Director's Series - New Books on the Middle East

In the decade preceding the British occupation (1882), Egypt was placed under international financial control, in the context of the debt crisis. European emissaries, diplomats and bankers conducted surveys with the aim of investigating the country's economic resources. Malak Labib's study takes these surveys as a starting point for a broader exploration of the history of statistics and quantification in Egypt in the era of the first financial globalization. Combining sources from Egyptian, British and French archives, Labib shows how the evaluation of public resources became a contested terrain where political struggles intersected with technical and scientific debates about measurement procedures. Her study offers a political history of public debt in Egypt and situates the Egyptian case within the global history of quantification.

Malak Labib is a social and economic historian of Egypt. She received her doctorate from Aix-Marseille University / Institut de Recherche et d'Etudes sur les Mondes Arabes et Musulmans (2015). Her doctoral dissertation examined the politics of public debt and statistics in late nineteenth and early twentieth century Egypt. Her current research interests focus on the global history of development as well as the trajectories of postcolonial state formation. She is currently a research associate at the Institut français d'archéologie orientale (IFAO) in Cairo and previously held a fellowship at the EUME program and the Freie Universität in Berlin.