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Download or read book Colonialism and Revolution in the Middle East written by Juan Ricardo Cole and published by American Univ in Cairo Press. This book was released on 1999 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this stimulating study, Juan R. I. Cole challenges traditional elite-centered conceptions of the conflict that led to the British occupation of Egypt in 1882. For a year before the British intervened, Egypt's government and the country's influential European community had been locked in a struggle with the nationalist supporters of General Ahmad 'Urabi. Although most Western observers still see the 'Urabi movement as a 'revolt' of junior military officers with only limited support among the Egyptian people, Cole maintains that it was a full-scale revolution with a broad social base. While arguing this fresh point of view, he also proposes a theory of revolution against informal or neocolonial empires, drawing parallels between Egypt in 1882, the early twentieth-century Boxer Rebellion in China, and the Islamic Revolution in modern Iran. In a thorough examination of the changing Egyptian political culture from 1858 through the 'Urabi episode, Cole shows how various social strata--urban guilds, the intelligentsia, and village notables--became 'revolutionary.' Addressing issues raised by such scholars as Barrington Moore and Theda Skocpol, his book combines four complementary approaches: social structure and its socioeconomic context, organization, ideology, and the ways in which unexpected conjunctures of events help drive a revolution. "The resulting account of the origins of the 1881-82 revolution is original and persuasive. The book will make a significant contribution to the comparative study of social revolution, in particular by explaining how neocolonial revolutions differ from the kinds of revolution previous theorists have studied." --Timothy P. Mitchell, New York University