Joel Beinin. Workers and Thieves: Labor Movements and Popular Uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt; David De Vries. Strike Action and Nation Building: Labor Unrest in Palestine/Israel, 1899–1951.

Abstract

Joel Beinin’s Workers and Thieves: Labor Movements and Popular Uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt draws on his earlier seminal work (Beinin and Zachary Lockman, Workers on the Nile: Nationalism, Communism, Islam, and the Egyptian Working Class, 1882–1954 [1987]; Beinin, Workers and Peasants in the Modern Middle East [2001]; and Beinin, The Struggle for Worker Rights in Egypt [2010]), as he offers a comparative, events-driven history of workers’ movements in Tunisia and Egypt that uses the 2010–2011 revolutions as beginning and ending points. Tunisia and Egypt are not only the first sites of recent insurrections in Southwest Asia and North Africa, but also historical sites of working-class activism, a topic too rarely addressed in North American scholarship. Beinin shows both labor activists’ efforts to dissociate their actions from politics and the ineluctably political nature of labor activism. Labor protest appears as a claim for political inclusion in response to policies imposed from above.