Ahmad Shokr, "Harvests of Liberation: Cotton, Capitalism, and the End of Empire in Egypt" (Stanford UP, 2025)

Hi everyone, I want to tell you all about another podcast I think you'll enjoy. College Matters from the Chronicle. College Matters is a weekly show from the Chronicle of Higher Education, and it's a great resource for news and analysis about colleges and universities. You'll hear sharp discussions with Chronicle journalists, offering fresh perspectives on the latest salvos from the Trump administration, and keen insights about how faculty and students are adapting to technological changes. College Matters also features incisive interviews with newsmakers, including recent conversations with Chris Eisgruber, Princeton University's president, and Rick Singer, who is best known as the mastermind of the varsity blues admission scandal. Check out College Matters, wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to the new Books Network. Thank you so much, Ahmad. Welcome to new Books Network, the Middle East series. I am really fortunate and excited that I get to sit down with you and ask you about your book, "Covis of Liberation." Cotton Capitalism and the End of Empire in Egypt that was published by Stanford University Press. So, I'll begin by my first and my favorite question, which is, "Can you tell me a little bit about the process that led towards the final product that we all get to see? It was the idea born and how did you go about kind of collating the material for the book?" Absolutely. So, I'm long been interested in global decolonization and the ways in which it succeeded or not, actually in the Middle East. I've also been interested in histories of capitalism in the global south and how they complicate Eurocentric theories and conceptions that are derived from the Western historical experience. I think the Egyptian revolution of 2011 provoked me to think about these two things together. Over the previous decade and a half, there was a widespread sense that Egypt was on the cost of change. There was an age resident that had ruled the country for 30 years and Egyptians were openly anticipating what the future could hold. And then a revolution broke out in 2011 that was precipitated among other things by decades of free market policies. And it sparked conversations about the pursuit of more equitable and sustainable models of economic development in the country. Now as we know, moments of crisis can encourage us to harken back to an earlier period when life was more stable and prosperous. We see this today with public nostalgia for an American welfare state that existed in the 50s and 60s and that intervened to address problems of social inequality, precarity, et cetera. And in Egypt, a similar kind of nostalgia existed for the Nossarist period, but with clearer anti-colonial dimensions, of course. A friend and colleague of mine, and I even wrote years ago that the only social contract present in the imagination of many Egyptians is purely Nossarist. And so my desire to write this book was part motivated by an imperative to envision a future beyond neoliberalism that didn't simply involve a return to an imagined golden age. And I believe that doing this required an examination of the origins of the post-Cloignal State in Egypt, and especially the shape that it took under Egyptian President Demail Abdel-Massar in the 50s and 60s. And so to do this project, I went into multiple archives in Egypt, the United Kingdom, the United States. I was able to gather a lot of published material, magazines, newspapers, et cetera. I worked in the archives. I worked with sources like government reports, ministerial correspondences, peasant petitions. And with this wide source base in English Arabic and French, I was able to put this book. That's, thank you so much. That's excellent. I would like to put some threads around the book since I got the opportunity to read it. I think the first question will be around the recasting of how we imagined the Nassarist period, both in the poppular scholarship and in the sort of the social discourse in Egypt. I think what I find really fascinating is that your writing is not only explicit, but your claims are really grounded in something that are not a lot of, that are not a lot of historian and audience is generally would imagine about Egypt. It's very interesting past with cotton. So could you, could you say a little bit about why cotton? Why did you choose this specific object to narrate the history of, or tell us something new about the Nassarist period, which I'll get to in a little while. But first, I want to begin by asking why cotton? Sure. Cotton is, so like many colonial societies, Egypt specialized in the production of raw materials and especially cotton until the 1940s or '50s cotton was, I believe, the most valuable raw commodity in world trade, Egypt with the third largest cotton producer in the world after the United States and India, that was the case since the mid-Talain-Iconcentry. Egypt had a monocrop economy in the period that I study where cotton made up 75 to 90% of its exports. Ruin classes in Egypt consisted of a powerful landed wallogarchy that produced cotton, as well as a mercantile bourgeoisie, including many foreigners that financed and traded cotton. And so cotton is kind of an ideal lens for which to examine the dynamics of decolonization in Egypt. Now in addition to that, Egypt has also occupied an important place for a theorist of imperialism and anti-imperialism. So on the 19th and early 20th centuries, critics like John Hobson, Vladimir Lenin, Rosa Luxembourg, created Egypt in their examinations of Western imperialism. Rosa Luxembourg even turned to Egypt as what she called a classical answer that illustrated how the expansion of Western finance capital worked. And then in the age of national independence, in the '50s and '60s, Egyptian leaders played a key role in pioneering a vision of non-alignment in the third world. They hosted important Afro-Asian forums, conferences and publications. And the country was a major recipient of Soviet aid and a crucial part of Soviet