Orientalism

NY Times, November 8, 2001

ECONOMIC SCENE 

The Decline of the Muslim Middle East, and the Roots of Resentment

By VIRGINIA POSTREL

Until the late Middle Ages, the Muslim Middle East was at least as
economically developed as Europe. Then, beginning with the rise of the
great Italian traders in the 14th century, Europeans pulled ahead, while
the Islamic world gradually declined. By the 19th century, European
economic influence had translated into political domination of the Middle
East. The Islamic world has never fully recovered, and that disparity feeds
resentment today.

What happened? The puzzle is vexing not only because Muslim traders had
been so successful in earlier eras but because they remained successful in
trade with other regions, like India and East Africa. They were not bad at
business; to the contrary, they were good at it.

(snip)

Since 1997, Timur Kuran, an economist at the University of Southern
California, has been investigating the connection between institutions and
the economic decline of the Muslim Middle East. In a paper, "The Islamic
Commercial Crisis: Institutional Roots of the Delay in the Middle East's
Economic Modernization," he proposes an answer: Islamic partnership law and
inheritance law interacted to keep Middle Eastern enterprises small, never
allowing the development of corporate forms. 

(A version of the paper can be downloaded at
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=276377.)

full: http://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/08/business/08SCEN.html

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Imperialism and Labor
By Ernest Crosby
American Federationist, rpt. The Public 3 (Oct. 27, 1900).

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The effect upon wages of annexing new countries overrunning with the
cheapest kind of labor is evident enough to anyone who will consider the
question dispassionately, but perhaps a brief account of what I have seen
with my own eyes in Egypt may serve to illustrate it. We hear a great deal
of the political benefits conferred by the British government upon the
Egyptians, but little or nothing is said of the industrial results of
expansion, and yet these results are the most important.

Some years ago while I was living in Egypt I visited one of the cotton
mills at Mansourah, the commercial center of the cotton region. These mills
are owned by English, French and German capitalists and operated by native
labor. In the main room of the factory the air is so thick with cotton dust
that I found it difficult to breathe. A row of Arab girls of 12 or 13 years
of age were standing there before a series of tubs manipulating the raw
cotton.

"What are the hours of labor of these girls?" I asked the European foreman,
who was acting as my guide.

"From four o'clock in the morning to six o'clock at night, with an
intermission for dinner," he answered.

"And what is the pay?"

"Twelve and a half cents a day."

I could hardly believe this, and the next time I met the English manager of
one of these mills I cross-questioned him on the subject.

"Is it true," I asked, "that you work your girls from four until six for
twelve and one-half cents a day?"

"Yes," he said, rather reluctantly. "I didn't quite like it when I first
went to Mansourah, but the girls don't seem to mind it."

"Don't mind 14 hours' work a day?" I cried.

"Oh, that is not all," he replied. "When we are very busy they stay
overtime from six till ten o'clock in the evening and we pay them an extra
piastre (two and one-half or five cents) and sometimes young mothers come
with their babes at the breast and put them down on the floor in the corner
and go to work with the rest."

And all this, mind you, in an atmosphere which you can almost cut with a
knife, so thick is it with cotton.

Full: http://www.boondocksnet.com/crosby/labor.html

Louis Proyect
Marxism mailing list: http://www.marxmail.org