Ahmad Shokr, Harvests of Liberation: Cotton, Capitalism, and the End of Empire in Egypt (Stanford University Press, 2025).
Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book?
Ahmad Shokr (AS): This book comes out of two long-standing concerns of mine. On the one hand, I have been interested in the protracted process of global decolonization, especially in the Middle East, and the ways in which it succeeded or not. On the other hand, I have been interested in histories of capitalism in the Global South, including the ways in which they depart from Eurocentric theories and conceptions that are derived from the Western historical experience. The Egyptian revolution of 2011 gave me an impetus to pursue these questions. Among other things, it was an uprising against decades of free-market policies that resulted in a massive concentration of wealth in the hands of a few, and it sparked conversations about the pursuit of more equitable and sustainable models of economic development. My desire to write this book was, in part, motivated by an imperative to envision a future beyond neoliberalism that did not simply entail a return to an imagined golden age of the 1950s and 1960s. I believed that doing so required an examination of the origins of the postcolonial state in Egypt—especially the form that it took under Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser.
Harvests of Liberation retells the history of decolonization in Egypt through the lens of cotton, the country’s prized export. From the 1920s to the 1960s, the vast majority of Egyptians worked in agriculture, the country had a monocrop economy, and the wealth of the ruling class largely took the form of landed property. Using a wide range of Arabic, English, and French sources—including archival records, newspapers, periodicals, published monographs and treatises, peasant petitions, and more—I reconstruct the history of “long decolonization” in Egypt by following transformations in both the political economy and political meaning of Egyptian cotton. By focusing on a key site for the production of the world’s most valuable raw commodity, I offer an account of the material and intellectual conditions that, over time, nurtured the key ideas, concepts, and concerns that came to form the corpus of Nasserism.
J: What particular topics, issues, and literatures does the book address?
AS: The main argument of the book is that Egyptian nationalist understandings of the political economy of imperialism and national sovereignty underwent a profound change in the middle of the twentieth century. In the 1910s and 1920s, Egyptian economic nationalists largely understood the main threat posed by Western imperialism to be the dependence of millions of Egyptians on volatile foreign markets and capital. Their country was vulnerable to price fluctuations, speculative bubbles, and trade instabilities that revealed its subordinate position in an imperial world economy. By the 1940s and 1950s, a new generation understood the main threat to be the stagnant productive capacities imposed on Egypt by an alliance of imperial monopoly capital and local landed oligarchs that controlled the country’s agricultural wealth. As a result, commercial agriculture, cash crops, and large estate owners became viewed with suspicion by a nationalist movement that increasingly valorized industrial capitalism. Over a few decades, then, the perceived locus of imperial domination largely shifted from the realm of circulation to the realm of production. Understanding this transformation requires a closer investigation into the political economy of Egyptian cotton in the 1930s and 1940s. The experience of depression and war led to the devastation of cash crops, the impoverishment of peasants, the collapse of rural credit, the spread of agrarian rentierism, the wartime growth of urban industries and populations, and the interpretation of those conditions through new transnational ideas about development. As a result, export-oriented agriculture, and especially cotton, went from being celebrated by Egyptian nationalists as the basis of the country’s riches to being condemned as evidence of a retrograde economic condition.
As Egyptian nationalists and Marxists began to adopt a conception of imperialism and economic sovereignty that centered on production, they also constructed a new understanding of modern Egyptian history. In the 1940s and 1950s, terms like “feudalism,” “monopoly capital,” and “economic backwardness” began to pervade their writings and they increasingly associated decolonization with the country’s ascent to a higher stage of development. After taking power in 1952, the Egyptian Free Officers claimed to be fulfilling this historical mission. They embraced policies of land reform, capitalist industrialization, and social welfare, and they consistently equated national liberation with national development. Their project was ultimately compromised by the country’s economic and technological dependence on global superpowers in an unequal capitalist world system. However, these contradictions were concealed by a narrative constructed by the officers and their allies that misrepresented the country as moving from feudalism to socialism, rather than from one kind of capitalism to another. In doing so, they obscured the country’s subordinate position in global (economic) space by misconstruing its place in historical time.
In the late 1960s and 1970s, Egyptian neo-Marxists, new leftists, and dependency theorists offered similar verdicts on Nasserism. Many of them rejected the term “feudalism” to describe pre-revolutionary Egypt and insisted that the country’s twentieth-century realities were firmly rooted in capitalism. By portraying themselves as revolutionaries against backwardness, the Free Officers and their allies concealed the history of capitalist development in Egypt since the nineteenth century as well as the class character of their own regime (which leftist critics described as a “state bourgeoisie”). Moreover, they embraced a growth model that led to balance-of-payment crises and heavy foreign debt burdens, which ultimately re-inscribed the country’s subordinate position in the capitalist world economy. My book builds on these critiques by situating Nasserism within a history of “long decolonization” in Egypt and examining the historical circumstances that made its vision of national development both conceptually plausible and structurally constrained.
