Writing about Lebanon's economic history is a difficult and often frustrating business. For one thing, the country has never really existed as a separate entity, even after its nominal independence from France in 1943 and the ending of its customs union with Syria in 1950. Its borders have always been too porous and its domination by outside forces too substantial for that. For another, and perhaps because of the above, there is a marked lack of reliable national statistics beginning with those for national income, evaluations of which have been subject more to the usually speculative assumptions about the value of what was being produced and by whom, particularly as far as the agricultural sector was concerned. Then there is the banking system, which was dominated by the secretive French-owned Banque de Syria et du Grand Liban until 1964 and equally secretive private banks thereafter. Hence, scholars like Ali Abou Zeinab have to make do with slim pickings, eked out in his case by a few interviews and the use of the unusually well-informed annual reports of the huge U.S. Embassy in Beirut.

Given all this, it is easy to fall back upon either the oft-told story of Lebanon's economic miracle since the Second World War or, like Toufic Gaspard's recent, The Limits of Laissez-Faire (Leiden: Brill, 2006), on a somewhat revisionist reevaluation of the same. Abou Zeinab, by and large, chooses the latter path with his argument that Lebanon's banks paid scant attention to industrial finance, but without Gaspard's interest in the political side of the equation. And yet little about the country's economic performance can be understood without reference to its government by a well-established group of sectarian merchants and bankers for whom the state, such as it was, was seen primarily as a milk cow providing funds to support the status quo. Nor also to Lebanon's valuable ties with the Arab oil states of the Gulf, whose capital it invested and whose growing markets it used as the basis for its growing export of building material and other manufactured goods.

Nevertheless, in spite of its restricted compass, Abou Zeinab has collected together most of what statistics do exist about bank deposits, banks' foreign assets, and the sectorial allocation of bank credit, all nicely placed in their comparative Middle East and, sometimes, extra-Middle Eastern context. Now and again he also breaks new ground, for example, with his good use of Geoffrey Jones's work on international financial centers ("International Financial Centres in Asia, The Middle East and Australia: A Historical Perspective." Finance and Financiers in European History, 1880–1960. Edited by Youssef Cassis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992) or his sensitive analysis of Lebanon's great banking crisis of 1966 which, he suggests, paradoxically stemmed from the belated creation of a Central Bank in place of the informal network of interbank lending, which had prevented such failures in earlier decades.

What Abou Zeinab is unwilling to do, however, is to challenge the old-established notion that development means the growth of a manufacturing sector and that this, in turn, means medium to long-term bank credit. Quite apart from the fact that these connections have been challenged in many ways in general, they prevent a more searching analysis of the Lebanese case itself in particular, where it seems highly likely that the usual family firms were able to generate enough credit within the family enterprise itself to invest in a range of manufacturing activities often invisible to the national income accountant. Nor does such a mind-set lend itself to the notion that an almost complete laissez-faire system can encourage such investment simply through the absence of workplace regulation and a minimal wage combined with a willingness to smash strikes, and all in a context of high degrees of unemployment among both the rural population and the Palestine refugees in their urban camps.

Hence, it is now generally agreed that, if civil strife had not broken out in 1975, Lebanon was poised to continue a short-lived mini-industrial revolution which, according to some calculations, might have brought the contribution of manufacturing to GDP to perhaps 30, and in some accounts 40 percent, that same year, much the highest in the Arab countries of the Middle East. Whether its status as the Middle East's major financial center could have survived the sudden increase in competition from Bahrain just as the war broke out is another matter about which it is only possible to speculate.

To end on a somewhat grumpy note: the fact that Abou Zeinab's work seems to be a university thesis should not exempt it from the fact that it is particularly badly edited, contains an eccentric bibliography, and lacks an index. That my own name is spelled "Own" on at least three occasions is one of the least of my criticisms. I would much rather the author had read my jointly authored (with Şevket Pamuk), A History of the Middle East Economies in the Twentieth Century (London: I. B. Tauris, 1998), where the source of most of the above comments can be found.