Commodity communities: Interweavings of market cultures, consumption practices, and social power in Egypt, 1907--1961

This dissertation examines commodities and commerce in Egypt in the first half of the twentieth century as sites for the articulation of culture and political economy. It helps explain why commercial goods with relatively limited consumption could provoke widespread political action, such as the 1952 Cairo fire. I argue that the analytical tool of commodity communities---clusters of particular commodities as well as the social relations constituted around them---offers a more dynamic way to assess the social effects of changes in consumer goods than analyses of aggregate patterns of consumption.;I examine a broad range of commercial spaces to argue that the two "cities" of commerce in Cairo in this period were interwoven in terms of commercial practices, the movement of shoppers, and the histories of department stores. Salespeople acted as the physical and symbolic centerpoints for groups of specific merchandise and customers; a diverse group, they also helped create a distinctively liminal "cosmopolitan" and "modern" space within Egyptian commercial culture. This presents a new view of Egyptian cosmopolitanism under colonialism. Cloth (especially silkiness in natural silk, long-staple cotton, and artificial silk cloth) emerged in the interwar period both to knit together national community and mark boundaries within it. Shoes, in their "mirrored pairs," opened a mass consumption regime in the 1940s and 1950s; the conditions of their production and distribution in small workshops and large factories confounded an elite discourse about the teleology of "modernization," and social critics used shoes as a popular literary trope.;Change in economic and social spheres did not come as suddenly nor as decisively as many contemporary observers and later nationalist historians have argued. "New," "modern," and "European" commercial practices, consumption patterns, market cultures, and commodity forms remained deeply intertwined---and even dependent on---older, more "local," and "traditional" practices. This dissertation brings together material from a wide array of state, commercial, journalistic, film, and literary sources. By locating agency in commodities in addition to viewing them as representative of identities and social processes, I emphasize the relational and material aspects of power and the structured polyvalence of meaning in goods.