Is the World of the Elites Really Flat? The View from Egypt: Critical Remarks on Sandra Halperin’s Re-Envisioning Global Development

Is the World of the Elites Really Flat? The View from Egypt: Critical Remarks on Sandra Halperin’s Re-Envisioning Global Development

Is the World of the Elites Really Flat? The View from Egypt: Critical Remarks on Sandra Halperin’s Re-Envisioning Global Development

By : Zeyad El Nabolsy

Sandra Halperin, Re-Envisioning Global Development: A Horizontal Perspective. (London: Routledge, 2013), 312 pages.

Universalizing Dependency Theory


Sandra Halperin's book is a Janus-faced creature. On the one hand, Halperin attempts to retrieve dependency theory, an approach to socio-economic analysis that many have relegated to the dustbin of history. On the other, Halperin attempts to retrieve dependency theory by universalizing it. In doing so, however, she attempts to sever dependency theory from its historical association with the national liberation struggles of the Global South. That Halperin's book takes dependency theory so seriously may perhaps explain why it has been ignored, for it has not been reviewed in any English academic journal as far as I can tell. Yet for those of us who do not believe that dependency theory is dead, this book raises important questions: what are the costs that one incurs when one attempts to retrieve dependency theory by disconnecting it from the Global South struggles to which it has been tethered? This question animates this review. While I argue that Halperin's attempt to revive dependency theory by universalizing it ultimately leads to an erasure of imperialism, the value of this book is precisely that it brings such issues to the forefront. Thus, what is at stake in this book is the relevance of theories of imperialism for the study of the Global South.

Halperin’s main thesis is that the key to understanding the development of historical capitalism – actually existing capitalism as opposed to an ideal model of how capitalism works –is to understand that it was not a process, or a set of processes, that pivoted around nation-states. Rather, it was one that pivoted around specific regions of nation-states: cities. While Halperin is engaging in a critique of dependency theory, whose adherents emphasize the draining of surplus from the “periphery” to the “core,” we can also understand her as attempting to universalize dependency theory. By this, I mean that Halperin argues that before WWII, the economies of the states that are designated as belonging to the “core” by dependency theorists shared all of the features that have been employed in order to describe “peripheral” economies by dependency theorists (84).[1]

Halperin argues that, for the most part, the relationships between what dependency theorists call the periphery and what they call the core were not as hierarchal as the dependency theorists claim, if by “hierarchal” we mean that power imbalances between elites in those different regions were such that surplus was systematically drained from the “periphery” towards the “core.” More specifically, Halperin argues that we should not think of these relationships in terms of relationships between nation-states. Instead, Halperin argues that we should think of global capitalist development in terms of horizontal relationships between export-oriented urban centers ruled by elites, who collectively constitute a trans-national elite. As Halperin puts it: “As capitalism expands it is characterized, not by the formation of a global core and periphery, but by the interdependent and synchronous growth of sites of elite accumulation across Afro-Eurasia and the Americas. In the nineteenth century, this regime of accumulation was consolidated and maintained by an imperial order that was far more cooperative, distributed its benefits far more widely than many scholars recognize or have been willing to acknowledge” [my emphasis] (xiv).

Halperin’s key aim is to re-orient understandings of development. She does so by pointing out that it was only after World War II that the economies of Western Europe ceased to be dualistic, or to be characterized by the lack of integration amongst different sectors of the economy due to the export-orientation of some sectors which hence respond more to external demands than they do to domestic demands. This pattern was only sustained until the 1970s. In other words, the main dynamic of growth for capitalist economies, except for the period from 1945 to the 1970s, is based on production for export as opposed to production for domestic consumption.

Class Struggle as the Royal Road to Development


Furthermore, she emphasizes that the Western European economies, as well as the settler economies of the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, became developed only after WWII. This occurred through a process of class struggle that led to what she calls the “nationalization” of capital, whereby the social power of the landowners, specifically in Western Europe and the United States, was broken. As a result, capital was nationalized, in the sense that production was undertaken for the domestic economy. There was also a greater re-distribution of wealth among different sectors of the population, which was necessary for the growth of demand in the domestic market. This, in turn, shows that development can only be achieved by class struggle (174-181). She points out that global struggles amongst elites (the two world wars) weakened elite power vis-à-vis their own working classes, who had been mobilized for war in massive conscript armies. Ruling elites were also forced to increase industrial capacity, geared towards domestic consumption, to sustain the war effort (172). One important consequence of Halperin’s project is to undermine the thesis that development can be viewed as an apolitical, technocratic project. She thus aims to undercut the discourse of development as an “anti-politics machine” (Ferguson 1994). The traditional historical account whereby the development of “Western economies” is attributed to specific facets of transformations in Europe in the eighteenth century, or even earlier in the sixteenth century, serves an ideological function, according to Halperin. It conceals the importance of social struggles, and specifically class struggles, in the post-WWII period in bringing about “development.”

Rethinking the Industrial Revolution


Halperin’s reconceptualization of the industrial revolution supports the thesis that the capitalist elites were not interested in developing national economies.[2] According to Halperin, the traditional view of the “industrial revolution” in Britain is incorrect in several ways. First, the “industrial revolution” did not completely change the manner in which the workforce was distributed in the ostensibly “core” countries. She points out that by 1914 almost half of the workforce in Western European countries was still employed in agriculture (146). Moreover, she challenges the idea that the “industrial revolution” was driven by technological transformations of world-historical significance. She points out that there were no significant technological changes in relation to industry in the mid-eighteenth century, the traditional date for the beginning of the set of transformations referred to as“the industrial revolution” (61). Instead, Halperin argues that elite accumulation by production for export was the main driving factor behind the transformations in question. Specifically, she argues that the rural hinterland of cities like London was de-industrialized, and production, geared towards export, was concentrated in the cities (66).

Neoliberalism as the Norm and the Generalization of Delinking as a Solution


Halperin argues that capitalism is a global system and has always been characterized by the existence of a transnational elite. Those elites are primarily interested in the accumulation of capital rather than the development of national economies. For them, production for export is a means by which they can reinforce the dominance of capital over labor. She is, then, arguing that neoliberalism and globalization are not essentially novel phenomena. She suggests that insofar as neoliberal reforms have aimed at re-integrating domestic economies into the global economy, and hence at dis-articulating those economies by tethering certain sectors of those economies to global markets and untethering them from their relation to other sectors of the domestic economy, what is called neoliberalism is essentially an attempt at a return to the past. Specifically, she sees neoliberalism as an attempt to re-establish the pre-1945 economic and social order in the “West” (213-214). Halperin’s characterization of neoliberalism as involving the withdrawal of the state from regulating economic activities is perhaps overly simplistic. For example, certain features of neoliberal reforms presuppose strong intervention by the state, like the commodification of communal land in some regions of the world. Instead of thinking of the state as withdrawing from regulating economic activities, it would be more fruitful to ask: what kinds of economic activities are being regulated today by the state? And what kinds of activities is the state helping to commodify and transform into economic activities? And for whose benefit and at whose expense?

