The new wave of Nahḍa studies, which was announced by Stephen Sheehi in 2012, seems to be fulfilling its critical promise of saving the textual corpus of nineteenth-century Arabic cultural and intellectual production from becoming an “infinitely rich nothing.”Footnote ¹ The growing interest in the Nahḍa is arguably premised on a scholastic intuition that our previous exploration of the nineteenth century missed something important. Recent years have seen the paradigm-setting works of Albert Hourani's Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age (1962) and Timothy Mitchell's Colonising Egypt (1988) being revisited, rethought, adapted, or superseded,Footnote ² illuminating the infinite richness of the Nahḍa. The three books under review in this essay belong to this process of illumination, even if their underlying methods differ. What these books do share is a consideration of the archive as the principle from which history both commences and commands.Footnote ³ While there is an overlap between the archives that each book visits, different methodologies produce different narratives of the Arab press, with varying beginnings, middles, and endings.

The three books stand together as a suitable representation of the current field of Nahḍa studies. Printing Arab Modernity finds historical value in the aesthetic and visual decisions taken by the American press and its Arab workforce from the 1830s to the 1870s; The Arab Print Revolution tells a multifaceted story of the initial struggles and later successes of the Arab print industry to produce mass commodities; Fictitious Capital reads the capitalist unconsciousness of this archive to connect the rise of the Arabic novel to the speculative financial anxieties that permeated the pages of serialized novels and their industrious publishing houses. As such, these approaches to the infinitely rich Arabic archive range from the historical to the epistemological, while also parting ways with the nationalist paradigm that had dominated literary criticism and historiography since the 1970s and has been on the wane for the past decade. The three books promise us histories divorced from that of the nation-state; material histories of the printing presses in the case of Ayalon and Auji, and a literary history that focuses on political economy rather than the anachronistic category of the nation-state in the case of Holt.

Ami Ayalon's The Arab Print Revolution sidesteps the “ideas, contents, and genres of the writings”Footnote ⁴ found within the literary output of the Nahḍa. Instead, Ayalon zooms in on “hitches, malperformance, and other material and organizational factors”Footnote ⁵ that form the focus of the book. The “Revolution” of his title is only explained towards the end as a “relative term” and a “semantic preference” to describe changes that “were sufficiently profound, and their implications sufficiently far-reaching, to merit being labeled revolutionary.”Footnote ⁶ It is a term that, in this case, is applied “with the benefit of hindsight.”Footnote ⁷ Yet this seductive semantic preference is the least interesting part of this factually rich book. Beyond revolution-talk, what the book helpfully offers is a rigorous excavation of the intricacies of the print industry from the mid-eighteenth century to the early-twentieth century.

Throughout the book, Ayalon does well to undermine standard explanations for the late arrival of print media to the Ottoman Empire. As it had not flourished until the mid-nineteenth century, previous accounts of the Arabic print industry attributed its absence to “government objection, ulamā disapproval, and opposition by the many book copyists in the capital.”Footnote ⁸ For Ayalon, these factors no longer stand as adequate explanations for the equally inadequate assumption that the “Muslim Ottoman state opted to remain on the sidelines of human progress, way behind Europe, which was racing ahead.”Footnote ⁹ Instead, Ayalon takes inspiration from the history of print in China to balance the comparison to the history of print in Europe. Simultaneously exposing previous assumptions as “rash generalization[s]” and providing correctives to them, Ayalon's answer relies on “cultural, religious, social, and political factors”Footnote ¹⁰ that together show the redundancy of print as a technology in the Ottoman Empire centuries after “Gutenberg.”Footnote ¹¹ “Middle Eastern societies,” writes Ayalon, “had no use for machines that multiplied written texts at high speed. They were not convinced by the European-printed samples they saw, which to them were inferior to locally made manuscripts, and were distrustful of their alien origin,”Footnote ¹² which, he quickly adds, echoes Chinese attitudes of a “superior indifference to Western things.”Footnote ¹³ Thus, Ayalon dispels the absence of print as a sign of inferiority or belatedness and casts it as a particular sign of cultural, religious, social, and political difference. It is with such differences in mind that Ayalon traces the history of Arabic printing presses and publishers, yet he is quick to highlight that his book is not going to be focused on the “ideas and the public discourse”Footnote ¹⁴ of printers, publishers, and authors; rather, Ayalon is clear that his book will zoom in on the material conditions of this industry, ranging from “printing, marketing, and vending” to its circulation and consumption.