strategy towards the developing world during the Cold War. And so I think the centrality of Egypt to the production of the world's most valuable raw commodity, as well as its place in the global landscape of imperialism and anti-imperialism, it's the country of remarkable case study through which to examine the links between capitalism and decolonization and given both the structure of the Egyptian economy as it existed in the period that I study, as well as the relative depth of histories of agrarian capitalism in Egypt during this period, especially in English. It only makes sense to me to approach this study by focusing on Egyptian cotton as a lens through which to understand decolonization. I find, I mean, I'm iterating the same point, but I find the book really, really fascinating the way you have organized the chapters which we'll get into. I think my next question gets to the heart of the argument, which is through cotton, you tell us a very interesting story, which we have heard, but not in the case of Egypt, that rather than lauding Nazareth's regime or the free officers as harbingers of hope and like kind of like a different color, a different color for a different policy of socialism, you say something really interesting, you say, no, that's not what exactly happened, it just changed hands and cotton stayed the same. It worked changes, but they won't the same changes that were kind of like imagined and promise to the Egyptian Republic at that time. Could you say a little bit more about the shifts that you talk about, and the claim that you make that it was not a futile, it was not a completely futile system. There were strains of sort of integration into the capitalist market and then you also introduce a really, really interesting idea which I want you to say a little bit more, which is monopolistic domain of, could you say of how and what factors led to these creation of these monopolistic domain, those zones that you talk about through the story of cotton? Sure. So, in much of the existing literature on decolonization in Egypt, the emergence of Nazareth is treated either as something that was structurally determined by the country's colonial economy since the 19th century or the result of contingencies in the early 1950s that could not have been predicted in advance. In the book I argue, it was neither. Instead I try to show that Nazareth was a historically situated phenomenon that grew out of the material and ideological transformations of the 1930s and 40s and then consolidated itself into a slightly more coherent project in the 1950s and the 1960s. Now the main argument of the book is that Egyptian nationalist understandings of the political economy, of imperialism and national sovereignty underwent a profound change in the middle of the 20th century. So in the 1920s, Egyptian economic nationalists largely understood the main threat posed by Western imperialism to be the dependence of millions of Egyptians on volatile foreign markets and capital. They were concerned with things like the exposure of Egyptians to price fluctuations, speculative bubbles, trade instabilities, basically intractable forces that came with being incorporated into a British-dominated capitalist world economy. In the 1950s, however, a new generation understood the main threat of imperialism to be the stagnant productive capacities imposed on Egypt by an alliance of imperial financial interests and local blended oil garks that controlled the country's agricultural wealth. In the 1940s, Egyptian left nationalists, Marxists, development economists began to theorize the condition of colonial underdevelopment in their country. They adopted new conceptual categories like monopoly, capital, and feudalism to understand Egyptian political economy and extension Egyptian history. And then the free officer who took power in 1952 were shaped by this political and intellectual climate after the revolution on what is said it, for example, who was a member of the free officer as a future president of Egypt after Nasser's death. He wrote that the Egyptian people had to storm two bastilles to achieve the revolution. feudalism was one, British imperialism was the other. And then in the 50s and 60s, the foundational documents of the officers were public, like the 1956 constitution, and the 1962 national charter. They identified the elimination of feudalism and imperialism and monopoly capital as a central imperative. So over a few decades, the perceived focus of imperial domination largely shifted from the realm of circulation to the realm of production. And cotton went from being celebrated by Egyptian nationalists as the basis of the country's riches to being condemned as evidence of a retrograde economic condition. So for example, in the 20s, the nationalist business tycoon Talat Harb considered cotton to be what he called the hub of national wealth. And other nationalists positively affirmed Egypt's status as an agricultural country. By contrast in 1951, the Egyptian communist Muhammad Gelen wrote in a widely circulated treatise that the policy of colonialism had worked to quote "cognize Egypt" and that this policy was then adopted by local feudalists. So in the book, I follow these kinds of transformations in the political economy and the political meaning of Egyptian cotton over three or four decades, what I call Egypt's long decolonization. However, I don't treat the emergence of these new categories in the 40s, you know, like monopoly capital feudalism as straightforward and accurate descriptions of social relations in Egypt as they have all existed. What I do, I kind of ground them in a set of material transformations that were happening in Egypt in the 1930s and 40s, amidst depression and war. And these transformations had both material and intellectual dimensions. So the depression and war led to the devastation of cash crops, the impoverishment of peasants, the collapse of rural credit, the spread of agrarian renteurism, the growth of urban industries and populations. And it also encouraged the interpretation of those conditions through new, transnationaly