Introduction

This chapter explores the social, economic and political origins of the revolutionary process that toppled Ben Ali from power on 14 January 2011 in Tunisia and Hosni Mubarak on 11 February 2011 in Egypt. Their ouster shook the foundations of other regional autocracies. Unlike most commentary on the uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt, we focus on the role played by rural-social classes, peasants and the near landless.

Before December 2010, almost all observers who thought they knew the countries of the region and their various difficulties and problems were well aware of the risk of spontaneous or organised violent protest. There had been, for example, the bread riots in Tunisia in 1984 and protests in phosphate mines in the south of the country (Seddon 1986, 1, 14; Daoud 2011; Bachta 2011, 11). And there had been bread riots in Egypt in 1977 and among other demonstrations, working-class protests in the textiles towns north of Cairo from 2006 (Toth 1998, 76; Ireton 2013; Beinin 2011). Despite this, the events of late 2010 and early 2011 came as a surprise to almost everyone. This was because they were the culmination of long historical processes of struggles by the poor and disenfranchised that had often gone without notice. In Egypt the resistance of the peasants against the agrarian reform of 1992 led to their expropriation by landed interests of agrarian capitalism and the birth of movements of struggles for democracy, especially among the middle classes.