Scholars and students of the Nahḍa will find value in Ayalon's book for highlighting peripheral and/or understudied figures in the history of Arabic print. A case in point is Khalīl Sarkīs, who Ayalon introduces as “a publisher and author who is not remembered as one of this society's literary luminaries, but was certainly a key figure in the region's printing history.”Footnote ¹⁵ The story of figures similar to Sarkīs brings into relief the day-to-day operations of a printing press: the trouble of obtaining a license, the hardships of keeping the business afloat, the unending effort to draw buyers and readers. According to Ayalon, figures like Sarkīs must be credited for surmounting the “multiple challenge[s] – at once assimilating a new product and creating the market for it,”Footnote ¹⁶ a credit that will almost certainly be absent from books of intellectual history. In turn, these important figures “tell us of editors, copyeditors, underwriters, right-holders, and others, including people who were not members of the regular press team”Footnote ¹⁷ who made up the workforce and established the infrastructure of the Arabic print industry. The focus on these marginal figures helps Ayalon tell the story of the Arabic press not only as that of proliferation of or “commitment to enlightenment” ideas, but also as “[a] quest for profit.”Footnote ¹⁸ As such, the story of the Arabic print industry is also one of capital, of winners and losers, and not simply one of Nahḍa, of rise and prosperity, as Holt's Fictitious Capital makes clear. If the story of Khalīl Sarkīs is one of success, Ayalon also conveys the less-than-successful experience of Jurjī Ḥabīb Ḥanāniyā. The latter's engagement with the Arabic print industry left him bankrupt, “cut off from his family and laboring hard to make ends meet in the only craft he knew. In 1920, he died [in Egypt] of heart failure.”Footnote ¹⁹

Ḥanāniyā’s failure, Ayalon implies, is more typical than the success enjoyed by those whose names we remember, like Aḥmad Fāris al-Shidyāq, Buṭrus al-Bustānī, or even Khalīl Sarkīs. Yet, what all these authors and publishers have in common was a characteristic fusion of classical and modern works of literature and science on the pages of their journals. Despite its titular nod towards the historical paradigm of revolution, Ayalon's book gives us a well-researched account of a process of evolution and adaptation, which Hala Auji foregrounds in her codicological analysis of Arabic printing from the 1830s to the 1860s.

Auji's Printing Arab Modernity showcases how print was domesticated by passing through the conventions of the manuscript tradition. The book considers the continuum between the scribal tradition and the printing tradition. The Press of the Presbyterian American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM), also known as the American Press, is the central focus of the book. This focus allows her to begin the study in the early half of the eighteenth century, when “print was adapted to emulate scribal conventions and methods that suited local readers’ perception of the book at the time.”Footnote ²⁰ What emerges is a history that is characterized less as a revolutionary change than it is a series of adaptations of new technologies to contemporary concerns. Focusing less on the textual aspect of print, and zooming in on the “graphic and material dimensions as a form of knowledge production,”Footnote ²¹ Auji “considers how changes in the design and content of these works throughout the years reflect shifts in the [American] mission's evangelical goals, and responses to local religious and communal concerns.”Footnote ²² In this respect, Auji's work is important for broadening our historiographical approaches to the Nahḍa archive to include the design decisions of the early printing presses. More than a narrative of the adaptation, and later abandonment, of scribal visual traditions to the visual design of printed books, Auji's book complicates the postcolonial paradigm of imperial dominance and local resistance. Printing Arab Modernity writes the story of how Arab intellectuals made use of the American Mission's printing press even as the mission itself was abandoning print as a tool for conversion.

