Description: Challenges existing views of crafts and service workers in Egypt in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Brief description: John T. Chalcraft is Lecturer in Modern Middle Eastern History at the University of Edinburgh.
Review Quotes: "An intelligent, erudite, and original work. Chalcraft finds that while guilds collapsed in the 1890s, the handicraft/service economy did not. In contrast to the dominant literature, he argues that small providers of goods and services managed to retain shares of existing markets and, in some sectors, they remained dominant for very long periods of time."