Description: This paperback edition has an updated first chapter, resituating its main argument for today's readers. New historical data on eigh-teenth- and nineteenth-century Egypt makes an extremely persuasive argument for the eighteenth-century roots of Egyptian modernity. The similarity, too, of Egyptian history with other Mediterranean countries is much more clearly demonstrated today than when Islamic Roots of Capitalism first was published.
Review Quotes: This is an important and stimulating book that challenges the ethnocentric notion that modernist thought and a capitalist economy could only be transferred to the peripheral states through direct contact with the European center. Peter Gran argues that the capitalist transformation of the Egyptian economy was begun by Muslim merchants and Mamluk rulers in the eighteenth century. . . . Gran's book, required reading for students of modern Middle Eastern history, is a pioneering study into the intellectual and economic history of Egypt.-- "American Historical Review"