For Halperin, the role of the state in development is crucial. She argues that only when the working class is able to re-direct state policies can it forge the conditions for the development of internally articulated economies and the social welfare programs that are associated with them.[3] We might return to the point that was made earlier: Halperin’s project is essentially a generalization of dependency theory. We may see this in her proposal that the aim of the working class in each state should be to “delink” from the global economy and to bring about “the nationalization of capital” by putting forward and implementing policies that aim at developing the domestic market along with a more egalitarian distribution of wealth. In other words, Halperin would agree with Samir Amin when he calls for the “refusal to submit national-development strategy to the imperatives of ‘globalization’” (Amin 1987, 435). However, she would disagree with the claim that delinking is a development strategy to be pursued only by the “Global South.” Instead, she would point out that the working class in every region of the world, including the “First World” or the “Global North,” must delink.

Critical Comments on Halperin’s Account of Imperialism and the Transnational Elite: The Egyptian Case Study


Taking Egypt in the nineteenth century as a case study, one can argue that insofar as Halperin argues that “elites were bound predominantly by relations of cooperation, producing surplus, rather than inequality and active exploitation” (128), she underestimates the power imbalance between the elites of the imperialist powers and the elites of the colonized regions. I focus on Egypt for two main reasons: first, Halperin is a “Middle East specialist” and her treatment of the Middle East is the most empirically developed aspect of her account. Second, and more importantly, the occupation of Egypt by the British in 1882 and the events leading up to it have been central to the Anglophone literature on imperialism from Hobson onwards (Hopkins 1986).In other words, the Egyptian case has served as a paradigm for the understanding of European imperialism in the nineteenth century. Thus, the strength of Halperin’s model of European imperialism in the nineteenth century can be assessed in relation to whether it provides a better account of this case than “conventional” theories of imperialism. Such theories conceive of imperialism in terms of unequal hierarchal relations between the elites of the colonial powers and colonized elites leading to a systematic draining of surplus from the colonized region and to the colonial metropole. Moreover, Egypt is often recognized as the first non-European state in the nineteenth century to attempt to “emerge” from its “peripheral” status (Amin 1984, 2016). Hence, it is instructive to consider how the Egyptian elite’s attempt to improve their position vis-à-vis the Ottoman elite and, more importantly for our purposes, the British elite, was thwarted by way of the utilization of the military might that was at the disposal of the British elite.

The characterization of Mehmed Ali’s project as “an attempt to escape from the status of being a peripheral economy” may be criticized for uncritically accepting the Egyptian nationalist narratives which depict Mehmed Ali as “the father of modern Egypt”. To preempt this objection, it is necessary to note that I do not claim that Mehmed Ali undertook the ventures that he did in order to create and defend a nascent nation-state, nor do I wish to claim that Mehmed Ali saw himself as the protector of the Egyptian people.[4] The nationalist narrative has been thoroughly criticized by Khaled Fahmy, who has argued that Mehmed Ali was a Turkish-speaking Albanian (assimilated into Ottoman culture) who was not at all interested in creating an Arabic-speaking Egyptian nation-state, and that he, in fact, saw the Egyptian peasants in semi-racialized terms as “wild beasts” (Fahmy 2003, 282). Fahmy’s critique of the nationalist narrative, a critique that I think Halperin herself would endorse given her criticisms of histories of capitalism that presuppose the nation-state as the primary unit of analysis, is well taken.[5] However, even if we accept the claim that Mehmed Ali undertook his projects for the sake of his family, we can nonetheless observe the manner in which the interests of the Egyptian elite, exemplified in this context by Mehmed Ali and his family, were eventually subordinated to the interests of the British elite.

Mehmed Ali, who became the pasha of Egypt in 1805, embarked on an industrialization program by imposing a monopoly on trade. Mehmed Ali’s program of agrarian reform aimed at allowing the state to concentrate almost all of the agricultural surplus in its hands, and was completed by 1815. The state was able to buy cash crops, primarily cotton, from the producers, and sell them at a profit to foreign merchants. For example, in 1833, the Egyptian state bought cotton at £48 per ton and sold it abroad at £119 per ton (Batou 1993). The revenue thus accrued was re-invested in industrialization programs. Halperin claims that during the course of the nineteenth century Egypt was essentially converted by its ruling elite into a giant cotton farm (136). Halperin is correct. However, she neglects to mention that Egypt was turned into a mere cotton farm only after Mehmed Ali’s industrialization project was undermined through the intervention of European elites. Mehmed Ali reinvested the income that was obtained through the trade monopolies in industry in an attempt to offset the harmful effects that stem from the unequal exchange associated with the exporting of raw materials and the importing of manufactured goods (Al-Sherbiny 2007). Mehmed Ali focused on developing the cotton industrial sector, and by the 1830s, Egypt could produce between 2000 and 3000 tons of yarn per year and 10 million m²of cloth per year. Mehmed Ali also established ironworks, sugar refineries, glass manufacturing factories, and paper factories. Moreover, contrary to what is usually claimed, the industrial sector that was established by Mehmed Ali did not exclusively aim to service his new conscript-based army. As Batou notes, “civilian outlets absorbed some 80% of locally produced cotton goods, and almost the whole output of sugar, indigo, paper, ink, glass, not to speak of machinery and equipment” (Batou 1993, 285). The industrial sector that Mehmed Ali built up also produced its own machinery.

Like many other attempts at industrialization, Mehmed Ali’s project was based on the exploitation of the countryside for the sake of developing the industrial urban centers (Barakāt2018, 182). At least in this respect, Mehmed Ali’s Egypt accords with Halperin’s account of industrialization in the late eighteenth century and the nineteenth century. There was also a process of uneven regional development, which also accords with Halperin’s account. Upper Egypt was drained of surplus, which went towards the large urban centers of Lower Egypt: Cairo and Alexandria (Richards 1977).

Nonetheless what is central is that this expansionist project put Mehmed Ali in competition with British elites over the markets of the Near East.: “from 1830 to 1840 British trade with the Middle East had increased dramatically. Indeed, its exports of cotton goods to this region had quadrupled in physical terms” (Batou 1993, 305-306). As the Egyptian historian Muḥammad Ṣabry al-Dāly has noted, Khaled Fahmy’s influential All the Pasha’s Men (2003) underplays the significance of Mehmed Ali’s efforts at industrial expansion in explaining British policy towards Mehmed Ali, as well as the significance of British ambitions to dominate the Near Eastern market as an explanatory factor (Al-Dāly2007, 39). Another key factor that contributed to the British decision to move against Mehmed Ali was concern about the balance of power with the Russian Empire. The British elite feared that an Ottoman collapse would allow Russia to expand its influence towards Constantinople and challenge British naval control over the Mediterranean.

