Property rights to land are perhaps the major institution that governs the distribution of wealth in agrarian societies. The Large Landowning Class and the Peasantry in Egypt employs primary archival sources, which are being uncovered for the first time in the literature, in order to analyze the evolution of the large landowning class in Egypt from 1837 to 1952. The central thesis of the book is that the large landowners controlled the main mode of production in the country prior to the 1952 revolution, where they defended their class interests vis-à-vis both the state and the peasantry, the authors argue, within a capitalist, rather than a feudal, system (pp. 201–05).

The authors, two leading historians of modern Egypt, attempt to avoid a unified theoretical framework, because a society is “governed by material conditions and historical circumstances that are generally specific to it and it alone” (p. 209). Instead, they adopt an “empirical” approach drawing on an impressively wide range of new primary sources that include: (i) Ministry of Finance's registers of land grants and transactions, (ii) Records of the landholdings of the ruling family, (iii) Records of taxable land which document the land tenure of every landholder in each village, (iv) Pension files of civil servants, and (v) Agrarian Reform Authority's records of the landlords who fell under the post-1952 revolution land reform laws (pp. xvii, 259–60). Nonetheless, admitting that theory can be useful in understanding history (p. 209), they often resort to theoretical constructs (mainly Marxist) in interpreting individual pieces of evidence.

Property rights to land in Egypt went through a long development process that culminated in the recognition of private landownership in 1891 (pp. 1–14). The large landowning class, defined as those owning more than 100 feddans (1 feddan = 1.038 acre), originated from the different types of land grants that were granted by rulers to various individuals throughout the nineteenth century (pp. 15–32). The authors attribute the subsequent growth of the class to the sale of royal estates in 1906–1912, the availability of credit, and the evolution of irrigation which increased the demand for land (pp. 32–54).

The large landowners were composed of three major ethnic groups: Turks, Egyptians, and Europeans (pp. 55–83). The authors assert that, despite their apparent heterogeneity, one can analyze the large landowners as a “class,” first, due to the mixing of these groups, and second, due to their shared economic interests. In particular, the large landowners were involved in a wide range of economic activities that initially included agriculture, but were later extended to industry and commerce (pp. 84–107).

But did the large landowners defend their “class” interests vis-à-vis the peasantry and the state? On the one hand, the relation between the large landowners and the peasantry was contractual rather than feudal (pp. 108–40). Yet, in spite of the poor conditions of the peasantry, the large landowners generally blocked attempts to redistribute wealth before the 1952 revolution (pp. 185–200). On the other hand, the large landowners lobbied to bias the state in their favor (pp. 141–84), but their lobbying activities were constrained by the Capitulations Agreements that granted extra legal rights to the Europeans and made the state largely unresponsive to the large landowners' demands.

There are various ways by which economic theory and quantitative methods can extend the analysis of the book. First, the primary sources introduced here can be quantified in order to examine the full landownership distribution, instead of using the a priori cutoff point of 100 feddans. A population with a majority of medium landowners is quite different from that with a majority of landless peasants, even if the share of large landowners is the same in both populations.

Second, a limitation of the class analysis is its unidimensional character. In particular, the authors argue that (landownership) income defines the large landowners' class interests and behavior towards the other classes (e.g., lobbying, exploitation of peasants), on the grounds that other determinants of behavior, such as ethnicity or religion, are less significant. While this may be true, it remains an empirical question that can be examined using the sources in hand. For example, Egyptian landowners might behave differently from Turkish ones. In this context, the individual analysis that account for both economic and non-economic motives may provide another route to analyze the determinants of behavior, substituting, or even complementing, the class analysis.

Third, the authors' definition of the large landowning class is a static one that is based on the landownership distribution at a given point in time, assuming that there was little mobility in and out of this class. The validity of this assumption, however, is also an empirical question, and it remains of major interest to examine landownership mobility over time. For example, it appears that Egyptians made significant upward mobility gains on the landownership ladder during the period of study (pp. 81–83).

Finally, the authors attempt to distance their work from the Marxist and liberal traditions, criticizing both as Eurocentric and inapplicable to Egypt (pp. 205–09). However, it is important to examine explicitly the aspects of inapplicability of economic theory to the question in hand, along with the needed adjustments to the theory. In this regard, the wealth of primary sources that are introduced here and the depth of the analysis can serve as an excellent starting point.