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Zachary Lockman, ed., Workers and Working Classes in the Middle East: Struggles, Histories, Historiographies (Albany: State University of New York Press 1994).
THIS ANTHOLOGY on the state of the art in Middle Eastern labour history resulted from a 1990 workshop at Harvard University. It consists of articles with different methodologies, theoretical, temporal, and regional focuses by leading historians of the Middle East, many specialists in labour history. It provides a wealth of information to the non-area-specialist labour historian as well as conceptual and historiographical insights to the general Middle East historian. The all-too-common problem of eclecticism in anthologies deriving from conferences has been averted in this volume by a comprehensive analytical introduction by the editor and two critical essays at the end (by Edmund Burke III and Dipesh Chakrabarty), all informed by the debates at the workshop.
The study of workers and working classes in the Middle East has been neglected due to various historiographical biases. The Orientalist disdain for subaltern social groups and identities has reinforced the modernization theorists' conventional privileging of elites. Proponents of dependency theory have emphasized class, but devoted insufficient attention to a working class weakened by Western industrial capitalism. Recently, the New Left has focused attention on the working class as a revolutionary agent by subscribing to a more rigid Marxist analysis.
In the Introduction, Zachary Lockman reviews the existing paradigms and presents the revisionist agenda of this project. (Labour may be on the margin of Middle Easter studies, but Lockman's discussion reveals that labour history is far from being the most neglected aspect of Middle Eastern social history, in large part thanks to the past work of the contributors to this book.) The Introduction, with diversity as its main theme, addresses the merits of the Middle East as a unit of analysis. The editor discusses the pitfalls of accepting the Middle East as a unit of inquiry by virtue of common (Islamic) cultural patterns or common transformations under the impact of...