By 1840, the British were blockading Egypt’s coasts and bombarding coastal cities in the Levant. Mehmed Ali was eventually forced to accede to British demands. As a consequence of the settlement of 1840, Mehmed Ali was forced to abandon all his conquests. In 1841, he was forced to abandon some of his trade monopolies, and by 1843 he had to abandon the monopoly on cotton. With the state no longer able to concentrate the revenue accrued from cotton and re-invest it in industry, and with the undermining of Mehmed Ali’s protectionist policies, the nascent state capitalist industrial sector in Egypt began to decline in the face of competition from imported manufactured goods. Under Mehmed Ali’s successors, Egypt became a mere cotton farm for British factories with no significant industry.

 Hence, even if Halperin is right to point out that in the course of the nineteenth century Egypt was transformed into a giant cotton farm with the acquiescence of its ruling elite, we must take into consideration that this collaboration was the collaboration of the vanquished. In other words, Halperin does not sufficiently historicize the processes which led to the adoption of a collaborationist stance by the colonized elites. In some cases such as in Egypt, local elites attempted to resist the imperialist elites. To be sure, they did not, for the most part, do so for nationalistic considerations, they resisted so that they could keep more of the surplus extracted from the local peasantry and working class. But they were defeated, and forced to accede to a settlement that made them dependent, weakened partners of the colonialist elites. Hence, when Halperin notes that Egyptian elites came to see themselves as participants in a cosmopolitan culture of elites across the world (by learning French, building European style villas, etc.), she does not take into account that this does not imply that the imperialist project was a collaborative project between more or less equal elites (126).[6] Moreover, even when Halperin gestures at recognizing that not all elites gained to the same degree, she does not attempt to quantify the differential distribution of the extracted surplus, which in fact is the crux of the matter.[7]

As noted above, Egypt became a cotton supplier to Britain, and Britain became its most significant trading partner. By 1880 Britain took 80 percent of Egypt’s exports, mostly cotton, of course, and supplied 40 percent of her imports. This fact partially undermines Halperin’s argument that contrary to what the proponents of dependency theory have claimed: “the ‘core’ did not import raw materials and minerals necessary for its industrial expansion, but luxury goods and foodstuffs that made it possible to depress wages” (142). In the case of Egypt, the main commodity that the British elite imported was raw material, in the form of raw cotton, for their textile factories. Thus, Halperin understates the difference in content between exports and imports in her account of trade between the West and the Global South.

Under the rule of Saʿid (r. 1854-1863) and Ismaʿil (r. 1863-1879), Egypt’s foreign debts grew massively (Al-Sherbiny 2007, Amin 2012). European lenders offered loans to the Khedives with extremely harsh conditions. For instance, between 1863 and 1876, Ismaʿil contracted debts worth £54 million, but the Egyptian state only received £32 million, the difference being deducted as fees and discounted interest (Amin 2012, 31).  As Galal Amin (2012) notes, when one studies the loans contracted under Saʿid and Ismaʿil, but especially the latter, one observes that the loans were determined by supply rather than demand. European elites pressured Ismaʿil into accepting loans that his state did not need. The debts contracted by the Egyptian state to British and French investors represented a way to profitably invest British and French capital with a guaranteed return, since Ismaʿil had to pay, otherwise, he would be deposed. By the 1870s, it was clear that Ismaʿil would not be able to pay off the debts contracted by the Egyptian state. By the late 1870s, Egypt’s finances were placed under the control of European supervisors.[8] The treatment of Ismaʿil is quite instructive in terms of understanding the relationship between European elites and subjugated, non-European elites during the nineteenth century. As long as he succumbed to pressure to contract loans that the Egyptian state did not need, and as long as he managed to squeeze the peasantry to service his debts, he was feted by European elites as a modernizer and as one of their own. However, as soon as it became clear that he would no longer be able to service the debts, he was depicted in the British and French press as a cruel oriental despot from whose rapacious rule Egypt had to be saved (Marlowe 1974, 110). In 1879 he was deposed, and replaced by Tawfiq (r. 1879-1892), who nominally ruled Egypt, but did not actually take any part in managing the affairs of the Egyptian state. Salisbury’s (then serving as foreign secretary in Britain) view of the relationship between the British elites and the Egyptian elites is also instructive in relation to understanding the extent to which Halperin’s insistence that the relationship between elites in different parts of the world was (for the most part) characterized by equality rather than hierarchy and exploitation, is misguided. Salisbury thought that Anglo-French policy towards Ismaʿil should be to apply enough pressure on him to “make him subservient to Anglo-French policy” (Marlowe 1974, 238). Hence, Halperin’s model of imperialism according to which the relationship between European elites and non-European elites is understood in terms of collaboration in which “agents were working jointly with one another” as opposed to one party “working for another” (131), does not seem to fit the Egyptian case. The British and French elite wanted to make the Egyptian elite work for them, and to a large extent, they succeeded in doing so.[9]

Furthermore, in the late nineteenth century there was a greater availability of foreign capital, for the European elites were encouraged to invest more in Egypt, since after 1882 it had become a country occupied by the British. However, capital was only made available for projects that expanded cotton production: land reclamation programs, irrigation works, and railways for the transportation of cotton (Ayubi 1995, 91). From the 1880s through to the 1920s, some members of the Egyptian elite, specifically a segment of the big landowners, had recognized that dependency on cotton production for the global market (and specifically for British factories) hampered their ability to maneuver in relation to the European elite. They, therefore, attempted to enter into the banking and the industrial sectors (Al-Sherbiny 2007, 46). Members of the European elite who controlled the banking sector in Egypt systematically thwarted some members of the Egyptian elite’s attempted entrances into the banking sector, e.g., Ṣīnūt Ḥanā, Manṣūr Yūssef, and the Wīṣā family, in the late nineteenth century (Al-Sherbiny 2016, 46; Tignor 1977).[10]

We can see that Halperin’s model of relations amongst the capitalist elite in different parts of the world does not adequately take into consideration the existence of hierarchies of dependence and domination amongst the transnational elite. Halperin attempts to critique histories of capitalism that adopt the nation-state as the primary unit of analysis. However, she ends up underestimating the significance of the power imbalances that structured interactions between European elites and non-European elites in the context of imperialism. Indeed, such power imbalances allowed European elites to systematically prevail in contests with the colonized elites over the distribution of surplus.

