Angela Joya’s new book, The Roots of Revolt: A Political Economy of Egypt from Nasser to Mubarak, is a serious attempt at reframing the discussion on Egypt’s contemporary political history. In doing so, Joya adopts—much like in her earlier research—a neo-Marxian, class-based, and structuralist approach, which is predominantly in the tradition of David Harvey. The main argument that the book offers is that Egypt, throughout most of its post-independence life, has been a case of crisis-ridden capitalist transformation, rather representative of the Global South. Joya employs three powerful conceptual and analytical framings in explaining Egypt’s case: the chronic crisis of capital accumulation, the fragmentation of the capitalist class into competing factions based on the nature of their assets and international linkages, and the corresponding legitimacy crisis of state authority.

The structure of the book is true to the theoretical framework. Joya dedicates the first chapter to theory, relying heavily on Harvey’s thesis of accumulation by dispossession under neoliberal globalization. Joya pulls the study of Egypt away from area studies and all of its underlying assumptions of uniqueness, particularity, and sometimes outright orientalism. Instead, she casts Egypt in a broader light of a global capitalist order stricken with problems of accumulation and legitimation. Chapter 2 provides a detailed empirical historical background on Egypt’s political economy since political independence in the 1950s, depending primarily on secondary literature. Chapters 3, 4, and 5 explore and reconstruct the relations between what Joya portrays as the three dominant factions of the Egyptian capitalist class that came to dominate the scene since infitah in the mid-1970s and the ensuing neoliberal restructuring. Chapter 3 tackles at length the neoliberal big bourgeoisie that was so close to seizing the state during the last decade of Mubarak’s long reign. Chapter 4 focuses on the military as an economic actor and a faction of the capitalist class, which became increasingly more market oriented from the 1980s onward. Finally, chapter 5 engages with the Islamist faction of the bourgeoisie represented by the Brotherhood-affiliated businesspeople, among others, who managed to occupy influential market positions under Mubarak. The focus does not remain on the elites, though. Chapters 6 and 7 shift attention to the processes and actors emerging from below. First, the workers’ resistance to privatization, subsidy slashing, and social retrenchment; and second, peasant protest to changing property relations in the countryside in the wake of the reversal of land reform in the 1990s.

Joya’s book is primarily theoretical and conceptual. As indicated in her introduction, she leverages her past extensive fieldwork in Egypt combined with a comprehensive and critical engagement with the literature. In keeping with Harvey’s analysis, Egypt’s post-independence drive for economic development is cast in the light of continuous attempts at effecting capitalist transformation on a national scale. The newly founded independent state was therefore embedded in the heart of the earlier phase of state-led industrialization under Nasser. A form of populist authoritarianism allowed room for redistribution and the partial incorporation of workers and peasants (pp. 37–49). The rise and fall of Nasser’s developmentalist state and the class alliance it garnered corresponded to the shifting dynamics of the post–WWII global capitalist order and the Cold War. The state was as present and crucial in the market-driven phase that followed with Sadat’s launch of infitah, which unleashed dynamics that remained at work throughout most of Mubarak’s time in power. Once again, class relations in Egypt re-formed not just in relation to the state but also through economic, political, and ideational linkages with the neoliberal global capitalist order.

Joya provides an elegant and robust theoretical framework that emphasizes class as a critical category in understanding capitalist transformations. She shows that power is central in shaping and reshaping economic relations, no matter how liberal they might be, because state authority is sine qua non for (re)defining and upholding (or stripping) private property rights. In the meantime, the analysis does not fall prey to methodical nationalism, given the focus on the Egyptian state. The book is, instead, quite aware of the transnational characteristics of capitalism in a neoliberal age and the way class relations have become themselves quite transnationalized, given the role of capital flows, international trade, and supply chains—as well as the global financial markets and international development institutions and banks.

Additionally, Joya makes a well-grounded assault on political economy orthodoxy, which is largely derived from liberally inspired literature either on democratization (pp. 12–15) or neoliberal socioeconomic development. The book also demonstrates the limitations of the crony capitalism literature (pp. 10–12) that builds explicitly or implicitly on neoclassical institutionalism (before it was appropriated by some leftist critics of neoliberalism). Joya supports this critical literature review both theoretically and empirically. Consequently, she positions her work within the field as a left-leaning critique of an alternative to mainstream liberal political economy.

Despite the many strengths of the book, there appear to be three possible lacunae. The first is not confined to the book. It extends to structuralist analyses more generally and has to do with problems of agency. Although this issue is to some extent tackled in the chapters on the various capitalist factions in Egypt, it is less satisfactorily addressed with regard to workers and peasants. More thorough engagement with the social movement literature is needed. Dispossession and immiserating measures under Mubarak did not necessarily lead to revolt. As a matter of fact, the brunt of neoliberal reforms has heavily and consistently fallen on the rural areas, as rightly depicted by the author, without making the countryside the hotbed of resistance to the regime. It was urban actors who played the most influential role in challenging the Mubarak regime and ultimately bringing it down in 2011. This was not confined to public sector workers. It also extended to different segments of the middle classes as well as variegated groups of the urban poor, which make very little appearance in Joya’s analysis.

A second possible shortcoming is that of striking the right balance between global and national scales of analysis. Although Egypt is doubtless not exceptional compared to other cases in the Global South, much of its class relations have been shaped by national trajectories that are specific to it. What Jean-François Bayart calls “historicité” is crucial to understanding how the impact of neoliberalism as a complex of global forces was mediated by national historical trajectories—sociopolitically and institutionally. This is how Bayart explained diverging national paths of integration into the same neoliberal global order.

My third concern is more empirical than theoretical. Many of the cases of accumulation of dispossession in the book focused on the transfer of property relations using state power to dispossess workers and peasants and to confer these rights on a fledging capitalist class (chapters 6 and 7). Indeed, this has been the case with the privatization and divestiture of state-owned enterprises as well as the changing of property claims in the countryside and prime real-estate locations in major cities. However, very little mention is made of desert areas that constitute the bulk of state-owned land. These desert lands, often uninhabited, have been central to private and institutional capital accumulation (for the military, for instance) without containing any direct element of dispossession. I believe these cases should have been integrated into the overall framework.

To sum up, Joya’s book is an important contribution to the debate on Egypt’s political economy on the one hand, and capitalist transformation in the Global South on the other. Along with other scholars working in the tradition of David Harvey, the book brings critical political economy to Egypt. This adds strong comparative angles that are much needed. It also links internal and external dimensions of capitalist accumulation and exchange transcending the myopic focus on nation-states as isolated units of analysis. Moreover, it is a serious attempt at bringing back class analysis while innovatively adapting network and social movement categories in an attempt to bridge the structure-agency dichotomy.