J: How does this book connect to and/or depart from your previous work?
This is my first book. It builds on my interests in capitalism, decolonization, and development that I have pursued in previous essays, articles, and book chapters.
J: Who do you hope will read this book, and what sort of impact would you like it to have?
AS: There are two main audiences for this book. The first audience consists of readers who are interested in Egyptian history and/or the history of decolonization in the Middle East. There are very few histories of agrarian capitalism in Egypt in the mid-twentieth century. A valuable literature exists on the history of capitalist development and decolonization in this period, but many of those accounts take individual investors, enterprises, or business coalitions as their primary object of analysis, and they focus overwhelmingly on urban centers. By contrast, Harvests of Liberation shifts our attention to agrarian capitalism, examining the ways it was experienced on the level of everyday life in the villages, towns, and markets where cotton was produced and traded, as well as how it shaped the minds of anti-colonial leaders, intellectuals, and activists.
The second audience consists of readers who are interested in global capitalism, especially outside of the Euro-American world. In Egypt, we find a case study of the kinds of changes that colonial societies were undergoing in the middle of the twentieth century. The book provides an account of how global events—like the Great Depression and the Second World War—transformed patterns of power and accumulation that had existed in Egypt for decades. Analyzing the impact of depression and war on an important global commodity frontier offers new insights into how and why postcolonial states anchored their political legitimacy in a promise to deliver national development to their people.
J: What other projects are you working on now?
AS: Harvests of Liberation was partly motivated by a desire to critically examine the era of national development in Egypt as a misplaced object of nostalgia. In doing so, it explores the linkages between agrarian capitalism, the Great Depression, and Nasserism, among other things. My upcoming projects will pursue similar questions within more expansive spatial and temporal parameters. The first project is a working paper series that I am editing on histories of state-led development in the Middle East, which is part of a research program based in the American University in Cairo called Pathways Beyond Neoliberalism. The second project is an article-length study of the evolution of the “peasant question” in the Egyptian communist imagination from the 1920s to the 1970s. The third project is a book that will examine the place of Nasserist ideas, agendas, and institutions in the Arab, African, Afro-Asian, and Tricontinental worlds. The fourth project will explore the impact of the Great Depression on colonial societies—including the devastation of cash crop agriculture, the break-up of rural power systems, and the movement of wealth from countrysides to cities—and how it spawned transnational circuits of activism and expertise that shaped prevailing understandings of decolonization, development, and political legitimacy in an age of national independence. While still in their early stages, these projects build on my long-standing interests in anti-colonialism, capitalism, and global history.
Excerpt from the book
To live in a capitalist world is to be subjected to two possible kinds of power. The first one stems from the direct actions of people and institutions, and can include extra-economic coercion, colonial plunder, and the promotion of racist and sexist ideologies. The second one stems from the impersonal workings of the system of market competition itself in which people must continuously produce value at or above an average rate of efficiency determined by the level of skill, technology, and productivity that prevails in their society. To build upon an analogy from Marx, personal domination is akin to somebody being physically pushed off the roof of a building while impersonal domination is like the force of gravity pulling them to the ground. While the first kind of domination is not necessarily born from the imperatives of market competition, it can easily be repurposed to serve them. In short, then, people in capitalist society can be dominated either by other actors and institutions directly or by abstract compulsions that exceed them.
