Table Of ContentTrade, Reputation, and Child Labor in
Twentieth-Century Egypt
Trade, Reputation, and
Child Labor in
Twentieth-Century
Egypt
Ellis Goldberg
TRADE,REPUTATION,ANDCHILDLABORINTWENTIETH-CENTURYEGYPT
© Ellis Goldberg,2004
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2004 978-0-312-29629-2
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ISBN 978-1-349-38835-6 ISBN 978-1-4039-7683-3 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/9781403976833
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Goldberg,Ellis
Trade,reputation,and child labor in twentieth-century Egypt /
Ellis Goldberg.
p.cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1.Cotton trade—Egypt.2.Trade regulation—Egypt.3.Child labor—
Egypt.4.Egypt—Economic policy.I.Title.
HD9087.E42G65 2004
331.3’18—dc22 2004040006
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Firstedition: September,2004
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For Peg, Louis, Sofia and Abraham
Contents
Acknowledgments ix
Note on Transliteration xi
Chapter 1 Introduction 1
Chapter 2 Reputation, Regulation, and Trade 11
Chapter 3 Growing the World’s Best Cotton: Colonial
Crisis or Business as Usual 33
Chapter 4 Regulation for Reputation in the Egyptian Delta 63
Chapter 5 Economics, Development, and Egyptian Economists 89
Chapter 6 Labor Regulation in Egypt After 1952 119
Chapter 7 Efficiency Wages, Moral Economies, and Involution 143
Chapter 8 Conclusion 163
Notes 175
Bibliography 189
Index 207
Acknowledgments
I began work on the themes this book addresses a decade ago. The
unacknowledged debts I have accumulated are not many but they are
large. They fall into two categories: those who encouraged or aided me
in the production of the book, its argument, and its substance directly and
those who have provided me with a sense of community. Abdellah
Hammoudi was more than generous as the director of the Transregional
Center for the Study of the Middle East, North Africa, and Central Asia at
Princeton University. He invited me to spend the 1997–1998 academic year
at Princeton as a resident fellow for which I will always be grateful. It was in
essence the kind of sabbatical my own institution cannot afford to provide.
Avrom Udovitch arranged for me to spend the 1999–2000 academic year in
the Near Eastern Studies Department at Princeton where I was able to pur-
sue further the research for this book in the Firestone Library at Princeton.
Bob Vitalis has undoubtedly read far more of this book in draft form than
anyone should have to. His comments have always been intelligent, encour-
aging, witty, and incisive. My intellectual and moral debt to him is great.
I have also benefited greatly from Roger Owen’s comments and encourage-
ment as well as from comments by Israel Gershoni, Steve Heydeman, and
Juan Cole. Audiences at colloquia at the School of Oriental and African
Studies, Princeton, Harvard Law School, Bogazici University, and the
University of Pennsylvania were gracious in hearing parts of the argument
and providing cogent comments. So were the members of the 1999–2000
Princeton discussion group that met faithfully at the home of Beth Baron
and Yitzhak Nakash. Jere Bacharach read, commented, and even fetched
documents for me.
Another group of people provided indirect but equally great influence on
the writing of this book. Writing about the politics and history of the Arab
world is an especially contentious issue today. In substance I have benefited
greatly from reading the writing of Kanan Makiya, Mai Ghoussoub, and
x ● Acknowledgments
Hazem Saghie, but I have benefited even more from discussions with them
over the past several years on many topics. This is an academic book but if it
addresses important issues including the exploitation of children and what
actually happened during the imperial era more forthrightly than I would
have a decade ago, it is due in large part to their influence. There are four
people whose influence endures but who I greatly regret will never see this
work in its final form. Bent Hansen and Charles Issawi were erudite econo-
mists and profound humanists; Ahmad Sadiq Sacd was a politically active
intellectual of uncommon honesty. I regret that I will not be able to share this
book with these three students of Egyptian history with whose work nearly
every page of this book is in dialogue. My father, who died as I was completing
this manuscript, will also never see this book although my mother will.
Raising three children, Louis, Sofia, and Abraham, has made the situation
of children in the world we live in far more real to me than when I was
engaged in earlier studies of the Egyptian political economy. Their impact on
this book is substantial as is that of my wife, Peg Benson. When we met
nearly two decades ago I promised that my next book would be dedicated
toher.
Note on Transliteration
T ransliterations in the text are based on the system used by the
International Journal of Middle East Studiesbut without reference to
macrons or other symbols to differentiate long vowels. Where an
established transliteration exists (as in Abdel Nasser) or where an author
chose how to transliterate his own name for publication in a European
language I have used those forms.
CHAPTER 1
Introduction
S pecialization, we are told, is good because it promotes efficiency, which
in turn makes everybody better off. Everywhere, that is, except in
international trade where high degrees of specialization by countries in
particular products seem to be associated with poverty, tyranny, corruption,
or all three. Why do some countries specialize in the production of some
goods to the degree that they become so intimately connected that we can
speak of banana republics and petro-states? Nature clearly has something
to do with it: Saudi Arabia has lots of oil and little arable land whereas
Argentina has lots of grass land (and cows) and little oil. Although the gifts
of nature are rarely as specific as in the South American pampas or the
Ghawar oil field, countries specialize despite the dangers of doing so. Why
this should be so is something of a mystery and the volume of advice to polit-
ical leaders to diversify their country’s economies is only exceeded by the vol-
ume of academic studies attempting to explain why they fail to do so.
Without claiming to resolve the mystery I can shed light on a largely ignored
aspect of specialization. Simply put, factor endowments matter but human
agency matters too and one of the most important drivers of specialization is
human agency in the form of a search by economic policy makers to segment
global markets to gain a premium price for products with a reputation for
quality. States, in short, create brands to promote exports.
If agency matters, its appearance will be in the form of politics and
politics matters to political scientists at least as much as it matters to the
world’s rich and the world’s poor, a large fraction of whom happen to be chil-
dren. Politics matters in the world at large because formal institutions that
structure the lives of the rich and the poor are directly affected by the state.
Without the state such institutions (even when considered as private bodies)