References:

Al-Dāly, Muḥammad Ṣabry. 2007. “Jadal al-siyāsa wa al-iqtiṣād fiʾazma Mehmed Ali Pasha bal sham: derāsa fi mawqif ʾingilterā 1831-1838 [The Dialectic of Politics and Economy in the Crisis of Mehmed Ali Pasha in the Levant: A Study of the Position of England 1831-1838].” Miṣr al-ḥadītha [Modern Egypt] 6: 19-68.

Al-Sayyid-Marsot, Afaf  Lutfi. 1984. Egypt in the Reign of Muhammad Ali. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Al-Sherbiny, Aḥmad. 2007. Al-iqtiṣād al-miṣrī: bayn al-tabʿaīa wa al-istiqlāl [The Egyptian Economy: Between Dependency and Independence]. Cairo: Dar El Shorouk.

Amin, Galal. 2012. Qiṣṣa al-iqtiṣād al-miṣrī: min ‘ahd Mehmed Ali ʾilā ‘ahd Hosni Mubarak [The Story of the Egyptian Economy: From the Reign of Mehmed Ali to the Reign of Hosni Mubarak]. Cairo: Dar El Shorouk.

Amin, Samir. 1987. “A Note on the Concept Delinking.” Review (Ferdinand Braudel Center) 10.3: 435-444.

Amin, Samir. 1984. “Contradictions in the Capitalist Development of Egypt: A Review Essay.” Monthly Review 36.4: 13-21.

Amin, Samir. 2016. “Egypt: Failed Emergence, Conniving Capitalism, Fall of the Muslim Brothers – A Possible Popular Alternative.” In Development Challenges and Solutions After the Arab Spring, edited by Ali Kadri, 19-38. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Anouar Abdel-Malek. 1968. Egypt: Military Society: The Army Regime, the Left, and Social Change under Nasser. Translated by Charles Lam Markmann. New York: Random House.

Ayubi, Nazih N. 1995. Over-stating the Arab State: Politics and Society in the Middle East. New York: I.B. Tauris Publishers.

Batou, Jean. 1993. “Nineteenth-Century Attempted Escapes from the Periphery: The Cases of Egypt and Paraguay.” Review (Ferdinand Braudel Center) 16.3: 279-318.

Barakāt, ʿAli. 2018. Al-qarya wa al-sulṭa  fi miṣr fi al-qarn al-tāsiʿʿashr[The Village and Political Authority in Egypt in the Nineteenth Century]. Cairo: General Egyptian Book Organization.

Fahmy, Khaled. 2003. All the Pasha’s Men: Mehmed Ali, his Army and the Making of Modern Egypt. Cairo: The American University in Cairo Press.

Ferguson, James. 1994. The Anti-Politics Machine: Development, Depoliticization, and Bureaucratic Power in Lesotho. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

Galbraith, John and Afaf Lutfi Al-Sayyid -Marsot. 1978. “The British Occupation of Egypt: Another View.” International Journal of Middle East Studies 9.4: 471-488.

Gran, Peter. 1998. Islamic Roots of Capitalism: Egypt, 1760-1840. 2nd Ed. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press.

Halperin, Sandra. 1997. In the Mirror of the Third World: Capitalist Development in Modern Europe. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Hopkins, G.A. 1986. “The Victorians and Africa: A Reconsideration of the Occupation of Egypt, 1882.” The Journal of African History 27.2: 363-391.

Marlowe, John. 1974. Spoiling the Egyptians. London: Andre Deutsch.

Patnaik, Utsa. 2006. “The Free Lunch: Transfers from the Tropical Colonies and Their Role in Capital Formation in Britain during the Industrial Revolution.”  In Globalization Under Hegemony, edited by K.S. Jomo, 30-69. Delhi: Oxford University Press.

Richards, Alan R. 1977. “Primitive Accumulation in Egypt, 1798-1882.” Review (Ferdinand Braudel Center) 1.2: 3-49.

Said, Edward. 1978. Orientalism. New York: Pantheon Books.

Salem, Sara. 2018. “Reading Egypt’s Postcolonial State through Frantz Fanon: Hegemony,

Dependency and Development.” Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies 20.3: 428-445.

Tignor, Robert L. 1977. “Bank Misr and Foreign Capital.” International Journal of Middle East Studies 8.2: 161-181.

Tignor, Robert L. 1980. “Dependency Theory and Egyptian Capitalism, 1920 to 1950.” African Economic History 9: 101-118.

Zeilig, Leo. 2017. “Revolutionary Change in Africa: An Interview with Samir Amin.” Review of African Political Economy: http://roape.net/2017/03/16/revolutionary-change-africa-interv



[1] Halperin argues extensively for the similarities in the developmental trajectories of the West and the Global South in her first book (Halperin 1997).

[2] This point is not original to Halperin. Fernand Braudel and Immanuel Wallerstein have made similar arguments. Halperin herself acknowledges her debts to them (24). However, she also argues that Wallerstein “fails to break with the national frame” (19). To this extent she conceives of her project as going beyond Wallerstein and as involving a more radical break with the “national frame.”

[3] The importance of focusing on attaining state power at the national level is also emphasized by Samir Amin (Zeilig, 2017), which further supports my point about the similarity of Halperin’s proposed remedies to the remedies that dependency theorists advocate, i.e., Halperin generalizes the solutions proposed by dependency theorists.

[4] I also do not take myself to contradict Peter Gran’s claim that by the 1760s Egypt was already undergoing a structural transformation away from being a social formation that can be characterized as an instantiation of the tributary mode of formation and towards a social formation that can be characterized as an instantiation of the capitalist mode of production (Gran 1998). I.e., Mehmed Ali did not emerge in a vacuum.

[5] Although one must say that Fahmy's thesis is not in fact original. Anouar Abdel-Malek had argued in the 1960s that Mehmed Ali had no intention of creating an Egyptian nation-state, and that while his actions did contribute to the rise of Egyptian nationalism this was despite his own intentions: "what for Mohammed Ali was only a move on the chessboard of power within the Ottoman Empire became in the eyes of Egyptians a national movement aimed against the Turkish occupant, the most hated of all" (Abdel-Malek 1968, 358).