The four chapters that make up Printing Arab Modernity chronologically tell the story of al-Maṭbaʿa al-Amrikāniyya (The American Press), the press of Presbyterian American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM), in relation to changing local and regional circumstances. Auji describes the American Press's presence as a doubly foreign body, first as a foreign press in the realm of Ottoman power, and second as “one of few printing establishments within a market dominated by scribal practices.”Footnote ²³ Despite this foreign designation, the American Press becomes a fertile soil for an “urban print intelligentsia” who produced a local Arab print culture from the existing scribal tradition. The attention paid to the work done by Nāṣīf al-Yāzijī, Buṭrus al-Bustānī, Ibhrāhīm Sarkīs, and Tānnūs al-Ḥaddād as employees of the American Press enriches our understanding of the material origins of the Nahḍa. The early involvement of these literati distinguished the production of the American Press for its conformity to “grammatical rules and stylistic structures of written Arabic.”Footnote ²⁴ Thus, the story of the American Press is also the story of the emergence of a generation of Syrian intellectuals who produced most of its Arabic books in the first three decades. Printing Arab Modernity studies the visual and aesthetic changes that occurred in these three decades as a consequence of local and regional social, economic, and political developments.

The three decades under consideration, from the early 1830s to the end of the 1860s, witnessed an emergent and ever-changing print culture in the Arab world. Auji's focus on the American Press provides readers with a diachronic view of the changing visual designs of its printed publications. The American Press's inaugural works are considered “sites of artistic innovation and experimentation where various local and external aesthetic impulses overlapped.”Footnote ²⁵ The print production in the 1830s was characterized by the juxtaposition of both scribal and print visual features, as well as non-religious moral material that appealed to both Christian and Muslim readers. The use of familiar, if also elaborate visuals in print helped to familiarize and domesticate the notion of the printed book, “len[ding] the book a certain amount of weight and importance.”Footnote ²⁶ These scribal visual traditions ornamented texts that commented on issues of morality, without explicitly proselytizing Protestant beliefs nor attacking the religious orientations of local Christian denominations. In this early cautious period, the American Press made sure to amass a readership by reflecting their concerns and interests on the printed page, visually and substantially.

The 1840s saw the American Press move away from scribal conventions as it began to publish more controversial anti-Catholic content. Auji clarifies that this minimalist style cannot be reduced to an elusive understanding of a “Protestant aesthetic,” but rather must be “read as reflections of a new missionary policy towards local conversion, as well as responses to a changing religious landscape and an expanding print readership.”Footnote ²⁷ Of the causes that led to the change in visual and aesthetic decisions of print, Auji singles out the higher typographic and production standards, the changing local religious landscape, the growing interest in secular education, as well as the American Mission's allocation of more of its attention on conversion and biblical instruction rather than on “broader intellectual, political, or economic” activity.Footnote ²⁸ The American Mission faced competition from other missionaries in the 1840s, especially from the Jesuit and Catholic presses. This crowded field led to a shift in missionary policy whereby the ABCFM board secretary Rufus Anderson directed the American Mission to decrease its reliance on “the press and the schools” and to embrace “the Pauline operation upon the hearts.”Footnote ²⁹ Thence, the publications of the American Press became more ecclesiastical, with a direct emphasis on religion and preaching, and less on secular publications such as lexicons and grammar books.

