material. "Smoking, Culture and Economy in the Middle East" will stimulate and inform anyone interested in political economy, social change and the Middle East region.

This volume explores major theoretical and empirical themes in the study of the economic history of the Middle East. Despite the relative neglect of economic history in Middle Eastern studies, this book makes a case for its importance as a discipline of study. On the one hand, it shows promise in illuminating the economic base of historical trends and events; on the other, it can elucidate the historical foundations of economic continuity and change. The chapters employ an array of theoretical and methodological approaches and ultimately demonstrate how economics and history, along with political economy, complement each other in studying the Middle East. Among the substantive topics explored are the trajectories of the Arab Spring, institutional change and economic development in the early Ottoman Empire, the destructive effects of the reordering property rights in Iraq by the American-led occupation authority, the evolution of the political economy of the Islamic Republic of Iran, and the determinants of movements in the yields of Egyptian and Ottoman sovereign debt following political and economic crises in the 19th and early 20th centuries. The book will be of interest to scholars and students of economic history, political economy, and the Middle East.

The dawn of the Cold War marked a new stage of complex U.S. foreign policy involvement in the Middle East. More recently, globalization and the region’s ongoing conflicts and political violence have led to the U.S. being more politically, economically, and militarily enmeshed – for better or worse—throughout the region. This book examines the emergence and development of U.S. foreign policy toward the Middle East from the early 1900s to the present. With contributions from some of the world’s leading scholars, it takes a fresh, interdisciplinary, and insightful look into the many antecedents that led to current U.S. foreign policy. Exploring the historical challenges, regional alliances, rapid political change, economic interests, domestic politics, and other sources of regional instability, this volume comprises critical analysis from Iranian, Turkish, Israeli, American, and Arab perspectives to provide a comprehensive examination of the evolution and transformation of U.S. foreign policy toward the Middle East. This volume is an important resource for scholars and students working in the fields of Political Science, Sociology, International Relations, Islamic, Turkish, Iranian, Arab, and Israeli Studies.

This edited collection considers representations of ancient Egypt in the literature of the nineteenth-century. It addresses themes such as reanimated mummies, ancient Egyptian mythology and contemporary consumer culture across literary modes ranging from burlesque satire to historical novels, stage performances to Gothic fiction and popular culture to the highbrow. The book illuminates unknown sources of historical significance – including the first illustration of an ambulatory mummy – revising current understandings of the works of canonical writers and grounding its analysis firmly in a contemporary context. The contributors demonstrate the extensive range of cultural interest in ancient Egypt that flourished during Victoria’s reign. At the same time, they use ancient Egypt to interrogate ‘selfhood’ and ‘otherness’, notions of race, imperialism, religion, gender and sexuality.

In Balkan Smoke, Mary Neuburger leads readers along the Bulgarian-Ottoman caravan routes and into the coffeehouses of Istanbul and Sofia. She reveals how a remote country was drawn into global economic networks through tobacco production and consumption and in the process became modern. In writing the life of tobacco in Bulgaria from the late Ottoman period through the years of Communist rule, Neuburger gives us much more than the cultural history of a commodity; she provides a fresh perspective on the genesis of modern Bulgaria itself. The tobacco trade comes to shape most of Bulgaria's international relations; it drew Bulgaria into its fateful alliance with Nazi Germany and in the postwar period Bulgaria was the primary supplier of smokes (the famed Bulgarian Gold) for the USSR and its satellites. By the late 1960s Bulgaria was the number one exporter of tobacco in the world, with roughly one eighth of its population involved in production. Through the pages of this book we visit the places where tobacco is grown and meet the merchants, the workers, and the peasant growers, most of whom are Muslim by the postwar period. Along the way, we learn how smoking and anti-smoking impulses influenced perceptions of luxury and necessity, questions of novelty, imitation, value, taste, and gender-based respectability. While the scope is often global, Neuburger also explores the politics of tobacco within Bulgaria. Among the book's surprises are the ways in which conflicts over the tobacco industry (and smoking) help to clarify the forbidding quagmire of Bulgarian politics.

Taking society as its central focus, Middle Eastern and North African Societies in the Interwar Period approaches the region as one of connectivities and fluidity and investigates networks and interregional relations, stratagems adopted to shape society and social resistance to or absorption of change. From tourism to health propaganda, marriage to beauty contest, mass communication to music, this book offers a vibrant and dynamic picture of the region which goes beyond state borders. Contributors are Diana Abbani, Amit Bein, Ebru Boyar, Elizabeth Brownson, Nazan Çiçek, Kate Fleet, Ulrike Freitag, Liat Kozma, Brian L. McLaren and Emilio Spadola.

By the early twentieth century, consumers around the world had developed a taste for Ottoman-grown tobacco. Employing tens of thousands of workers, the Ottoman tobacco industry flourished in the decades between the 1870s to the First Balkan War—and it became the locus of many of the most active labor struggles across the empire. Can Nacar delves into the lives of these workers and their fight for better working conditions. Full of insight into the changing relations of power between capital and labor in the Ottoman Empire and the role played by state actors in these relations, this book also draws on a rich array of primary sources to foreground the voices of tobacco workers themselves.

Examines the results of the Middle Eastern oil boom of the 1970s-80s on the Egyptian economy and how this economic growth has an impact on Egyptian society.

“Masterfully illuminates the social and cultural fissures left by colonialism in the Levant as hashish trade transgressed new national borders.” —Paul Gootenberg, Stony Brook University, author of Andean Cocaine: The Making of a Global Drug When European powers carved political borders across the Middle East following World War I, a curious event in the international drug trade occurred: Palestine became the most important hashish waystation in the region and a thriving market for consumption. British and French colonial authorities utterly failed to control the illicit trade, raising questions about the legitimacy of their mandatory regimes. The creation of the Israeli state, too, had little effect to curb illicit trade. By the 1960s, drug trade had become a major point of contention in the Arab-Israeli conflict, and drug use widespread. Intoxicating Zion is the first book to tell the story of hashish in Mandatory Palestine and Israel. Trafficking, use, and regulation; race, gender, and class; colonialism and nation-building all weave together in Haggai Ram's social history of the drug from the 1920s to the aftermath of the 1967 War. The hashish trade encompassed smugglers, international gangs, residents, law enforcers, and political actors, and Ram traces these flows through the interconnected realms of cross-border politics, economics, and culture. Hashish use was and is a marker of belonging and difference, and its history offers readers a unique glimpse into how the modern Middle East was made. “A fascinating and revelatory tale.” —Ted R. Swedenburg, University of Arkansas “[A] singular, original work of research.” —Yossi Melman, Haaretz “Informative, though (pun intended) sobering, this book is suited for academic libraries.” —Hallie Cantor, Association of Jewish Libraries Reviews