Overview

The concept of the ‘dangerous classes’ was born in a rapidly urbanizing and industrializing nineteenth century Europe. It described all those who had fallen out of the working classes into the lower depths of the new societies, surviving by their wits or various amoral, disreputable or criminal strategies. This included beggars and vagrants, swindlers, pickpockets and burglars, prostitutes and pimps, ex-soldiers, ex-prisoners, tricksters, drug-dealers, the unemployed or unemployable, indeed every type of the criminal and marginal. This book examines the ‘dangerous classes’ in the Middle East and North Africa, their lives and the strategies they used to avoid, evade, cheat, placate or, occasionally, resist, the authorities. Chapters cover the narratives of their lives; their relationship with ‘respectable’ society; their political inclinations and their role in shaping systems and institutions of discipline and control and their representation in literature and in popular culture. The book demonstrates the liminality of the ‘dangerous classes’ and their capacity for re-invention. It also indicates the sharpening relevance of the concept to a Middle East and North Africa now in the grip of an almost permanent sense of crisis, its younger generations crippled by a pervasive sense of hopelessness, prone to petty crime and vulnerable to induction as foot soldiers into drug and people smuggling, petty gangsterism and jihadism.

Full Product Details

Author:   Stephanie Cronin
Publisher:   Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
Imprint:   I.B. Tauris
Weight:   0.640kg
ISBN:  

9781788313711

ISBN 10:   1788313712
Pages:   328
Publication Date:   28 November 2019
Audience:   College/higher education ,  Professional and scholarly ,  Tertiary & Higher Education ,  Professional & Vocational
Format:   Hardback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   Manufactured on demand  
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Table of Contents

Acknowledgements Note on transliteration The Dangerous Classes in the Middle East and North Africa Stephanie Cronin, University of Oxford, UK Part One: Dangerous Women Disciplining Sex Work in Colonial Cairo Francesca Biancani, Bologna University, Italy Governing Prostitutes with Fear and Compassion: The Red-Light District of Tehran, 1922-1970 Jairan Gahan, University of Toronto, Canada “Disorderly Women” and the Politics of Urban Space in Early 20th Century Istanbul (1900-1914) Müge Özbek, Koç University, Turkey Disreputable by Definition: Respectability and Theft by Poor Women in Urban Interwar Egypt Hanan Hammad, Texas Christian University, USA Part Two: Banditry and Crime Noble Robbers, avengers and entrepreneurs: Eric Hobsbawm and banditry in Iran, the Middle East and North Africa Stephanie Cronin, University of Oxford, UK Rural Banditry in Colonial Algeria, 1871-1914 Antonin Plarier, Panthéon Sorbonne University, France A State of Tribal Lawlessness? Rural and Urban Crime in Fars Province, 1910-15 Mattin Biglari, SOAS, University of London, UK Rural Crimes As Everyday Politics of Peasants: Tax Delinquency, Smuggling, Theft and Banditry in Modern Turkey Murat Metinsoy, Istanbul University, Turkey Part Three: Dangerous Streets: Urban food riots in late Ottoman Bilad al-Sham as a ‘repertoire of contention’ Till Grallert, Orient-Institut Beirut of the Max Weber Foundation, Lebanon The Dangerous Classes and the 1953 Coup in Iran: On the Decline of lutigari Masculinities Olmo Gölz, University of Freiburg, Germany The ‘Virtual Poor’ in Iran: Dangerous classes and Homeless Life in Capitalist Times Maziyar Ghiabi, University of Oxford, UK Index

Reviews

Accepting the social notion of class and frequently relying on the foundational theories of prominent sociologist Eric Hobsbawm, this collection brings the well-known social history of 'dangerous classes' in Europe to bear on the Middle East and North Africa. Cronin (Univ. of Oxford, UK) has compiled 11 essays from well-recognized scholars of the region that look at societies in Iran, Turkey, Egypt, and Algeria from the bottom up. In already underdeveloped countries with segmented economies that tend to protect those with accumulated social and economic success, the lumpenproletariat (the unproductive) turns to what is available based on street-learned skills and adaptability. For women, this has traditionally meant turning to the 'oldest known profession,' prostitution; for urban youth and rural agricultural workers lacking regular support, the primary alternatives have been gangs and banditry. What comes through in many essays is the general opposition among this class of people, across countries, to the political establishment, regardless of whether it is the tax collector, the landowner, or the national government. This is a well-created sociohistorical collection worthy of addition to Middle East collections. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty; professionals. * CHOICE *

Author Information

Stephanie Cronin is Elahé Omidyar Mir-Djalali Research Fellow at St Antony’s College and a member of the Faculty of Oriental Studies, University of Oxford. She is the author of seven books, including Armies and State-building in the Modern Middle East: Politics, Nationalism and Military Reform (I. B. Tauris, 2014) and The Army and the Creation of the Pahlavi State in Iran, 1910-1926 (I. B. Tauris, 1997).

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