Sherene Seikaly has written an important and highly original book on the economic and business history of Palestine that readers of this journal ought to take notice of. Given that readers here might not be familiar with the historiography of Palestine, and that the book has already been reviewed in more specialized journals devoted to that literature, I will instead focus this review on what Seikaly’s book brings to the field of business history more broadly.

The thrust of the narrative that Seikaly presents is one of a Palestinian business community whose far-reaching aspirations were gradually quashed through wartime regulation and economic policies that disadvantaged them vis-à-vis a population of newly arrived Jewish settlers. In the first two chapters, arguably the richest in the book, the reader is treated to an in-depth analysis of Arabic-language periodicals and radio broadcasts, all of which highlighted the sense of optimism that the Palestinian business community exhibited about the future in the 1930s. Seikaly beautifully details the sense of excitement about Palestine’s broad economic horizons (which involved business communities from around the Arab world) and the new forms of economic subjecthood that seemed to be possible. At the same time, she is careful to mark out anxieties among both men and women surrounding how their engagement with the changing world of consumer goods could bring with it both material advancement and moral peril. On the whole, theirs was a sense of “economy” that had little, if anything, to do with politics and that marked off a business horizon similar to what one saw in interwar America and Europe (Victoria de Grazia’s work is appropriately invoked here).

By the middle of the book, however, this optimistic narrative begins to take a turn. With the onset of World War II and its attendant austerity measures (exemplified by the food controls and policies surrounding caloric consumption, which take up chapter 3), the possibilities that had defined the early 1930s began to close off, and the business horizons shrank dramatically. In chapter 4, Seikaly charts out how Palestinian businessmen, faced with restrictions on their activities, took to politics with gusto and mobilized chambers of commerce and other institutions to lobby for a position in an increasingly constrained economic arena. Although the economic notions of the 1930s did not disappear during this transition, they became anchored in discourses surrounding the Palestinian Bedouin, whom the businessmen reinvented as consumers being affected by the new measures. By chapter 5, it becomes clear that the Palestinians were fighting a losing battle, as wartime controls on the production and sale of vegetables began to pit Arabs and Jews against one another, and Palestinians were forced to contend with a regulatory environment that their Jewish counterparts chose to ignore altogether.

Seikaly’s study of Arab businessmen and their engagement with the mandate government in the 1930s and 1940s forcefully challenges trite narratives on the stagnancy of the Palestinian business landscape in the early twentieth century. At the same time, it spearheads a movement among Middle East historians, many of whom are returning to the study of business and political economy after some time away.^{Footnote 1} For readers of this journal, then, Seikaly’s book captures a turning point in the historiography on the Middle East and deserves attention if only for that reason.

Meanwhile, there exists another thread in the book that runs parallel to the story of Palestinian business communities. Throughout, Seikaly draws the reader’s attention to the process by which notions of “economy” were being produced—sometimes by the businessmen themselves, but more often by the British mandate government. The “economy” was an object that sometimes existed outside society (chapters 3–5) and at other times was woven into its very fabric (chapters 1 and 2), but it was always something that called for management. This is perhaps the less compelling analytic thread—not because it is unconvincing, but because it often feels forced. Drawing heavily on the work of Timothy Mitchell, Michel Foucault, and to a lesser extent Karl Polanyi, the analysis sits well on its own—particularly in chapter 3, where Seikaly makes deft use of the framework to dissect the political economy of the calorie. When brought together with the rest of the material, however, it can be stifling and distracting, forcing the reader’s attention away from the more textured picture she otherwise paints. Its analytic purchase, too, is perhaps less than compelling; it is not clear that the study of Palestine tells us any more about the production of “economy” than, say, Mitchell’s study on Egypt and other similar studies have.

For historians of Palestine there is no going back after Seikaly’s book; it has inverted the terms of the discussion and has done away with any hackneyed (and largely unsubstantiated) notions of an underdeveloped and “traditional” Arab economic sector in the pre-1948 years. In just 178 pages of engaging prose, she has raised the bar for serious engagement with the history of the Arab business community and flung open the gates in terms of thinking about possible sources for doing so. For business historians writ large, Seikaly has contributed a highly readable, engaging story of the aspirations and frustrations of a business community beset by political obstacles. She has opened up possibilities for what a business history in the Middle East might look like—and as other reviews of the book have pointed out, the businessmen and institutions she highlights go on to be consequential actors in the world of Israeli and Arab business more broadly. For those looking to include material on the Middle East in a survey of global business history, Seikaly’s book is indispensable.