Beth Baron and Jeffrey Culang (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Modern Egyptian History (Oxford University Press, 2024).

Jadaliyya (J): What made you edit this volume? 

Beth Baron (BB): An editor from Oxford University Press contacted me about the possibility of editing a handbook on the history of modern Egypt. Given the years that had passed since the appearance of the classic Cambridge volumes on Egyptian history, there was clearly room and demand for such a volume. Although I had sworn never to edit another book or journal, I reconsidered and thought that this might be an interesting project to work on with Jeff, who had been the outstanding book review editor of the International Journal of Middle East Studies (IJMES) when I edited it and was now its managing editor. In fact, I would not have taken on the project unless Jeff had been enthusiastic about it and had agreed to be the co-editor. It was wonderful to be collaborating again and to have Tamara Maatouk join later as an assistant editor. We all thought that putting such a volume together could be a significant contribution to the field of Egyptian studies at a time when working in and on Egypt had become fraught. What quickly became apparent from the contributions was that the challenge of accessing archives in Egypt had given rise to novel questions, approaches, and source materials.

J:  What particular topics, issues, and literatures does the book address? 

Jeffrey Culang (JC): Rather than a broad survey of modern Egyptian history, we wanted this book to put a spotlight on the most exciting and promising topics in modern Egyptian history right now—both to brag, in a way, about the depth and quality of scholarship emerging from our field, but also to encourage new work in these areas. The latter include the history of medicine, the environment, and disease, which are inseparable in many ways, as well as that of technology, labor, and mobility, which also intersect—together comprising the first two sections of the handbook. They also include strands of analysis and debate within the traditional staples of law, culture, and politics and political ideas, which take up the rest of the book. You can probably tell that the project touches on quite a long list of issues and literatures! The connective tissue, as Beth alluded to, is the relationship between archives, knowledge, and power—which is especially pertinent at a time when the Sisi regime in Egypt is surveilling and suppressing knowledge production, including that related to history, while also producing and disseminating narratives of Egyptian history in ways that serve its interests and survival into the future. I am confident that any reader with an interest in Egyptian history or any of the broader issues I mentioned will find something for them in this book.

J: How does this book connect to and/or depart from your previous work? 

JC: We started working on this book as I was wrapping up a five-year term as Managing Editor of IJMES, so it was easy to see the new project as an opportunity to extend and perhaps build upon the editorial work I was doing on the journal. The main difference was that I would now be focused exclusively on my own field of modern Egyptian history and have the chance to collaborate with a group of incredible scholars from around the world in that field whose work I had engaged with closely over the years and, in many cases, whom I knew personally. Along with Beth and Tamara, I read and commented upon each chapter at least once and often multiple times—a process that was very exciting and fruitful for me and, I hope, the authors, too. I saw this as a way of contributing to field-building—something volumes such as ours often aspire to do, and which I also tried my hand at while at IJMES.

In terms of my chapter in the handbook, the piece is a departure from my prior published work in that it is an example of communal history—that of Egyptian Jewry—though one reflecting a conscious effort to use that history to tell a more “central” story. This is the transition from the Islamic notion of the common good to the secular notion of public interest in Egypt, which gets at issues of inclusion and exclusion amid the rise of the Egyptian nation-state. I wanted to show how perceived communal and conceptual boundaries often (re)inscribed in scholarship are far less stable than we might presume and that transgressing them can produce new insights and help push the field in new directions.

BB: Prior to editing IJMES, I had edited two volumes: Women in Middle Eastern History, with my doctoral advisor, Nikki Keddie, and then a book in honor of Keddie, with Rudi Matthee. Those experiences taught me a great deal about editing and made it easier to navigate some of the issues that came up in this project. The project differed from prior ones in that Oxford handbooks are big books, much bigger than the earlier volumes I edited or an IJMES issue, which gave us the opportunity to cast a wide net in soliciting articles, with twenty-five contributions the final number.  The pandemic slowed us down, but we are very pleased with the final result. 

My own piece in the handbook builds on past work on gender and colonialism with a focus now on medicine and the body. The article looks at imperial efforts to professionalize local midwives (dayas) through the development of a network of maternity schools and birthing protocols as well as the ways in which midwives responded to the new training and inspection regime. It draws on the papers of the imperial inspector of the schools, Grace de Courcy, who was one of the first women doctors from New Zealand.  

J: Who do you hope will read this book, and what sort of impact would you like it to have?

BB & JC: We hope this book will be read in graduate seminars on Egyptian and Middle Eastern history and by historians of modern Egypt, the broader Middle East, and beyond. As mentioned already, our main goal with this book was to take stock of where the field of modern Egyptian history stands and to direct the energy of emerging scholars specifically to areas of inquiry that seem most interesting and pertinent right now. This goal is obviously focused on our own field. But we also had a secondary goal of demonstrating the broad relevance of Egyptian history. For a long time, one had the sense that modern Egyptian historiography was perpetually half a decade or more behind other fields—not only European history, but also other areas of colonial history. That is no longer the case. Historians of Egypt are producing cutting-edge work that is being picked up in and shaping many other fields. We would like our book to amplify this trend.

