The Fertile Crescent, 1800-1914: A Documentary Economic History

by Charles P. Issawi

This is the first comprehensive history and economic analysis of the Fertile Crescent during the 19th century, a region currently encompassing Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Jordan, and a small part of Turkey. Presenting 155 carefully selected documents--the majority drawn from British and French archives and here published for the first time, the balance translated from Arabic, French, German, Russian, Hebrew, Italian, and Turkish sources--Issawi provides an in-depth treatment of the economic life of the region, with chapters on social life and organization, trade, transport, agriculture, industry, and public and private finance. Including extensive cross-references that pinpoint the connections between the subjects discussed, the book is an invaluable resource on a historically rich and dynamic region.

520 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1988

About the author

Charles Philip Issawi was a prominent academic economist and historian of the Middle East at Columbia University and Princeton University in the United States. Roger Owen, the A. J. Meyer Professor of Middle East History at Harvard, stated that Issawi, "was the father of the study of the modern economic history of the Middle East." Issawi was born in 1916 in Cairo, Egypt, to Assyrian Orthodox Christian parents, studied at Victoria College in Alexandria, and read philosophy, politics, and economics at Magdalen College, Oxford. He worked for the Egyptian government from 1937-1943. Issawi taught at the American University of Beirut from 1943-47. He joined Columbia University in 1951 and became the Ragnar Nurkse Professor of Economics. He also was the director of the Near and Middle East Institute at Columbia. From 1975 until he retired in 1986, he was the Bayard E. Dodge Professor of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University. From 1987 to 1991, he was an adjunct professor of economics at New York University. He died on December 8, 2000 at the age of 84.