CASAS’ member Amr Khairy has just published this paper in Capitalism: A Journal of History and Economics.

Abstract:

In Egypt, the word “industry” emerged in the 1860s transliterated as al-industriyya (from the French industrie). Rifāʿa al-Ṭahṭāwī, a prominent educator, translator, and man of letters from the 1830s through the 1860s, coined the term and equated it to “public wealth,” “industriousness,” “growth,” and “manufacturing”—among other meanings—and noted that “colonial industry” meant “global trade.” With evidence that the French source—industrie—comes from the Saint-Simonian deliberations on the term, the article traces the lineages of al-industriyya and associated words, as they occurred in al-Ṭahṭāwī’s economic treatise Manāhij (1869), to the Saint-Simonian circle of Prosper Enfantin (1796–1864). The Saint-Simonians had stayed in Egypt in the 1830s, pushed for grand public works projects, and helped establish modern Egyptian engineering education. This transcultural conceptual history shows that advocating and planning colonization, as well as credit and property rights, followed from the rise of processes associated with both concepts (industrie and al-industriyya) as they were presented by the Saint-Simonians and al-Ṭahṭāwī.

Read their full paper here: https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/56/article/990851

CASAS

The Collective of Agrarian Scholar-Activists from the Global South (CASAS) is a community of Scholar-Activists working in critical agrarian studies.