By the mid-1850s, the American Press had updated its equipment with the purchase of a steam press, increasing the efficiency and speed of its printed output. Yet with only sporadic publishing of its own, the American Press loaned out its equipment to local intellectuals like al-Yāzijī and al-Bustānī who took advantage of this resource to publish their own work—a different yet related practice is mentioned by Ayalon whereby wealthy contractors would commission the publication of certain works from both state and private presses such as the Būlāq press.Footnote ³⁰ Al-Yāzijī would publish the infamous Kitāb majmaʿ al-baḥrayn, while al-Bustānī published the proceedings to al-Jāmiʿyya al-Sūriyya l-iktisāb al-ʿulūm wa-l-funūn. Inevitably, tensions arose between the ABCFM's evangelical mission in the region and the secular publishing of Nahḍa intellectuals. Despite this, Auji remains committed to her focus on visual aesthetic, noting that both ecclesiastical and secular books printed at the American Press shared “a minimalist design that demonstrates an emphasis on text and typography within which any ornamental elements are limited to simple borders.”Footnote ³¹ Auji helpfully elucidates the aesthetic differences between al-Yāzijī’s and al-Busṭānī’s books and those of their contemporaries. Here, the book's rich images play their part in showing the persistence in scribal conventions in the Muslim-owned presses of Cairo and Tabriz. The juxtaposition of images not only contrasts the various aesthetic decisions of different presses, but it also allows us to appreciate the evolution of the American Press's printing conventions from the 1830s to the 1860s. It is a strength of Auji's work that she does not overemphasize the role of the American Missionaries at the expense of the local Arab authors. As such, readers are constantly reminded that the aesthetic choices are “studied decisions made by these locals to incorporate certain conventions (e.g. those of the Protestants’ books from the 1840s onwards) and to exclude others (e.g. those which demonstrated literal emulations of scribal traditions).”Footnote ³² This argument is central to Auji's reading of these authors as producers, not only of knowledge, but of what a book should look like, and how these visual decisions reflect a negotiation of political subjecthood and identity. In this vein, Auji reads the appearance of the basmala tughrāʾ in numerous non-religious and religious texts, both Muslim and Christian, as evidence of the remnants of the scribal tradition, but also as a sign of the text's multi-confessional readership. This close reading of the tughrāʾ exemplifies “the shifting roles the Press played as an enterprise caught in between missionary goals and independent secular publishing.”Footnote ³³Printing Arab Modernity offers readers a different perspective on the materiality of the print industry by focusing on the “mediations between scribal traditions and emergent printing practices”—a consideration that makes visible and visual the “multi-dimensional components, the labor involved in their production, and their history as sites of negotiation between missionary ideals and Arab cultural and socio-political engagements.”Footnote ³⁴ Both Auji and Ayalon's books improve upon the material histories of the Nahḍa, if differently. Elizabeth M. Holt's Fictitious Capital: Silk, Cotton, and the Rise of the Arabic Novel puts forward a materialist and epistemological history of the Arabic novel as a story of capital gone rogue.

If Ayalon's book is read as the coming together of the printed book as a commodity, and Auji's book as the correspondence between the visual designs of the book printing and the developing social and political climate surrounding the American Mission, then Holt's book captures the underlying speculative nature of book publishing in the nineteenth century. Fictitious Capital unmoors the bildungsroman of the Arabic novel from that of the nation, and convincingly tethers it to that of finance capital: to the flow and eventual ebb of the silk and cotton markets of the nineteenth century. Readers will find Holt's book a welcome addition to Ayalon's and Auji's material analyses as well as to the new wave of Nahḍa studies. Holt offers a materialist account of the rise of the novel as opposed to conventional idealist versions of this story. The serialized novels of Fictitious Capital become the archive of a changing epistemology effected by the rise of financial instruments that keep hope in abeyance and portend a near future riddled with ever-increasing anxiety.

