This book is the result of research carried out at the Moshe Dayan Center for Middle Eastern and African Studies at Tel Aviv University. It was funded by the Sandra Glass Fellowship. I am grateful to Asher Susser, former director of the Center, for his assistance and to three reviewers for their valuable comments on drafts. Francois Crouzet and the late Paul Bairoch encouraged me to take a long, historical view of contemporary economic problems in the Arab world, and I am grateful to them for the time they spent with me discussing European and Middle Eastern economic history. My thanks to Scott Parris and his colleagues at Cambridge University Press for their encouragement and assistance and to Tammy Berkowitz, who provided vital technical assistance.

Some of the demographic material in Chapter 5 is based on an article published in the Middle East Review of International Affairs. Chapter 6 uses material published in an article in Orient. I am grateful to the editors of those journals for permission to use them.

My greatest debt is to my family, to whom this book is dedicated with love and thanks. Rosemary read and improved much of the text and produced the graphics; Ben assisted in producing the diagrams and coping with bilingual and two-directional software. Alex made many pertinent and thoughtful comments on contemporary economics. Thanks to my mother, Zena, who taught me to ask questions and to my parents-in-law, Brenda and Michael Josephs, for their interest in my work.