Peasants, Crime, and Tea in Interwar Egypt

Abstract

Contemporary discussions of the Egyptian peasantry, for example relating to the recent tenancy law, centre on stereotypes of backward peasants. Such discourses, which paint peasants as apolitical creatures and bearers of a backward mentality, can be traced at least as far back as the interwar era. But by using the peasant “mentality” as an all-explanatory device for understanding rural poverty, these discourses ignore the social and political processes that produced rural poverty in the first place.