[6] Halperin attempts to downplay the significance of cultural differences between European elites and non-European elites in influencing the manner in which they interacted with one another (28). She also attempts to undermine the significance of constructions of racial and cultural difference as a causal element in structuring interactions between European elites and non-European elites. The British ruling elite had no illusions about the hierarchal nature of their relationship to Mehmed Ali. They did not view him as a more or less equal collaborator whose interests should be taken into consideration when it comes to achieving a settlement. Lord Palmerston, who served as foreign secretary at the time, made this quite clear: “to subjugate Muhammad Ali to Great Britian. . .could be wrong and biased, but we are biased; the vital interests of Europe require that we should be so” (quoted from Al-Sayyid-Marsot 1984, 240). Moreover, Palmerston himself never concealed the fact that he viewed Mehmed Ali as an uncivilized barbarian: “for my part, I hate Mehmet Ali, whom I consider as nothing but an ignorant barbarian. . .. I look upon his boasted civilization as the arrantest humbug” (quoted from Fahmy 2003, 303). If we examine the language which was used to describe the British occupation of Egypt in 1882, we will encounter similar Orientalist themes. For instance, Gladstone described the invasion of Egypt as an “upright war, a Christian war” (quoted from Hopkins 1986, 381). Malet, the British Consul in Egypt, wrote to Salisbury (then serving as foreign secretary) the following note of congratulations after the occupation of Egypt: “you have fought the victory of all Christendom and history will acknowledge it” (quoted from Galbraith and Al-Sayyid Marsot 1978, 478). The point is not that the British elite took the decision to occupy Egypt because they were motivated by a crusading ethos. As Hopkins (1986) convincingly argues, the main cause of the British occupation of Egypt in 1882 was the need to preserve the financial interests of the British and French creditors of the Egyptian state. The point is that Halperin is overemphasizing the extent to which European elites in the nineteenth century thought of the elites of the colonized (or soon to be colonized) regions of the world as being their equals, or as inhabiting the same cultural spheres as them. We may add in relation to this point about the importance of cultural analysis that in the first chapter of Orientalism, Said draws heavily on Lord Cromer’s description of Egypt as an example of Orientalist thinking (Said 1978, 35-49).  Lord Cromer served as British Controller-General of Egypt from 1877 to 1879, and then as the British Consul-General after 1882 until he resigned in 1907.

[7] Utsa Patnaik estimates that between 1770 and 1820, colonial transfers of surplus from India and the West Indies essentially served to double Britain’s capital formation out of domestic savings (Patnaik 2006, 50). Hence, even if we recognize that the British elites did not intend to develop a national economy, we should recognize that their power vis-à-vis the colonized elites meant that they systematically earned a greater share of the surplus.

[8] In general, her account of nineteenth-century imperialism also understates the significance of international finance, and the role of the pound sterling as the dominant currency. This point was suggested to me by Philip McMichael.

[9] Even Tignor, who criticizes dependency theory, contends that by 1920, “all of Egypt’s exports, much of its internal commerce, the mortgages on its most valuable asset, land, and its currency were in the hands of foreigners” (Tignor 1980, 103).

[10] Bank Misr, which was founded in 1920 in order to serve as a source of capital for Egyptian industrialists who wanted to maintain independence from foreign capital, was subjected to heavy pressure by the British authorities in order to force its board to agree to work with European capitalists (Salem 2018, 435). Eventually, it had to succumb to British pressures and in 1939 its directorship was placed in the hands of capitalists who were more acceptable to the British.

Aug 1, 2017 Lebanon
Max Ajl By :
Max Ajl

Critical Readings in Political Economy: 1967

Guy Laron, The Six-Day War (Yale University Press, 2017).

Amidst the forest-felling libraries of literature on the question of Palestine, Israel’s 1967 war of aggression is perhaps responsible for the largest clear-cuts. So much is manufactured. Yet so little is useful or new. Part of the problem is the massive industry – literally – whose product is perpetual dispute over the most basic facts. Colonial expansion generates resistance. Both processes require intellectual support. For that reason, ideological and political battles occur on epistemological and methodological planes.

At least one consequence of the revisionist denial of Palestinian dispossession is that nationalist accounts predominate even in the critical literature. Amidst this historiographical morass, Guy Laron’s The Six-Day War sets itself most sharply against accounts fixating on the supposedly bumbling run-up to the war. The book’s novelty is to discuss the material conditions – local, regional, and global – in the run-up to the war. It sets a wider and longer historical compass than most histories of the war, tracing trends from the post-World War II period until the war itself. He gives pride of place to several structural-institutional factors. One, the tension between civilians and generals. And two, the global condition within which that tension heightened: balance of payments crises in Syria, Egypt, and Israel.

Laron argues that Egypt and Israel – as part of a global dirigisme moment – attempted industrialization using import-substitution (ISI) or export-oriented (EOI) models. Foreign aid supported these processes. But in Egypt, the United States saw its “aid” failing to bridle Egyptian radical nationalism. Meanwhile the Soviet Union too moved to trade over aid. Both states armored allies or clients. Amidst domestic unrest or unease “civilian supervision over the military in contiguous countries weakens. As a result, the regional situation becomes enflamed and ignitable….The victory of hawkish generals in one country strengthens the hand of hawkish generals in other countries.” Instability builds, and breeds instability. War results.

Laron’s model goes as follows: developmentalist policies’ failure leads to the instability of civilian rule. That leads to a breakdown of democratic procedures, and the empowerment of actors who might move to war to avoid dealing with such instability on the internal plane. As method, his exercise melds international relations with a form of political economy analysis. He gives due attention to internal factors of social stress, business interests and their concerns with wage compression, and peoples’ demand for development.

Bringing these regional countries onto a global plane of analysis is a welcome correction to dizzyingly myopic literature fixated on this or that armistice line skirmish in late May 1967. And tracing internal class division within the dominant Israeli Jewish sector and its role in the move towards further war and colonization is an important if partial corrective to court histories of Israeli defensive war. But how far from palace accounts does Laron go?

In what follows I offer a three-part review of the book. The first focuses on his account of Israel; the second, the Arab states; and the third, moves to questions of concept formation and mechanisms of social change, particularly war.

Israel

Laron’s builds his account of Israel around a sharp tension between a civilian leadership wary of further war under Levi Eshkol, and a military leadership rearing for further war and territorial acquisitions. The military perpetually sent in tractors to work on land in the northern demilitarized zones. This was a deliberate provocation. They justified it by insisting that it was “Jewish land.” They knew Syria would eventually respond by firing on the encroaching tractors, or by shelling.

Domestically, the GDP was growing massively – ten percent a year. Meanwhile, the Histadrut, a corporatist-colonial labor institution charged with wage containment, was beginning to fail at its task. Unemployment was too low, wildcat strikes were too high. Jewish labor was beginning to gain too strong a position within the corporatist balancing act. Thus, the government “inflicted” a recession. The consequence was further labor unrest, especially among Jews from North Africa and the Middle East. Here the facts drape oddly over Laron’s model. First, there was no ineluctable progress from balance of payments crisis to any particular policy outcome. As he notes, in 1964, reserves were at 500 million US dollars and “Israel could have settled at least some of its debts.” In fact, it is difficult to see why he characterizes this as a balance of payments crisis in the same sense as occurred in Egypt, as we will see. Israel chose to impose a recession on the lower class of the dominant Israeli Jewish sector in part to discipline labor and prevent what Michel Kalecki called the “political consequences of full employment.” Wages in general decreased by .4 percent, but in some sectors they increased massively. The government did not inflict the recession evenly.

