On an Economic History of the Middle East and North Africa

This is my third book on Middle Eastern political economy this year, after The Middle East in the World Economy and A Political Economy of the Middle East, and it’s quite different from both.

Assessed alongside them: Owen’s book is easily the most technical — detailed statistics, granular, written with a thoroughness you don’t see much anymore. Cammett and Diwan’s is the widest ranging, combining social forces with politics and economics into a genuinely broad view, and it was my favorite of the three. Issawi’s falls between. It offers the classic economic history that Owen pursues, but less granular and far more approachable — though it lacks the storytelling that Cammett and Diwan’s case studies supply. Like them, Issawi works thematically: oil, infrastructure, agriculture, urbanization, all of it here, each chapter outlining the social and economic forces that produced “today’s” conditions, meaning 1982. Unlike Owen, he gives North Africa its due alongside the Middle Eastern heartland.

I learned a great deal from it; it struck the right balance of big-picture analysis without getting lost in the grain. For anyone after a classic economic history of the Middle East, this should be the starting point.