circulating ideas about development. And it's a combination of these material and intellectual circumstances that ultimately nurtured the ideas and concerns that came to form the core of nationalism. Now as Egyptian nationalists and Marxists began to adopt this conception of imperialism and economic sovereignty that centered on production, they also constructed new understandings of Egyptian history, you know, it's like feudalism and monopoly capital economic backwardness began to pervade their writings. But like I said, these were really a reflection of the material circumstances and challenges and transformations in the cotton economy that they were grappling with in the 30s and 40s, more than a straightforward reflection of how Egypt had always looked since the 19th century. So power in 1952, you know, the free officer is turned to this intellectual production of the 1940s as a kind of repertoire from which they drew terms and concepts to legitimize the state that they constructed in the 50s and 60s. They claimed to be decolonizing Egypt by, you know, fulfilling the historical mission of moving forward to a higher stage of development and they constantly equated national liberation with national development and adopted policies of land reform, capitalist industrialization, social welfare, and pursuit of that goal. And these were all kind of visions and ideas that emerged amidst the transformations of the 40s that I described. Now the last part of your question as the officers did this, they, they, especially in the 1960s, consistently portrayed what they were doing as leading Egypt on a historical transition from feudalism to socialism. What I argue in the book, however, is that what they were really doing was transforming Egypt from one kind of capitalism to another, right? If you look at how agrarian capitalism worked in Egypt during the earlier part of my narrative in the 10s and 20s, it operated through a series of what I call monopolistic domains, right? In Egyptian agriculture, you know, commerce, transportation, et cetera. And those monopolistic domains and the people and groups that operated and controlled them transformed over the course of the 40s and 50s, not into something called socialism, but into a new set of monopolistic domains under a system of what communist critics have not served by the late 60s and 70s would later call state capitalism. I think that, thank you so much for touching on the point. I think that the really fascinating thread of the book is the differentiation between lassas fear capitalism. It also made me think of imperial capitalism and its transformation to a national capitalism, which needs me to ask my second question, which is when I was reading the book and I grew up another, I grew up in another post colony, which is India, the distinctions or the projects or the stories that you tell are distinct from usual postcolonial theories. So nationalism, both has been written about at something so distinct that it generates that exceptionalist tendency, but what you work does is it situates it in the larger range of, as you said, imperial Britain capitalist market. So how do you think, and one of the key figures of the book is also Rashid Al Barawi, who you were kind of right about in the introduction? How do you think the relationship is between Barawi's thought, the 40s and 50s and 60s NASA research that we saw and the postcolonial kind of nation-state building that was happening globally at that time? So Rashid Al Barawi is a key figure in this vibrant intellectual and political scene of the 1940s that I described in which Egyptian left nationalist Marxist and development economists, many of whom had traveled abroad, studied abroad, in England and France, some of them in the United States, have returned to their country and introduced these new ideas and conceptions into the political grammar, right, of Egyptian nationalism. And so Rashid Al Barawi is a key figure, right, in all of this. In the 1930s he travels to Britain, he studies in the London School of Economics and is very much influenced by Fabian socialist tendencies over there. And when he returns to Egypt, he's eventually appointed to the faculty of commerce at one university, when later becomes a renowned Cairo university. And he's a very prolific writer in the 1940s, right? He's writing all kinds of books about the theories of development. The co-author is one of the first materialist histories of Egypt, a modern Egypt since the 19th century. And so I understand Barawi as well as many other characters like him that I described in the book, right? Marxists who belong to any of the three major communist tendencies that existed in Egypt in the 1940s during what historians call the second wave of Egyptian communists, right? I understand all these people to be sort of the conduits through which ideas about development from different parts of the world are circulating and are reaching Egypt. And they're using those ideas to then try to grapple with local challenges, problems, and circumstances in Egypt and specifically in the Egyptian countryside, right? So this is not a case where they're just replicating ideas as they existed in other parts of the world or bringing them in the form that they have already existed elsewhere. This is also a project of really grounding themselves in local circumstances and trying to do that work of translation, right? Between concepts and through concepts and categories that originate elsewhere and that they bring to Egypt, but then can help them interpret and describe what's happening in the Egyptian countryside in the 1940s. Now the work of all of these people becomes really important in shaping the political consciousness of the free officers. Many of the free officers, so free officers are a clandestine movement that of military men that is created in Egypt towards the end of the 1940s and who eventually, the throne, the Egyptian king in 1952 and take power and transform the country to a republic and eventually end the final phase of British colonialism in Egypt. And in the 1940s, many of these officers are either