J: What other projects are you working on now? 

JC: I am working on an article manuscript on the life of the concept of the minority in Egypt and exploring new projects on the history of the environment. Independent of these efforts, I am currently Senior Editor at the Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University SIPA, where I work closely with thought leaders in energy and climate to help them translate complex and often technical ideas into accessible and compelling content that can inform policy. I am also teaching a course there that I developed on research and writing in the policy space.

BB: My current book project, “Hard Labors,” looks at the history of birth work in colonial Egypt, focusing on those who gave birth and those who assisted them. The book moves between Egypt’s first male and female obstetricians and gynecologists, such as Dr Naguib Mahfouz; problems in conceiving, pregnancy, and giving birth; and the midwives who delivered the majority of Egyptian babies throughout most of the twentieth century. Drawing on a range of materials, including medical journals, textbooks, memoirs, Mahfouz’s medical museum, and private papers, the work traces the medicalization of childbirth and at the same time challenges the romanticization of “natural birth.”

J: Can you tell us a bit about the story behind the wonderful cover of the book? 

BB & JC: We wanted to find an image from Egypt that reflects some of the themes of the book. In our search, we found a painting titled “The Square II” by the extraordinary Egyptian painter Mohamed Abla, which depicts the vibrant life of a popular square in Cairo called Midan ‘Abd al-Mun‘im Riyad, named after the widely venerated officer and Chief of Staff of the Egyptian Armed Forces during the Nasser era. Anyone who has spent time in Cairo would recognize and probably have feelings about the scene of cars, bikes, and buses zipping by, people walking, talking, or whiling away the hours, and animals prowling and scouring for food or attention. The painting encapsulates Cairene social life, technology, mobility, the environment, modernity, and the relationship between the military and society. It also evokes ideas of time, space, and change inherent to historical questions. With the help of Alzahraa Ahmed, who is familiar with the Egyptian art world, we were able to connect with the artist, who was kind enough to offer us permission to use the painting for the book cover. Beth and Tamara also traveled to Egypt around this time and had the chance to see some of Mohamad Abla’s work in person at Gallery Misr in Cairo. We are incredibly grateful to the artist and so happy with how the cover turned out.

Excerpt from the book (from the Introduction: New Directions in Egyptian History)

This book originated with an invitation from Oxford University Press to fill a void in Egyptian history in its Oxford Handbooks series, which offers high-level surveys of the state of the art. Thinking that the time was ripe for such a book on Egypt—it had been two decades since the publication of the two-volume Cambridge History of Egypt, edited by Carl F. Petry and M. W. Daly—we accepted the invitation. The Oxford Handbook of Modern Egyptian History brings together a dynamic and diverse group of historians of modern Egypt to map the present state of the field. Rather than adopting a synthetic approach, it aims to showcase the most cutting-edge and promising avenues of research among leading scholars in Egyptian history, laying new ground upon which future generations of scholars may build. The handbook is intended for both a general audience and specialists, who will encounter overviews one would expect from a reference work in history and new research that pushes the field forward, with an emphasis on the latter.

Scholars of Egyptian history long understood the modern period to begin with the movement of European people and ideas to Egypt’s northern shores sparked by Napoleon’s invasion in 1798. From this perspective, modern Egyptian history was animated by the diverse and sometimes contradictory ways in which Egyptians responded over time to colonial power and modern forms of knowledge. Since the mid-twentieth century, scholars have sought to complicate the facile colonizer/colonized and modern/tradition binaries undergirding this view. This volume builds on this effort. We see modern Egyptian history not as a series of reactions, but as a continuous process of translation and adaptation, invention and reinvention, construction and reconstruction that followed the French invasion but was not dependent upon it and that was far from unilinear. What is modern is less mimicry of Europe and more new technologies of governance, urban and rural structures, productions of law and culture, and ways of seeing the body and body politic.

Temporally, then, the volume explores the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with a few chapters covering the twenty-first century and post-2011 revolutionary and counterrevolutionary forces. Whereas some chapters carve out large arcs of time, a (long) century or even the whole modern era, others focus on particular periods—such as the khedival or interwar years—or take deep dives into specific decades. The questions asked reflect contemporary concerns and debates, including medical sovereignty and bodily autonomy; the management of the environment; the rights and movements of workers; courts and legal struggles; cultural expression, production, and reception; and the relationship between the army, state, and society.

