This is my third book on Middle Eastern political economy this year. I had previously read The Middle East in the World Economy and A Political Economy of the Middle East. This work is quite different from the other two.

If I were to assess them in tandem, Owen White’s book is easily the most technical. It has detailed statistics, granular detail, and is written with so much detail. It’s the sort of work that you don’t see much anymore. Cammett and Diwan’s book, on the other hand, is probably the widest ranging. It combines social forces with politics and economics to give a really broad view of political economy. I think it was my favorite of the bunch.

Issawi’s book, on the other hand, falls somewhere between the two. It offers the classic economic history that White pursues, but is not as detailed and is much more approachable. Still, Cammett and Diwan’s case studies offer a sort of storytelling that you don’t really see in this book.

Like Cammett and Diwan, Issawi takes a thematic approach. Oil, infrastructure, agriculture, urbanization: it’s all here. Each chapter offers an outline of social and economic forces that led to “today’s” conditions (that is, 1982). Unlike White, he gives attention to North Africa as well as the Middle Eastern heartland.

I feel like I learned a lot from this book; it struck the right balance of big-picture analysis without getting too caught up in grainy details. For those looking for a classic economic history of the Middle East, this should be the starting point.