The best books on cities and travelling ideas

This book is similar to mine but instead of focusing on the spread and dissemination of capitalism, it focuses on the dissemination and adaptation of radical, socialist, and anarchist ideas in the Eastern Mediterranean region during the nineteenth century, and argues that the cities of Alexandria, Cairo, and Beirut played a major role in this process.

In particular, dense social and intellectual networks that linked key segments of the population in these cities together were pivotal in facilitating both the spread of these ideas and the ways in which they were reworked, reinterpreted, and adapted to local and regional contexts.

Though focusing on a different time period and on the spread of counter-hegemonic rather than hegemonic ideas, Khoury’s work is similar to the argument that I have been developing in this book, in the sense that it traces the regional networks and spaces of individuals and organizations who played a central role in importing but also adapting discourses of western origin, in ways that made these discourses intelligible and useful for local populations, and at the same time, worked to integrate the region as an integral part of a broader global community. 

Sherene Seikaly’s Men of Capital is a great book that focuses on Elites and the spread of certain ideas like my project.

Men of Capital focuses more on the intellectual projects of local economic elites in British-ruled Palestine in the early twentieth century, who “understood their economic interests as part of a broader Arab horizon” and sought to promote a capitalist “pan-Arab utopia of free trade, private property, and self-responsibility.”

They did this through direct collaboration with and travel to local Chambers of Commerce based in cities in Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, and Iraq, but also through extensive engagement in publishing and disseminating books and periodicals that promoted their vision in cities throughout the region. 

In this important study, Abu-Lughod presents a groundbreaking reinterpretation of global economic evolution, arguing that the modern world economy had its roots not in the sixteenth century, as is widely supposed, but in the thirteenth-century economy—a system far different from the European world system which emerged from it.

Using the city as the working unit of analysis, Before European Hegemony provides a new paradigm for understanding the evolution of world systems by tracing the rise of a system that, at its peak in the opening decades of the 14th century, involved a vast region stretching between northwest Europe and China.

Writing in a clear and lively style, Abu-Lughod explores the reasons for the eventual decay of this system and the rise of European hegemony.

The book was formative in my thinking through ideas and control. Growing up in war zones, peace had always been something we strive for.

It was reading this book that made me aware how peace can be used as control, how colonialism works in order to preserve the status quo of injustices through ideologies of peace and harmony. But who said that peace is always what is needed, or harmony not conflict is the best ideal in societies?

The book was formative in also making me think about culture, ideas, and control. 

The book is one of the first books that critically looked at NGOs, not as agents of change but as the infrastructure of the spread of the ideology of neoliberalism.

Maha brings back Gramsci to the study of civil society in the Middle East and critique the celebration of civil society as the agent of change in the region- and elsewhere – to argue that civil society is where hegemonic ideas about free market economy is spread. Maha was also one of the first writer to speak of NGOs as employer.