Workers and working classes in the Middle East: struggles, histories, historiographies.

Zachary Lockman, ed., Workers and Working Classes in the Middle East: Struggles, Histories, Historiographies (Albany: State University of New York Press 1994).

THIS ANTHOLOGY on the state of the art in Middle Eastern labour history resulted from a 1990 workshop at Harvard University.

It consists of articles with different methodologies, theoretical, temporal, and regional focuses by leading historians of the Middle East, many specialists in labour history. It provides a wealth of information to the non-area-specialist labour historian as well as conceptual and historiographical insights to the general Middle East historian. The all-too-common problem of eclecticism in anthologies deriving from conferences has been averted in this volume by a comprehensive analytical introduction by the editor and two critical essays at the end (by Edmund Burke III and Dipesh Chakrabarty), all informed by the debates at the workshop.

The study of workers and working classes in the Middle East has been neglected due to various historiographical biases. The Orientalist disdain for subaltern social groups and identities has reinforced the modernization theorists' conventional privileging of elites. Proponents of dependency theory have emphasized class, but devoted insufficient attention to a working class weakened by Western industrial capitalism. Recently, the New Left has focused attention on the working class as a revolutionary agent by subscribing to a more rigid Marxist analysis.

In the Introduction, Zachary Lockman reviews the existing paradigms and presents the revisionist agenda of this project. (Labour may be on the margin of Middle Eastern studies, but Lockman's discussion reveals that labour history is far from being the most neglected aspect of Middle Eastern social history, in large part thanks to the past work of the contributors to this book.) The Introduction, with diversity as its main theme, addresses the merits of the Middle East as a unit of analysis. The editor discusses the pitfalls of accepting the Middle East as a unit of inquiry by virtue of common (Islamic) cultural patterns or common transformations under the impact of the capitalist world economy. Lockman concludes that the Middle East is "a legitimate entity because it has meaning for many people, within the region itself and outside of it, however that meaning was originally produced." (xvii) He is less inclined to view the "working class" as a useful category; to be sure, the plurals in the book's title point to the project's emphasis on the multiplicity of experiences, self-views, and narratives.

The authors pose a number of new directions in the study of Middle Eastern labour and many agree on a research agenda that moves discourse analysis to the forefront. There is an overall appeal to view workers not only in the workplace but in their daily lives, and in the context of their domestic and public cultural practices rather than as the members of a vanguard fulfilling its deterministic role in the factory.

The core of the book consists of essays on Egypt. Why and how Egypt has come to constitute the laboratory for the study of Middle Eastern labour, however, is not addressed in the historiographical and historical discussion. Egypt does serve as a useful model here, and conceptualizations and problematics most elaborately articulated for Egypt are effectively addressed by the non-Egyptianist contributors as well. Yet, the focus on Egypt also creates a certain imbalance. Several authors (Lockman, Joel Beinin, Ellis Goldberg) offer new insights and correctives on their past work on Egypt, as others (Kristin Koptiuch, Marsha Pripstein Posusney) dialogue closely with that work. The nuanced presentation of theoretical and historiographical issues pertaining to Egypt in a number of historical periods contrasts with the compendious substantive treatments of "histories and historiographies," particularly in the chapters on Turkey (Feroz Ahmad), Iran (Assef Bayat), and Iraq (Eric Davis).

These differences in scope and methodology do not present problems in the cohesion of the book, which is organized chronologically, but in the project's thematic consistency. In the early chapters, Sherry Vatter and Donald Quataert provide the late Ottoman backdrop. There are parallels between Quataert's broader analysis of state-labour relations and Vatter's appraisal of the journeyman-master relationship in Damascus. Both authors stress guild dynamism, and point to the workings of a moral economy in the workers' demands for fairness. Quataert discusses the modes in which workers expressed their grievances (petitions, public appeals) even as they groped for collective action in unions (which looked more like guilds than modern syndicates) vis-a-vis a repressive state.

In the first article that treats Egypt, Koptiuch describes the persistence of vibrant petty commodity production long after Egypt confronted industrial capitalism and well into the 20th century, thus imparting further strength to the case for abolishing the sharp dichotomies between artisan labour and "proletarian" labour. In a separate chapter, Lockman elaborates on another main theme of the volume: the significance of investigating the cultural components of class formation while exploring and accounting for the multifarious narratives of labour history, foremost among them those reflecting worker subjectivity. Goldberg then addresses one manifestation of the workers' voice by analysing some memoirs of Egyptian labour activists from the 1930s. He argues that a relationship of agency rather than subordination prevailed between the workers and administrators/owners of textile factories as a result of the workers' rational expectation of benefits (primarily job security) deriving from enhanced productivity. Posusney, in contrast, is skeptical of attempts to understand worker consciousness with the very limited discursive evidence. She turns her attention to an analysis of collective action and upholds the moral economy argument by concluding that worker action in contemporary Egypt is by and large restorative (if not symbolic) rather than rational, seeking more favourable terms at times of economic prosperity. In the last chapter on Egypt, Beinin turns to contemporary Egyptian critiques of the historical role of the Left in the workers' movement as one of betrayal and co-opting by the Nasserist state. Beinin does not reject this argument, but takes issue with the contention that such betrayal was responsible for the dissipation of a revolutionary opportunity in 1977. The social movement of the late 1970s encompassed many different subaltern strata, he argues, which lacked a unified consciousness.

The volume's stress on the need to analyze worker attitudes in a broader cultural, economic, and political context finds concrete expression in the articles by Ahmad and Bayat, who look at Turkey and Iran, respectively, across an extended period. While most contributors would agree on the importance of the role of women on the one hand and Islam on the other, in the project of shifting the focus from "structure" to "culture" it is only in Ahmad's account that we encounter the female worker's voice, and in Bayat's some analysis of how class consciousness has come to be articulated through religion. Bayat and Davis provide concise accounts of labour historiography pertaining to Iran and Iraq, respectively, while the Turkish experience provides Ahmad the opportunity to investigate the vicissitudes in the transformation of workers' economic struggles into political ones. Particularly poignant in Davis' account is the prominent role that the Iraqi working class played in politics and society in the 1940s and 1950s by transcending ethnic differences.

As Burke points out in his comments, this volume might have benefitted from a more consciously comparative approach. And as the editor laments by pointing to the financial constraints of the workshop, the collection does not include contributions from labour scholars pursuing careers in parts of the Middle East that are the objects of their research. The anthology remains, however, as perhaps the single most significant contribution to the study of labour in the Middle East by virtue of its breadth of scope and revisionist import. It builds on existing theoretical ground by offering further conceptual nuances, fresh information, and new directions for empirical research. Indeed, this collective effort by the leading historians of labour should be a paradigm for other components of Middle Eastern subaltern studies.

Hasan Kayali

University of California, San Diego