The rich literature on the “Great Divergence” between Western Europe on the one hand, and the Ottoman Empire, and Egypt in particular, on the other, has been either too Eurocentric or focused too much on the role of state. Much of the recent work emphasizes institutions as the ultimate determinant of Ottoman weakness, but these studies invariably overemphasized the supply side without a healthy discussion of incentives for institutional change at the micro level. (See, for instance, Timur Kuran. The Long Divergence. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011.) Nelly Hanna's Artisan Entrepreneurs attempts to rectify this imbalance by giving small actors, in this case, “artisan entrepreneurs,” agency in the changing economic environment of the early modern period.

What Hanna refers to as an “artisan entrepreneur” is a “small businessman whose activity went beyond his traditional craft activity and whose scope surpassed that of the ordinary artisan in terms of his working relations, the geographical sphere within which he worked, and the practice of various forms of money-earning activities related or unrelated to his craft.” (p. 55) Hanna uses a variety of qualitative evidence, mainly from court registers, to show that, besides their traditional craft, artisan entrepreneurs engaged in a variety of activities such as long-distance trade and tax farming and used the profits from these other activities to invest in their primary enterprise. The author focuses on two industries, linseed oil pressers and textiles. Later, Hanna argues that craft guilds displayed surprising sophistication by manipulating existing, traditional institutions—in this case guilds themselves and pious foundations, waqfs—and were able to achieve a great deal of capital accumulation. In this way, artisan entrepreneurship created “pockets of capitalism” and a fair degree of commercialization before the European penetration of the nineteenth century, not with the intervention of the political elite or the state but rather “from below” (p. 26).

This book is a useful addition to the general debate and a welcome corrective to accounts that stress faulty incentives without much evidence on specific actors. Unfortunately, the designation “artisan entrepreneur” is not as precise as one would like. Would these people be any different from merchants if they could also access crafts and industries? What barriers faced a “traditional” artisan who sought to become an “artisan entrepreneur? Hanna nonetheless succeeds in conveying their entrepreneurial skills and sophistication. Through the scattered pieces of evidence and vignettes, one can deduce that they operated almost Chandlerian enterprises, exploiting economies of scope if not scale. They used horizontal integration to incorporate activities that made use of their network of connections, especially trade; expanded into tax farming and the sphere of the political elite in order to raise capital for their workshops and increase their market share within their industry (even establishing monopolies); and vertically integrated to ensure steady flows of inputs. For instance, a family of linseed oil pressers used their alliances with the political elite to subordinate upstream guilds—in this case, seed and grain weighing (p. 142). Hanna dispels the illusion that artisans were not rational economic agents but falls into that very same trap by disengaging their various activities and asserting a sense of pathology on some of their traditional practices.

Perhaps the most compelling argument relates to the craft guilds in textiles and the degree of their sophistication. In a stark contrast to Kuran's depiction, they were able to accumulate and reinvest a great deal of capital through the manipulation of the pious foundation, the waqf, another institution Kuran bemoans as an impediment to economic development. Through this organizational innovation, these textile guilds were able to place their investment in perpetuity without the interference of the fragmenting nature of the Islamic inheritance law or untimely dissolution, which would have been exacerbated by the interaction of the inheritance law and the law of partnerships. Thus, they were far from the hapless victims of Islamic legal institutions. The fact that there existed venues for the development of sophisticated organizational forms comparable with those of Europe is an exceptional finding that needs to be assessed rigorously in future work. On the other hand, it is not obvious that the marriage of the guild and the guild waqf was a second-best solution to the inefficiency brought by the Islamic legal institutions. For instance, the increasingly hierarchical structure within these guilds Hanna notes (pp. 144–45) might be a symptom of the guild's monopoly power and rent-seeking structure, which itself is a point that Sheilagh Ogilvie (“‘Whatever Is, Is Right’? Economic Institutions in Pre-Industrial Europe.” Economic History Review 60, no. 4 [2007]: 649–84) makes regarding inefficiencies associated with guilds. Indeed, the persistence of such guilds might be due to the political economy within which they operated (especially the alliance between the guilds and the military, and its implied redistributing practices) as well as their innovations.

Ultimately, Hanna's evidence may not be enough to support the book's claims. By Hanna's admission, artisan entrepreneurship made up a small portion of the economy (p. 28) and it is not clear if these findings are particular to the two industries discussed throughout the book, let alone selection issues associated with using court records. Hanna notes that court records suggest some industries were more likely to have artisan entrepreneurs (p. 55). A systematic analysis of such variation can yield a better understanding of the constraints these businessmen faced. These reservations aside, Hanna presents a cogent picture of the early modern Egyptian economy. The author's use of micro-level data to assess the incentives of economic actors is a welcome addition, which will surely burgeon into a rigorous discussion on this subject.