adjacent to or part of different political groups in the country, communist groups, Islamist groups, nationalist groups, and they're very much influenced by these new ideas that are circulating so much so that they, like I said, provide the political and intellectual repertoire for what becomes nocerism in the '50s and '60s. Russia, the borrower, is actually appointed to very important positions of authority under the new republic in the early 1950s. You could say that in the first few years of the republic, he's kind of the economic mastermind or one of the economic masterminds behind the regime's policies. And so that's another way in which these ideas that he plays a central role in creating in the 1940s come to profoundly shape the character of the post-colonial state in Egypt during the age of national independence. Thank you so much. I think that helps clarify so many questions around both Barawi's role in the free officer moment and then in the sort of the niece and republic and how he was able to what you said is really important, translating those ideas and categories that you were learnt and trained abroad, which was very quintessential of the colonial system at that point. I think my next question would be, I found it really, really interesting, the theorization that you were doing with capitalism and how broad you were channeling its effects. I think I loved swells kind of riff that you did with swell, which is like cyclical patterns of capitalism found really, I found that really, really helpful. And thinking through those, through your ideas and through your theorization about capitalism, I was wondering, could you say a little bit more about the structure and the order of the book where we start with the story of how you sort of disassembled the global, what you say, an at-me of global plantation and situate Egyptians, cotton plantation and economy in it. And then that's where the story begins, which feels linear, like temporally feels linear that you go from one point of time in history and narrate the story to the next, but at the same time, this feels cyclical because it's a story of capitalism and we still inhabit those capitalistic worlds. And as you say, names might have changed, categories might have changed, but the sort of the fundamental ethos of capitalism stays. So could you say a little bit more about your theorization of capitalism and how it helps structure the book? Okay. So the way I set it up in the beginning of book is as follows, right? I understand capitalism to operate through both political and economic forms of domination that are interval, right? So some forms of domination can be very direct, right? And involve things like direct coercion or military conquest or different forms of political domination on many different scales, right? And Egypt, this would include everything from the way that peasants on larger states were physically coerced or abused into producing more cotton, all the way to the kinds of politically mediated relationships that Egypt as a government and as a country had with Britain as an imperial power. And so you have this interaction between kind of direct forms of political mediation, but you also have indirect forms of market mediation or economic mediation, right? By which I mean, you know, the very fact of it existing in a world where millions of people are producing commodities for sale on global markets means that they're now subject to all kinds of fluctuations, volatility, etc. That are difficult to pin down on any single person or any single group and are experienced rather abstractly, even though it's people themselves who constitute an abstract structure, you know, like the market, right? And I think in a book, I tell a story in which there is no stages progression happening, right, from one kind of capitalism to another or from one kind of society to another, that's perhaps more modern, right? Instead, what we have is a form of capitalism, right, which I call in the book a regime of concessionary accumulation that operates through a particular combination of, you know, political and economic domination that operated through these monopolistic domains that I was describing earlier. And that over time transforms into another kind of capitalism that, you know, critical theorists will sometimes refer to a state capitalism or bureaucratic capitalism, but that is also a form of capitalism operating through interwoven forms of political and economic domination, right? So what I try to avoid doing in the book is using any kind of language that suggests a sharp dichotomy between the market and the state, right, where the economy and the state. And instead, I look at the actual actors, institutions and procedures through which the economy and Egypt was controlled, some of which were, you know, mechanisms that relied on market mediation and others which, you know, relied more on political mediation. And I describe how, you know, what I call those monopolistic domains transform over time, right? Such that by the time we get to the Nostra's period in the 1950s and 60s, when the free officers embrace this project of national development, there's still existing in a world where those, you know, two interwoven forms of domination continue to exist. And I do give examples of, you know, by the time I get to that last chapter in the book that I'd be happy to share with you. Thank you so much. No, this is, this is, this is terrific the way you talk about not the dichotomy, not the transformation, you know, change from one, but the fuzziness that capitalism kind of, you know, generates between these different categories and your idea of like both personal and impersonal domination and citing marks in such an interesting way was I think really, really helpful in kind of centering the story of cotton a little bit more. I think mine next question, which is two prime question one, when you were, I think the book who was the imagined audience in your mind and my second question will be, is there going to be a Arabic translation of the book? Sure. So, so in response to the second question, yeah, I do