The serialized narratives studied in the book reveal a speculative literary practice that mirrored the developments of finance capital, where periodicals like the Ḥadīqat al-Akhbār promised weekly harvests and “invited readers to speculate about the future of the region, to hope even as they feared it.”Footnote ³⁵ This linking of literary to financial speculation attends to an argument about the reconfiguration of time in the nineteenth century. Holt's approach allows her to grasp her object of study, the Arabic novel, as historically variable and conditioned by the changing epistemologies produced by the rise of finance capital. In that vein, Holt reads her narratives as “the moment of the emergence of a certain kind of textuality,” which “conceives of texts, of textuality, through the materiality of textiles.”Footnote ³⁶

The six chapters of Fictitious Capital trace how the logic of financial speculation correlates to the serialized fiction of the nineteenth century, at a time when the Arabic novel was producing itself on the pages of periodicals. Through close readings of “disremembered” serialized literary texts, the book reveals a correlation between the boom of silk and cotton speculation and hopeful plotlines of Edenic romances on the one hand, and on the other hand, another correlation between the bust of these speculative enterprises and the anxious serialized plots that are unresolved. In studying this correlation between fiction and finance, Holt invites us to review our understanding of Nahḍa as simply a rise and/or a renaissance by indexing the moments of suspenseful anxiety that riddle the “archive of these fictions of capital.”Footnote ³⁷ In this way, “The Arabic dream of Nahḍa, of a reunion of lovers in the next installment of a novel, of financial markets that will never crash, is one and the same,”Footnote ³⁸ a speculative instrument trying to imagine the future in the present.

Fictitious Capital, then, is as much a history of print capital as it is a literary history. This interdisciplinary combination makes the book a study of the genres of social existence whereby the rise of the Arabic novel indexes socio-economic changes driven by the social logic of finance capitalism. In other words, Fictitious Capital is a study of the historical epistemology of the Nahḍa as it is refracted through the episodic fictions of finance capital.

This literary and epistemological history begins in the 1870s with the work of Salīm al-Bustānī in al-Jinān and Yūsuf al-Shalfūn in Al-Zahra. Holt reads the language of risk, speculation, and suspense in editorial articles, serialized literary texts, but also in the Nahḍa's rich lexicon of garden tropes as signifiers of finance capital's penetration of this literary field. Al-Jinān and Al-Zahra are instructive examples of the boom and bust of the “technologies of suspense.”Footnote ³⁹ While the former achieved relative success on its investment of serialized narratives that in turn promised its reading public positive returns for their “gardens of knowledge”Footnote ⁴⁰ as the fruits of adab broadly defined, the latter's short lifespan exemplified “a mode of anxious speculation just beginning to be articulated in Arabic, one that would perpetually suspend the Nahḍa’s dream of literary and material progress between an alchemy of hope, and the fear looming at the horizon of the gardens of the future.”Footnote ⁴¹ Holt's claim here is that the growing sense of uncertainty heralded by the foundation of finance capital “resonates with the serialized form of long fictional narratives,”Footnote ⁴² which “gave literary form to the speculative hopes being undone in the mulberry orchards of Mount Lebanon.”Footnote ⁴³ Holt's book thus gives a different perspective into the financing of journals than Ayalon's book does, revealing how journal editors and authors assimilated the anxiety of staying afloat into the form of serialized narratives that built suspense and whose plotlines rose and fell with the volatile fluctuations of the market. “Fiction loomed within finance,” Holt writes, “speculating in Arabic became the province of novelists and financiers alike.”Footnote ⁴⁴

By the mid-1870s, when the bankruptcy of the Ottoman Empire allowed for cities like Beirut to be “increasingly knit into a global capitalist market with structural disadvantages for those in cities beyond the metropoles of France, England, and the United States,” the serialized novels of the Nahḍa come to “persistently critique these speculative financial practices.”Footnote ⁴⁵ The relationship between fiction and financial speculation became strained, the former expressing the dangers of the latter, and the hopes of Edenic gardens became premonitions of the fall. In careful, close readings, Holt follows the shifts in Salīm al-Bustānī’s work, from his early 1870 al-Huyām fī jinān al-Shām, to the 1872 Budūr, the 1875 Bint al-ʿasr, and his final 1882–84 serialization of Sāmiya, a novel that “directly engages pressing questions stirred by the global rise of finance and falling returns on silk.”Footnote ⁴⁶

