Bücher von Peter Gran

Although decades of scholarship have critiqued traditional binaries of developed and undeveloped in Arab studies, the narrative of 1798 symbolizing the coming of the modern west to the rescue of the static east endures. This book takes stock of this dominant paradigm, interrogating its origins and the ways in which scholarship perpetuates it.

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

Challenging the ethnocentric notion that a capitalist economy could only be transferred to the peripheral states through contact with Europe, this text argues that the capitalist transformation of the Egyptian economy was begun by Muslim merchants and Mamluk rulers in the 18th century.