"A unique and welcome perspective which will challenge some and inspire others in the field. . . The scholarship involved, with its fluent familiarity with this extraordinary range of sources--a range which very few historians are capable of using--is remarkable, as is the quality of the prose, and the breadth and maturity of the judgments made. This book will become the standard work in a field where much has been written."--Rashid Khalidi, University of Chicago

Zachary Lockman's informed and thoughtful history of European Orientalism and U.S. Middle East studies, the 'clash of civilizations' debate and America's involvement in the region has become a highly recommended and widely used text since its publication in 2004. The second edition of Professor Lockman's book brings his analysis up to date by considering how the study of the Middle East has evolved in the intervening years, in the context of the U.S. occupation of Iraq and the 'global war on terror.'

This groundbreaking book examines the role of trade unionism and the working class in the development of Egyptian nationalism during the first half of the twentieth century. Beinin and Lockman examine, "the dialectic of class and nation [and] the formation of a new class of wage workers as Egypt experienced a particular kind of capitalist development."