With the silk industry in Beirut failing, Fictitious Capital migrates in chapters four and five with the Syrian émigrés to Egypt. In Egypt, Fictitious Capital tells the story of how the press and their novels forged themselves as fully fledged commodities. Charting this literary and capital flight in the figure of Jurjī Zaydān, Holt demonstrates how “the novel emerged all the more heavily capitalized: it was a commodity, one that in its very form and circulation betrayed the Edenic, impossible dream of an Arabic novel untroubled by speculation.”Footnote ⁴⁷ Here the reader learns of a transformation between the 1860s and the 1880s from a press and its serialized novels that harnessed the suspense of the silk industry, in both hope and fear, to a condition wherein the press and the novel became themselves primary domains of speculation and profit. Holt anchors this transformation in Jurjī Zaydān, who acts as the major entrepreneur of the Arabic press and the Arabic novel and who manages to woo “his readers away from gambling establishments to spend their money instead on his journal, historical novels, books, or other edifying works available for perusal and sale through his reading room and bookstore, and worldwide by subscription.”Footnote ⁴⁸ The importance of Zaydān to the literary history that Holt writes is to be situated in his success at untethering the novel, as a non-serialized book, from the futures of silk and cotton; the press and novel, after Zaydān, had their own future, no longer dependent on suspenseful serialization, but on their own capitalization and industrialization; what some Marxists might call the regimes of formal and real subsumption. No representation of this capitalization is more apt than Zaydān's announcement of his own lottery in an effort to entice subscribers and readers to pay in advance in exchange for the chance to win the “seedlings of sciences and knowledge.”Footnote ⁴⁹ Zaydān, the “literary capitalist,” becomes the entrepreneurial figure who both announces the Nahḍa as a paradigm and enacts it through the commodification of the novel in book form.

Yet Fictitious Capital will not end with this tale of a promise fulfilled, of the total enculturation of value in the form of the Arabic novel, a capitalist dream of Nahḍa as rise and renaissance. The 1907 financial crash in Egypt looms on the horizon, and Yaʿqūb Ṣarrūf's Fatāt Miṣr appears in the lead-up to the crash as a fictional account of financial speculation, and “exposes the serialized novel's imbrication in the kind of suspense tethering in the financial markets of Egypt.”Footnote ⁵⁰ We are reminded that Nahḍa is not only Zaydān's designation, but must include the history of Edenic gardens threatened by locusts.

The strengths of the Fictitious Capital are its close readings, its extraction of the lexical field of financial and literary keywords from the texts, and the slow philological work that bridges these terms together and to the respective fields. Exemplifying this methodology is the connection Holt reveals between jarada, to lay bare, jarād, locusts, jarāʾid, newspapers, and riwāya, the Arabic term for novel, but also the act of irrigation. This connection is situated within the lexical field of gardens that give names to the various newspapers of the Nahḍa. Beyond mere wordplay, Holt's book grounds these lexical terms in close readings of widely unread narratives of the Nahḍa, and convincingly places them within a growing conceptual apparatus of capital. In the end, Fictitious Capital emerges as the literary history of how the early Arabic novels “were caught up in the market's ups and downs,” only to later become “an industry […] the better to capitalize on its potential to be marketed and sold.”Footnote ⁵¹ Holt's book is a literary history not of nations, as she reminds us, but of how the rise of the novel can be read through the rise of finance capital, and vice versa, of how the rise of finance capital can be read in the serialized novels. In this respect, it is Arabic literary criticism's response to material histories of capital in the Middle East and a reminder that historiography cannot forsake the close, slow, and philological reading of the archive.

The three monographs reviewed here share a commitment to the archive that is an exemplary approach to material histories and literary criticism. In their varied methodological approaches, these books display the possibilities that the archive of the Nahḍa holds for scholars. For such vigorous research and scholarly synthesis, these works make future work on the archive an exciting prospect.