A consequence of this imposed recession was further unrest and the government’s resulting unpopularity. Still, budgetary allotments to the military continued to grow as a percentage of Gross Domestic Product, structurally empowering the military. And the industrial lobby was increasingly uneasy with Eshkol’s policies. Textile magnates and other actors in the private sector saw an opportunity to displace the Mapai government. They made an alliance with the military. By late May, Yediot Aharonot was attacking the government for “capitulating to aggression” from the Arab frontline states. Other papers called for war cabinets.

Now, one oddity is that Laron assimilates the end of German “reparations” (which he does not explicitly discuss) to the broader breakdown in aid to Egypt, as doppelganger socio-historical mechanisms moving the societies to greater military control. But Israel received reparations at least in part because it was woven into the social and political fabric of Western capitalism. Israel also has played a unique role in the symbolic de-Nazification of Germany – and its decision to whitewash rather than reckon with its past. Capital flows for political and historically specific reasons. Would such funds have gone, for example, to the regional Jewish populations had they stayed at home, or the populations which did stay at home? Did any other regional country receive such gushers of aid?

Another fairly large gap is the underexplored tension between structural moves towards greater power of the military within Israel and an excessive focus on institutional analysis of the relative power of the civilian versus military sectors. Eshkol, Ben Gurion, and Dayan were different figures. But they differed within hard financial parameters as well as secular tendencies within the relative distribution of government spending. In the first place, Eshkol supported the armouring of Israel, increasing the military budget as a portion of GDP, especially the air force. In the second place, he green-lit numerous aggressions against the Arab states. In 1967, “Eshkol told Rabin that he wanted to make Syrians pay, but he felt like doing something new, something creative.”

Laron’s focus on process-tracing is important. His emphasis on civilian-military dissensus is less convincing. The ideology of expansion, an expression of a very material desire for land, was the calling card of colonialism. To take land requires force, and Israel’s constitution and concentration of social resources in armaments was a secular tendency. Ideology and colonial state-formation provide the parameters within which political actors act. Laron’s model seems to place undue emphasis on the move from civilian to military decision-making as a qualitative shift which led to war. But his evidence shows clearly enough that Eshkol was moving towards ever-more-belligerent actions over the course of 1967 in any event, often explicitly endorsing further aggressions. The role of the military in pushing for the 1967 war is clear. Laron seems to place undue weight on this institutional mechanism for further aggression. Historians bear the task of avoiding the Scylla of teleology and the Charybdis of providence. Still, if there is a counterfactual, it would ask this. Given the clear tendencies in state budgetary disbursements and the in-built mechanism for Israel to soothe internal social tension through war, would it have been possible for Israel to have ceased further aggressions against abutting states and stayed within the 1967 armistice lines? Whether such a counterfactual would have been possible is impossible to say. But the likelihood of this possibility is less than dim.

The Six-Day War and the Arab States

Laron’s account of the Arab states involved in the six-day war is actually an account of Syria and Egypt. He largely brackets Jordan, and leaves Iraq to the side. According to Laron, Egyptian industrialization rested on the unstable foundation of foreign aid flows from the United States and the USSR. When such flows slowed amidst the transition from John F. Kennedy’s carrot approach to Lyndon Johnson’s fuite en avant, the power of the Egyptian civilian establishment under Nasser decreased relative to that of the military. The former oriented more to building strength through developmental policies. The latter oriented more towards a frontal confrontation with the Israeli threat.

In Syria, anti-Nasserist civilians lost power to more redistributionist and left-Ba’thist generals amidst civilian discontent with Nasser’s roll-back of the land reforms and nationalizations of the United Arab Republic. Laron traces the battles between, on the one hand, the Ba’th leadership and its lower-level cadre agitating for more widespread social redistribution, and on the other, the ancien regime – conservative landholders, their accomplices among the ulema, and the petty bourgeoisie. Such social tensions, essentially about class, ripped through Syria throughout the 1960s as some forces fought for forceful redistribution of power and others pushed for the status quo ante.

Laron’s model does not quite equate the Egyptian and Syrian situations, but like any model, there is a tendency towards reduction and a search for similarity. He claims that “balance of payments crises…strengthened generals and humbled civilians.” He creates an ideal-typical model and tension: between civilians tacking towards less belligerence and generals tacking towards more. Post-1973 Syria basically falsifies this model. More to the point, behind a notion of “civilian” versus “military” rule is an implied value judgment that civilian institutions somehow express the will of a “robust civil society” whereas “civil society tends to be weaker in post-colonial countries, which accept the rule of the gun indifferently.” But the 1961-1963 “democracy” in Syria was the fruit of a right-wing coup d’état, which represented the “land and factory-owning families… [and] religious movements such as the Muslim Brotherhood.” In turn, a “democratically” elected Maruf al-Dawalibi pushed through massively unpopular regressive social measures, creating social instability which led to a “soft” coup: “so unpopular was the regime that there was no resistance.”

Laron’s notion of civil society in post-colonial states and his model of military-civilian tensions does not offer clarity in understanding this period of Syrian history. It is more accurate to state that some Syrians accepted “the rule of the gun” – really, a gun aimed a certain way – because of anticipated developmentalist policy. Other Syrians, including some in civil society, called for the guns to aim at their enemies precisely in the service of a different vision of Syria. The divide was along lines of class. The very brief currency crisis was more than anything a symptom of a class conflict interlocked with a question concerning Arab states’ orientation to Israel. Furthermore, the suggestion of Arab indifferent acceptance of an essentialized “rule of the gun” is also more than a little discomfiting, a discomfort magnified when one reads both false and frankly sectarian formulations such as Laron’s diagnosis of post-2011 Syria as having “recently disintegrated into its various ethnic, religious, and geographical components.”

More to the point, the model sets up each case as instances of a global moment. But the character of that global moment is underspecified. Laron’s country-size analytical units are sufficiently porous to permit – partially – global developmentalism to exist as a systemic phenomenon, manifesting differently in each state. But Laron deals with anti-colonialism on the country-level, and as an issue concerning politicians and generals. This framing overlooks the broad ranging and mass based support for Palestine and decolonization more broadly. This sentiment was rooted in a shared experience – that of millions of people watching the loss of Palestine to largely European colonists. That experience also crystallized in organizational form: for example in the Arab Nationalist Movement, flowing freely over borders and seas. Human experience, the sentiment it produced, and the organizations which emerged to turn sentiment into action were the material basis for anti-colonialism and support for Palestine to become what Laron minimizes as a local “cog” in the Arab cold war.

Furthermore, support for such struggles, especially in the Arab world at that time had human avatars – leadership – which might be beyond any specific border. Thus, Nasser was more popular in Jordan in the 1960s than was the monarch. This is the inescapable background against which both the Syrian and Egyptian states outbid one another as they aimed to lead the Arab world.

