2023 Theses Doctoral

The Economic Nahda: Capital, Empire, and Economic Thought in the Modern Middle East, 1860–1920

Atassi, Nader

“The Economic Nahda” is social history of the economic ideas articulated by Arab intellectuals in the last decades of the Ottoman Empire. The Nahda—the Arab cultural and intellectual “renaissance” of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—took place during a time of immense socioeconomic transformation in the late Ottoman Empire. During this time, the region saw increased trade with the global market, the spread of capitalist social relations, and a rising Ottoman public debt to European financiers.

This dissertation focuses on how figures associated with the Arab Nahda conceptualized the tumultuous changes of this period. It begins by revisiting some of the classic publications of the Nahda and surveying the first engagements with the ideas of political economy. It then moves on to examine the economic ideas that were circulating during different historical junctures in late Ottoman Syria, starting from the establishment of the province of Syria in 1865, and ending with the new era of mass politics after the 1908 Ottoman constitutionalist revolution.

It argues that throughout this period, intellectuals and political elites increasingly conceptualized political reform and economic transformation within the framework of the new “science” of political economy. Ultimately, the dissertation traces how these new economic ideas were elaborated and mobilized in response to developments such as peasant revolt, Ottoman state reform, increasing public debt, and ascendant European imperialism.