Lost and found, then lost again? The social history of workers and peasants in the modern Middle East

Abstract

Academic research on the history of the “modern Middle East” in European languages initially emerged in conjunction with efforts to dominate and colonize the region. Yet it was not until the post‐war wave of de‐colonization that what we recognize today as “social history” began to emerge in the field of Middle East studies. At the time, structural functionalism set the parameters for the field, with the elite‐centric “notables paradigm” providing a durable way for historians to think about the region. This scholarship was soon eclipsed by the “new social history,” which aimed to shed light on the previously neglected lives of provincials, women, workers, peasants, slaves, and others. But the “cultural turn” has served for the past twenty or so years to push back against the impulses that used to motivate social historians. This article provides an overview of these developments, along with suggestions for future research in the field of Middle East studies to re‐focus on the lives of workers and peasants. I argue that recent research, informed by theories of performance and a critical geographic approach to institutions and the state–society relationship, overcomes the epistemological critiques embodied in the cultural turn and provides promising new directions for the study of workers and peasants in the modern Middle East.

The history of public health in the modern Middle East: The environmental–medical turn

“…When Middle Eastern social history emerged as a subfield in the 1960s, it employed a top-down approach focusing on "notables" (Hourani, 1981;Lapidus, 1967); while subsequent waves began exploring other social strata, these were hardly representative given the average 90% illiteracy rate as late as the early 20th century. Since the publication of Orientalism and Timothy Mitchell's Colonizing Egypt, there has been what Kyle Anderson has described as an "epistemological impasse" between historical attempts to reconstruct peasant subjectivities on the one hand and critics who have argued that colonial discourse analysis makes this nearly impossible (for a more detailed accounting of this historiography, see Anderson, 2016). Anderson described how social historians have moved outside the fields of Middle Eastern studies and history and utilized methodologies from anthropology, ethnomusicology, and critical geography to uncover the urban poor and rural peasants.…”