Laron’s point about how Nasser escalated as a response to Syrian escalations speaks to how anti-Israel or anti-Zionist sentiment was not merely a factor of legitimation but an index of democracy in the regional state system. Moving to armed confrontation with Israel and support for the Palestinian cause was a response to popular will and demand. This explains the Jordanian state’s reluctant participation and the Iraqi state’s willing participation in the war. Governments which confronted Israel were more popular than those that did not. Ostensibly value-free models which reduce democracy to institutional structures expose a liberal bias, eliding democracy in the substantive sense of popular rule. Addressing these factors would have accounted for the inclusion of Iraq in the war, as well as addressing state formation, the social bases of the state, and popular social incorporation.

Also, Laron frames the global moment vis-à-vis national developmentalism and its relationship to capital flows in a limited way. Broadening the historical analysis provides a deeper explanation of aid distribution. Egypt, for example, received aid as geopolitical rent, in order to usher the national project under the aegis of US anti-Communist foreign policy. The Kennedy administration used aid to support non-Communist developmentalism and forestall Communist governments coming to power. It is true the United States “acquiescence[d]” to Nasserism, as Laron terms it, after 1958. It is also true that the United States viewed Nasserism as preferable to the Communist threat then flourishing in Iraq. The United States played a role in exterminating that threat in 1963. Acquiescence emerged contrapuntally amidst a globally oriented US foreign policy. The United States allowed developmentalism only when it was forced to do so. In Syria, on the other hand, there was a brief currency crisis due to capital flight and an outflow of professionals. Austerity, to the extent it took place, was a reaction to the middle- and upper-classes starving the Syrian government of developmental resources. This looks nothing like what occurred at that time in Israel. Laron’s ideal types fail to historicize and specify such capital flows.

The regional framework, as limited as it is, also fails to attend to broader global trends. The US sent immense rents to South Korea and Taiwan during this time. The acuteness of the threat of neighbouring Communist China, and its radical agrarian reforms, enabled post-war developmentalism in East Asia. Syria and Egypt had no neighbouring China to induce the United States to support ISI or EOI and to prevent a harder-left turn. Post-1967 geopolitical rent to each state, which helped their balance of payments and underpinned Syrian ISI, rested on regional states like Saudi Arabia’s multifaceted need to confront -- and yet contain their confrontation of -- Israel. Laron’s model building leads him to lean analytically on ostensibly similar balance of payments crises. But this approach overlooks historical processes and difference. Meanwhile, a comparative approach with sees bleached units such as “capital flows,” states, within them, undifferentiated “civilian” and military classes, reifies rather than historicizes these dynamic concepts.

War

How does the role of war – as mechanism, as event, as process, as catalyst – appear in Laron’s account? Again here, Laron privileges singularity over historical specificity. There are very different kinds of wars and social formations resort to kinetic warfare to achieve socio-political aims in widely divergent ways.

Laron offers a critical account of Israeli motivations, especially those of the generals, for entering the 1967 conflict, and for causing the political friction that predated it. He traces two essential and interlinked logics. One is territorial aggrandizement. Two is the internal constitution of the surrounding states. Rabin “told his generals on April 24 that Israel should continue confronting Syria until the Baath’s fall from power,” Laron notes. In Tehran on April 1967, Rabin stated, “it is in our mutual interest to deal with [Iraq, Syria, and Egypt]. We should contain Nasser in the southern Arab peninsula, neutralize the Iraqis and screw the Syrians.” For Israel, war was a means – a successful one – to prevent neighbouring or nearby nations from neutralizing Israeli freedom of action. For Israel, taking land and preventing development were two sides of one coin.

This imperative was linked to the question of Palestine. When Syria proposed a ceasefire in the demilitarized zone in the summer of 1966, Rabin was irked. He felt there should be no ceasefire while the Syrian government gave safe haven to Palestinian guerrillas. Thus, from Israel’s perspective, its neighbours’ attitudes towards Palestinian anti-colonialism and anti-colonialism more broadly determined its orientation towards those states. “Internal” pressures also weighed on Israeli war-making. The generals’ perspective was embedded in the offensive-defense ethos of mainline Zionism. Arms were crucial to building an “offensive army that was capable of expanding Israel’s borders.” A devil’s brew – territorial aggrandizement, militarism, the imperative of suppressing an anti-colonial struggle on its Palestinian and broader Arab planes –produced war.

Laron is critical of the post-1967 Israeli expansion. So he is harshly critical of the elements and tendencies within Israel society which he considers to have produced that expansion. But his hesitance in describing pre-1967 Israel as colonial leads to him to avoid any focus on the colonial nature of Israel’s interaction with the Palestinians, and a framing which would cast Israel as a source of regional instability. For example, he writes of Fateh’s guerrilla raids over Israeli armistice lines as a catalyst for the 1967 war. He also describes Syria in the 1960s as akin to Serbia in 1914 – “a terrorist haven that was a source of regional instability, and which provided the spark that ignited the crisis.” One cannot accept calling the exiled Fateh fighters “terrorists.” Indeed, one might equally present the 1967 war as a moment in a protracted and regionally implicated national struggle over the land. There can be no value-free answer to whether Palestinians had and have the right to pursue that “most essential value,” in Frantz Fanon’s words: the land. Moreover, when Laron speaks of the “dovish worldview” of Eshkol, this is a value judgment legitimating the 1948 war of colonial conquest – or that moment of primitive accumulation. It is also simply odd given the number of offensive military actions Eshkol explicitly endorsed. Placing the positions of Eshkol and the generals further rather than closer is a moment of value-laden interpretation within social science. A focus on tensions between them incants 1967 as an inflection point. A focus on tension amidst shared values might have created 1948 – or 1882 – as an inflection point.

Different inflection points are also the fruit of different analytical paradigms. If we interpret the 1967 war within a settler-colonial framework several crucial elements become clearer. First, the Israeli resort to external aggression, or colonial expansion, was to some extent a move to allay internal social contradictions. Settler-states such as the United States and Israel export their internal contradictions onto indigenous populations. Such a dynamic was distinct from the Arab move to confrontation. Some of the Arab states did implement this strategy, in part, to contain and divert internal social contradiction concerning class. But such a strategy, whatever the complex of motivations within the state institutions, also expressed a clash of interests between the colonizing and colonized peoples.