Approaching capitalist temporality and domination in this manner reveals the ways in which the character of socioeconomic life in Egypt was shaped by both historically specific conditions as well as abstract forms of interdependence. Over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Egyptian peasants were physically abused by their landlords, they were targets of discipline and rehabilitation by government officials, and, by the postwar period, they were required to produce ever more cotton under the rubric of a modernization program that was sponsored by foreign aid and assistance. But these ostensibly contingent events, and the direct forms of political mediation upon which they depended, existed in constitutive tension with indirect forms of market mediation that linked the activities of Egyptian producers, traders, and bureaucrats to other parts of the world. Cultivators complained about having to endure an unremitting labor process to continuously produce ever larger amounts of cotton for distant markets. Landowners protested the seemingly intractable fluctuations in the price of the crop. Nationalists warned about financial crashes that were caused by unregulated flows of capital in and out of the country. All of these grievances underscored their exposure to impersonal compulsions that arose from being incorporated into a system of generalized commodity production that generated a variety of incoherent and contradictory developmental impulses. (pp. 9-10)
The genesis of the postcolonial state in Egypt was firmly situated within two larger historical dynamics that began after World War I. First, the arrangements that had sustained global capitalism since the nineteenth century were deeply unsettled. The four decades before the war are often described as a golden age of imperial globalization characterized by a dramatic growth of world trade, the expansion of international finance, increased migration, and massive overseas investments by European colonial powers in the production of raw materials. The foundations of this British-centered imperial world economy were severely shaken by the war. Over the next two decades, as Eric Hobsbawm writes, “world capitalism retreated into the igloos of its nation-state economies and associated empires.” Second, the war represented a crisis of empire as imperial governments around the world faced unprecedented protests, strikes, and anti-colonial rebellions that created opportunities to imagine an alternative future. The breakdown of a global economy that worked largely through imperial institutions prompted political leaders, investors, and intellectuals around the world to search for ways of disentangling their societies from a web of interdependence that centered around the imperial metropole. In short, they began to contemplate how to reorganize global capitalism after empire. (pp. 18-19)
For more than a decade, Egyptian nationalists had already begun to re-imagine the geographic parameters within which to organize economic life. A growing number of politicians, business moguls, and intellectuals had started to believe that political and economic independence were inseparable. For them, genuine sovereignty required more than taking control of their country’s formal institutions of government; it demanded a substantial transformation both in the everyday behaviors of Egyptians and in their material relationships with the world beyond their borders. Only in this way could they confront the interwoven forms of political and economic domination that had become characteristic of British rule in an imperial world economy. After the war, the forms of wealth and power that prevailed in the Egyptian Nile Valley were shaken by unprecedented volatilities in the movement of goods, capital, and prices, which resulted in a veritable crisis of accumulation. Nationalist leaders searched for ways to protect Egyptian cultivators from the effects of these turbulent fluctuations. In 1919, a nationalist uprising swept the country, and Egypt was granted a conditional form of independence by the British three years later. The politics of the next two decades were largely shaped by a struggle between the Egyptian palace and its allies, the British embassy, and a nationalist movement that found its strongest expression in the Wafd Party. Under conditions of limited independence, nationalist leaders began to fashion a variety of mechanisms—like national banks, cotton buying campaigns, and cooperative societies—to reorganize the management of cotton within the protective boundaries of the nation. In the process, they created new agricultural institutions and practices, new forms of rural knowledge, and new understandings of economic sovereignty.
The Great Depression and the war that followed were a vital turning point in the history of Egyptian nationalism. The demise of large mortgage banks that financed the activities of wealthy growers, the wartime restrictions on cotton acreage, and the changing labor and cropping patterns on cotton farms combined to transform large landowners into an unproductive rentier class. As the structures of cash crop production that had long existed in the Egyptian Nile Valley were altered, a new cohort of anti-colonial voices started to fashion a program of national development—with land reform and industrialization as its twin pillars—in order to upend the agrarian foundations of their societies as they had existed under colonialism. This agenda became the prism through which independence, political legitimacy, and history would be widely understood under the reign of the Free Officers. Narrating the history of modern Egypt within this framework brought with it a distinct cast of characters. These included toiling peasants, corrupt politicians, heroic masses, and redemptive officers. Most importantly, it spotlighted those who became the main villains in Nasserist accounts of the Egyptian past: the large landholding class. After taking power, the officers immediately seized properties that belonged to the country’s largest estate owners, eliminating one of the principal expressions of oligarchic power that existed in the colonial period. The concern with the feudal character of ‘izba owners became a ubiquitous fixture of post-1952 speeches, writings, and films about modern Egypt. But this preoccupation was the product of a particular historical moment, rather than a straightforward reflection of social relations as they had always existed in the countryside. Large landholders undoubtedly formed the nucleus of the ruling class before the revolution. Viewing them as antagonists who thwarted the country’s development, however, reflected a particular form of historical consciousness that only acquired an appeal in a postwar world where nationally organized, industrial capitalism became widely embraced.
By the 1950s and 1960s, the Free Officers consolidated the visions and practices for agrarian relief, reform, and reconstruction over the previous two decades into a governmental regime of accumulation. They became more involved in the management of peasant labor to ensure the ever-increasing production of Egyptian cotton, and they relied heavily on international trade regimes to acquire the capital they needed to pursue their development program. The main argument of this book, therefore, is that Egypt witnessed a transformation from a regime of concessionary accumulation—based on monopolistic domains that were labor intensive, imperially scaled, less centralized, and rooted in islands of exceptional authority—to a regime of governmental accumulation—based on monopolistic domains that were capital intensive, nationally scaled, more centralized, and intrusive into everyday peasant life. In Nasserist speeches, writings, and films, however, this transformation was often misrecognized as a transition from feudalism to socialism, rather than from one kind of capitalist monopoly to another. (pp. 20-22)