intend to have the book translated into Arabic. I've started to have some initial conversations with potential translators and publishers, you know, but as you know, that's, that's going to take some time, but it's definitely something that I intend to do. And I'm very much looking forward to doing because, you know, many of my colleagues and comrades and friends with whom I lived through the revolution in Egypt were very much, when I was writing this book as I said in the beginning and were very much intended audience. Now who else did I write this book for? Well, so this book has maybe a couple of potential audiences. So the first audience are people that are interested in a breed of Egypt specifically and maybe the Middle East more generally. And especially the history of decolonization in the Middle East. So, like I said before, there is very few histories of agrarian capitalism in Egypt in the middle of the 20th century that are written especially in English. There is a literature that exists about the history of capitalist development in this period, but you know, a number of those studies, folks on individual investors, enterprises, business coalitions as their main object of analysis. And by contrast, what I'm trying to do is shift the attention to agrarian capitalism, right? As a whole and examine the ways in which it was experienced by all kinds of different people on the level of everyday life in the villages that grew cotton in the towns through which cotton ruled in the markets where cotton was sold, as well as how agrarian capitalism shaped the minds and the ideas of anti-colonial leaders and activists and writers in Egypt during this period. Another audience that I think might take interest in the book are readers who are interested in global capitalism more generally and especially global capitalism beyond the Euro-American world. I think that in Egypt we find a case study of the kinds of changes that many colonial societies were undergoing in the middle of the 20th century. And you know, in much of the book I tried to provide an account of how global events like the Great Depression, like the Second World War, transformed the kinds of, or the forms of power and accumulation that existed in Egypt for decades and how those sets of transformations then allowed the post-colonial state or shaped to the way the post-colonial state in the 50s and 60s established its political legitimacy and its claim to be achieving independence. And that's much more of a global story that has very interesting parallels that you can find between Egypt and other societies, especially in African-Ageps that were decolonizing and achieving their independence in the middle of the 20th century. So I think the book will be interesting to that wider readership beyond just a Middle East Pacific audience for those reasons as well. Thank you so much. I completely agree. I think it speaks to different registers and different not only area studies, but different both theoretical strains and kind of different subgenres of history as well. And my last question will be, what are you working on currently and what should we come and eye out for? So currently I'm working on a few different projects. For the next year or so I'll be co-editing a series of working papers that are part of a project based at the American University of Cairo called Pathways Beyond New Liberalism. And this series of working papers will explore histories of state-led development in the Middle East, especially from the 1940s to the 1960s. And with an aim towards drawing lessons for what alternative models of development in the region can look like beyond neoliberalism. I have also started work on an article that will look at the agrarian question or the peasant question in the Egyptian communist imagination over the span of about half a century from the 1920s until the late 1970s. I mean there's already snippets of those histories in the book, but the book is not primarily about communists and communist thinking in Egypt. So you only get snippets here and there of that history, especially the chapters that deal with the 1940s and the 1950s. But I do hope to write a more complete article about that question. I've also started work on my next book project, which is going to be a history of how Nossarist sort of ideas, projects, agendas traveled around different parts of the world, you know, by looking at Nossarism regionally in the Arab world. I'll also look at it in the context of Africa and pan-Africanist movements in the context of Afro-Asia, especially around the mid-50s, the time of the Bandeau conference and afterwards. And Nossarism in the Trichontinental world, especially in the 1960s, incorporating Latin American to the story as well. And then finally, there's another project that I started getting off the ground a little while ago, and I'm hoping to recurrent to, which is going to be a study of the Great Depression and how the Great Depression impacted colonial societies around the world. You know, I'm hoping to look at the way that the Great Depression devastated cash crop agriculture and broke up rural power systems. And as a result, spawned transnational circuits of activism and expertise that shaped prevailing understandings of decolonization, development and political legitimacy in an age of national independence. Like I said, I've started work on that project a little while ago and had to put it to the side. But I'm hoping to return to it now that I'm done the book. And especially that project builds on many of the themes that are in the second half of harvest of liberation, but expands their spatial parameters by looking at other parts of the colonial world as well. And then, no, thank you so much. I was about to say this, it might be so much of you upscaling some of the brilliant ideas. And the book, as you just said, especially towards the second half, whether it's the story of Great Depression or whether it's the story of sort of like Nossarism, influencing and impacting other regions around the world. I am looking forward to seeing some of the snippets from the next project.