Product Description: In Egypt, the landowning class first arose in the early part of the nineteenth century from land grants given to extended family members and friends of the ruler Muhammad 'Ali. The development of capitalism and, with it, the evolution of law and social practice allowed these land grants gradually to take on the attributes of private property, a process that culminated in 1891 in land becaming a form of property like any other...read more

History as a discipline faces a crisis of identity as Eurocentrism fades in a world where globalized visions compete to explain historical processes. Facing the challenge squarely, this volume_comprising specialists on Asia, Africa, and Latin America_explores the state of historical analysis in various world regions and appraises current views on what defines and challenges historical knowledge. It is widely accepted that Eurocentrism no longer seem acceptable in a world where others are reasserting their own notions of past and future. The postDWorld War II spatialities that guided both historical analysis and the division of labor in historical work are in the process of disappearing into more globalized visions. Constituencies left out of history in the past are making demands for the recognition of their historical presence. History as epistemology is under attack as a marker of Eurocentric modernity from non-historical ways of thinking, as well as from ideologies of postmodernism that deny to history its claims to truth. Indeed, the current situation in the field has been described by one distinguished historian as a Ocacophonous confusion.O The challenge historians face is how to imagine new ways of writing history that overcome this confusion without falling back upon ideological and methodological prejudices that reproduce the problems of the past in new guises. The contributors discuss how these challenges are voiced and met in their different areas of specialization. Unsurprising in a volume that addresses a variety of regions and issues that (view table of contents)

Product Description: Challenging the ethnocentric notion that a capitalist economy could only be transferred to the peripheral states through contact with Europe, this text argues that the capitalist transformation of the Egyptian economy was begun by Muslim merchants and Mamluk rulers in the 18th century...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Employing the approaches of Gramsci and Foucault, Gran proposes a reconceptualisation of world history. He challenges the convention of relying on totalitarian or democratic functions of a particular state to explain relationships of authority and resistance in a number of national contexts. (view table of contents)