The handbook includes twenty-five chapters organized into five topical clusters: medicine, environment, and disease; technology, mobility, and labor; law and society; literary, performative, and visual culture; and state, politics, and intellectuals. The authors address long- standing themes in the field, though in new ways, and explore new themes reshaping how we understand modern Egyptian history, and thus Middle Eastern, global, and transnational histories. The topics demonstrate the expansion of Egyptian history beyond the traditional staples in social, economic, and political history.

The histories of medicine, environment, and disease are the fastest-growing fields within Middle Eastern history today. We combine them in the first section to highlight their intersections and amplify the various concerns that run across the chapters in this section, notably the mutual constitution of public health and the state. Recent literature on the history of technology has breathed new life into historical materialism. New technologies needed laborers who came through immigration and internal mobilizations, voluntary and involuntary, and included men and women. These technologies also involved nonhumans, transforming their relationship to both humans and the natural environment. The chapters in the second section draw out some of these connections. Recent legal histories of the modern Middle East have sought to rethink the relationship between Islamic law and secular law, the secularization of law, and the role of law broadly in shaping modern subjectivities and societies in the region. The chapters in the third section build on such efforts by examining underanalyzed areas of Egypt’s legal system, drawing on new or different kinds of sources, and/ or incorporating new analytical frameworks. Egyptian culture has long had an outsized influence on the Arabic-speaking world, and the field of Egyptian cultural history has reflected that dynamism. The authors in the fourth section show the potential value in revisiting and reinterpreting long-standing archives and the possibilities in creating new ones, whether textual, visual, or performative. The final section poses frameworks for understanding how the Egyptian state was constituted over a long durée, theorizes the place of intellectuals during the colonial and postcolonial periods, including in their relationship to the state, and examines the state’s production and reproduction of Egyptian history since 2011, in addition to countervailing renderings of the past. Each of the five clusters maintains a loosely chronological order while attempting to juxtapose chapters that are in conversation with one another.

Readers will surely identify topical gaps in the handbook. These, in part, reflect an acknowledgment on our part that no volume can provide a complete history of modern Egypt, if such a history were possible. But it also reflects our sense that, in the wake of the 2011 uprising and subsequent retrenchment of authoritarianism under President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi, with all the implications these events have had on research and scholarship, the field is at a hinge point, and now is as good a time as any to take stock of where we are and where we are going. We therefore opted to forgo any attempt to represent all subfields of Egyptian history and instead focus on the questions, topics, and trajectories that are animating the field at present […]

Our authors adopt a variety of analytical lenses. Gender cuts across many of the chapters in the handbook, with attention to the (re)training of birth workers, women’s labor activism and social welfare work, changes in family law, and the ways in which photography shaped new social practices. Class comes to the fore in explorations of medical professionalization, migrant laborers who worked on the Suez Canal, debt and imprisonment, and petition writers, among other topics. While there is some signaling to race here, particularly in discussions on colonialism, there is much more that could be done, and we look forward to seeing more work in the field that combines analyses of race, class, and gender intersectionality moving forward.

One of the most challenging and interesting developments in the recent writing of Egyptian history is the turn away from the Egyptian National Archives, Dar al- Watha‘iq al- Qawmiyya, for reconstructing the past. This is in part by choice but also of necessity. While historians recognize the wealth of material in the archives, teeming as it is with petitions, court cases, administrative files, and so on, access to the archives, long difficult for foreign scholars, has become extremely hard for all but a few scholars in a post-2011 world, for reasons that Pascale Ghazaleh explores in her chapter. While a few of the chapters in this volume are based on trips to the archives in earlier decades, most draw on literary, oral, and visual materials found outside the Egyptian National Archives.

Scholars have collected photographs from the historic book market of Cairo, oral histories from doctors, and documents from family and private archives. Aware that the Arabic periodical press has been a mainstay of historical writing, particularly of cultural and intellectual histories, scholars have drawn on some of the most well- known journals but have also turned to administrative, medical, and theatrical journals, among others. Rather than disregard colonial archives, they have employed new methodologies to read colonial archives creatively. They have found new imperial sources from outside Great Britain, sources in underutilized archives outside Egypt, and sources in languages such as Greek and Italian. The internet has facilitated the search for new materials, connecting scholars to one another, to the holders of private and family collections, and to established and emerging digital archives. There is hope that new initiatives such as H-Egypt will disseminate information on the circulation of such materials. In short, calls to decenter the view from the capital, and by necessity to decenter the national archives, have led to the proliferation of new strategies for locating sources materials, which in turn has led to exciting new work in Egyptian history.

[…]

Finally, this handbook was some time in the making, due in no small part to the pandemic. COVID set back our timetable, not least because some of our scholars had difficulty accessing libraries and archives as well as finding the space and concentration to write. The editors also faced interruptions and challenges. But we are thrilled with the volume that has resulted. We hope that it lives up to expectations to chart new directions for the field and that its voids and holes are seen by a new generation as opportunities to embrace and challenges to be met head on.