Because Laron does not really consider the question of colonialism, the matter of anti-colonialism’s social content is absent from this account. Can one evaluate from a value-free position the question of Palestine from 1948-1967, or offer an objective perspective on Palestinian anti-colonial claims? Can, or should, one offer a neutral account of pre- and post-1967 Arab developmental trajectories? Here the gap in scientific formulation is not merely Laron’s; it is a gap in most Western social science writ large. The colonial question is two questions. The first is a national question of land. A second is, in the words of Amilcar Cabral, “to free the process of development of the national productive forces.” The colonial question is, then, one about people’s control over national productive forces. Furthermore, Israeli elites understood the war as a mechanism for hammering Arab developmentalism. In the words of Harman, the Israeli ambassador to the United States, “Syria was becoming a Middle Eastern Cuba.” The Israeli attack was a factor forestalling such an outcome.

These questions allow for an understanding of Palestinian anti-colonialism and the broader Arab sentiments that give it strategic depth. They also allow us to question the implicit equation Laron creates between the warfare of colonial and anti-colonial states. Laron’s tableau equates these social dynamics through the mechanism of civilian-military conflicts with the latter base of institutional power opting for war. This is problematic even on its own terms. As he shows clearly, the 1967 war required manufacturing consent in the Israeli Jewish sector. Confronting Israel did not require any kindred manufacture of consent in Syria, Iraq, Egypt, or Jordan, where such policies were massively popular. Social science must recognize the difference between war as an elite versus a popular project, which also means understanding how popular sentiment hardens in the form of specific state institutions and takes form through specific state policies. Assessing whether or not such states were cynical in so doing allows for a deeper understanding of the moment. It does not invert the judgment.

But on a deeper level, equation of the Arab republics with Israel erases what makes Israel distinct: its colonial character, that is, its relationship to a dispossessed, occupied, and exiled Palestinian people. The model that sees states interacting with internal classes as the sole drivers of regional social development and de-development effectively erases the Palestinians from Laron’s history of the 1967 war.

Finally, there is the US role. Laron is clear: the US green-lit the war. This is an important contribution, and one which most reviewers have understandably underplayed. But the aggregate evidence is irrefutable. A common and correct explanation is that a violent defeat of the Arab armies would deal a blow to the national-developmentalist Arab projects – a projection borne out by the Corrective Movement in Syria and Sadat’s infitah. Even more to the point, the Arab project suffered a blow hard enough to leave it comatose or quiescent for some decades, a consequence Laron does not delve into in any depth. In a moment in which a great deal of critical historiography on Palestine is increasingly shearing off the question of Israel from questions of imperialism, this book puts the centrality of the US-Israel Special Relationship and its role in regional dynamics from 1967 onwards at the center of materialist interpretations of Palestine’s present and past. It is perhaps there that it makes its signal contribution.

Conclusion

But it is also a flawed contribution. It has received praise, I think, for responding to an intellectual demand for political economy frames of analysis. But such frameworks have never been politically innocent. If they are historical materialist – Marxist – they write from a certain perspective and offer a map of the social world. No map is innocent. A given cartography implies or suggests political movement.

Laron’s account successfully analyzes the internal social stresses and stressors in Israel, Egypt, Syria, and Jordan, and the global aspects of aid flows. He is less successful in understanding national developmentalism as a world-systemic process, the United States’ opposition to it as a global phenomenon, and the role of colonialism in both. Colonialism writ large was a process of constrained and distorted development on a global scale. Settler colonialism largely has meant dedevelopment, often to socially fatal levels. Decolonization sought to eliminate the mechanisms which produced such distortions – lack of tariff walls, colonial currency systems, and dispossessed populations lacking land and livelihoods and so unable to participate in demand-led development. The US opposition to the removal of such mechanisms has meant that it has almost without fail supported elements within post-colonial countries seeking less redistribution versus those seeking more. Within that project, on the regional scale Israel has played a key role. It has diverted regional resources for human development to preparation for warfare. It has also inflicted serial military defeats on the Arab states. Those defeats have empowered social layers oriented towards national unity in the face of Israel, rather than, as with Yusuf Zuayn and Salah Jadid in Syria, those urging more radical redistribution as a means to the same end. If decolonization is about the restoration of both economic and political sovereignty, Israel has been a tool not merely to prevent Palestinian political sovereignty, but furthermore to ensure that social layers seeking a fuller economic sovereignty were not able, for the most part, to acquire power in regional states (Iraq is an exception, and for that reason had to be destroyed).

Laron’s flaws are symptomatic of broader trends in the political economy turn in contemporary social science. First, there is an urge to engage with Marxist literature without identifying explicitly with the Marxist tradition and its political commitments. Second, there is a Eurocentric bias which continues to dominate even the Marxist tradition, sidestepping the constitutive role of primitive accumulation in the past and ongoing kinetic violence in contemporary accumulation. Imperialism as a concept is out of favor – or worse, a slur. Correspondingly, cases are dealt with as independent, rather than constituting a world in which the core-periphery divide remains crucial for the present and future of social formations.

Such turns have an uneasy relationship with 1967 as an inflection point in Israeli-Palestinian relationships. For from a certain perspective, little was novel about 1967. It was part of a long history of Zionist colonization. Imposing it as a massive gravitational force may rip apart the historical continuities that give 1967 another meaning entirely.

As Sherene Seikaly points out,

The historian’s task, then, is to decolonize Palestinian and Arab periodization… Perhaps, for example, we can begin the history of the fedayeen not in the 1960s, but the 1950s, the 1930s or indeed the nineteenth century. Perhaps, for another example, we can think again and anew about the central question of land in Palestine, and its inextricability from histories of global and regional capital, whether in the bantustans of the contemporary West Bank or the coastal strip and interior hinterlands of nineteenth-century Palestine.

An intriguing part of the recent settler-colonial turn in Palestine scholarship has been an engagement with the US indigenous question. Perhaps less examined has been the relationship between that question and 1492, and 1882. The first was the moment when colonialism as a world-historic process began to extend European sovereignty forcefully outwards over both the southern and eastern Mediterranean littorals and across the Atlantic. The second was when Zionist colonists started modern settler-state formation in Palestine. That project and its further ramifications have been one aspect of the broader and longer colonial process – tying 1882 to 1492. Another aspect of modern settler-colonialism has been the enfoldment of Israeli state-formation into British, then French, then US imperialism. All of these relationships and processes also find their full meaning amidst the historical process of accumulation on a world scale.

So if we broaden out the scope of 1967 – and such a scope, is implicit, I think, in the call to decolonize periodization – we may see 1967 a bit differently. We can see it as a moment when the Rise of the South in its Middle Eastern incarnation, a process which challenged both global accumulation and was the outcome of challenging colonialism, suffered a sharp defeat. Perhaps it further suggests 1967 as an inflection point when the process of substantive decolonization and the full reacquisition of sovereignty in the Middle East, underwent a secular, but not permanent, one hopes, reversion. Such a rewriting or reframing of the parameters within which we understand 1967 does not at all preclude a meticulous examination of the minutiae of the 1967 war. It provides the appropriate context within which to understand the global forces and tendencies which produced that war in the first place.