Elite conflict, colonialism and democracy in the Middle East
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Welcome to the LSE Events podcast by the London School of Economics and Political Science. Get ready to hear from some of the most influential international figures in the social sciences.

All right, everyone. Welcome to LSE. My name is Eric Schneider and I'm a professor in the Economic History Department. Welcome to this public lecture. Before I introduce our speaker, I just want to go over a few rules of the game. So this is a hybrid event. It's being recorded, so keep that in mind when you're asking questions. You'll be on YouTube.

We also, actually it's not up right now, but if you do want to tweet or blue sky or whatever there is these days about this event, you can use the hashtag #LSEevents and that will come up. If I can ask everyone to please silence your phones so that we aren't interrupted during Mohammed's talk.

And then finally just a quick word about etiquette for questions. So once Mohammed's finished I'll take questions from the room and also we have people online so I'll kind of take some from online as well. It's really important that you wait for the microphone to reach you before you ask your question because otherwise other people and especially the people online won't be able to hear you. So make sure that you have the microphone and speak clearly into it.

For those online, you can use the Q&A function and I'll voice your questions for you. We always bring in questions from online, so please ask questions. All right, on to the main event. It's our pleasure today to have Professor Mohamed Saleh here, my colleague in the Economic History Department. Mohamed is a leading expert on the economic history of the Middle East and North Africa, and his research focuses on the political economy of the region.

He's written fascinating papers seeking to explain why Coptic Christians, for instance, tend to be a privileged minority in Egypt today. And in a really great paper, he's shown that this tax that Christians had in place from 641 to 1856 slowly led to the poorest Coptic Christians to convert to Islam, and therefore kind of explains these kind of differences that we see today in the socioeconomic status of

of Coptic Christians, really cool paper. In another paper he showed how cotton trade booms affect labor coercion and showing that they increase both slavery and coercion of the state of labor. So these papers are not only innovative because they focus on a region that's under kind of represented in economic history, but in the way that they're also innovative in the way that Muhammad uses Egypt and the Middle East

to help us understand the kind of core issues of political economy. And his work's been published in top economic history, economics, and political science journals. For me, I also have to say this as a historical demographer, Mohammed's made some really important data contributions, particularly to the field of historical demography, having transcribed samples from the 1848 and 1868 censuses of Egypt.

really cool. You should look at his website. He's got pictures of these these sentences. Obviously, I don't read Arabic, so it doesn't mean anything to me, but it's really cool that this data exists and that it's been made available to researchers to use. So it's a big contribution. And Mohammed has used that data to show, for instance, that there are kind of

differences in the number of children that different kinds of families have. So high socioeconomic status families in Egypt tend to have more children for two reasons. One is that high socioeconomic status men have more than one wife, and then also they tend to marry younger women, and so that leads to higher fertility. So that's my plug for that.

But tonight, Mohammed will discuss research that he's been conducting as part of a British Academy mid-career fellowship this year. And it really turns on a really important and thorny question, which is why has democracy struggled to take hold in the Middle East? And I think many of us will remember the protests of the Arab Spring in 2011. There was a lot of discussion about this particular topic. But I think what Mohammed is going to share with us tonight is that

this failure of democracy in the region has much deeper roots than what was going on in 2011. So Mohamed, over to you. Good evening everyone. Thanks a lot, Eric, for this very kind and generous introduction. Do you hear me well? Yes. Okay. It's a very great honor and pleasure to be standing here in front of you. So,

Basically what I will present today in this lecture is, as Eric said, is essentially part of this British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship project that I have been working on over the last, over this last academic year, on elite conflict, colonialism, and democracy in the Middle East. So of course, like when you mention democracy in the Middle East, like everyone will,

crown and as you all know the Middle East is ruled today by some of the most authoritarian regimes in the world. This is a fact, right? The purpose of this project is not to deny this fact. This is a well-known thing.

But why is this the case? There are many theories that try to explain essentially this persistence, so to speak, of authoritarianism in the region. Like why do we observe these highly persistent authoritarian regimes? Here I try to, I don't think this is a comprehensive list, but it's at least some of the most common causes or set of causes that are typically mentioned in this literature.

And it comes from various schools of thought. It comes from economic history, from institutional economics, and from older and more younger traditions in economic history and history as well. The first set of explanations is essentially about Islam. So they think of the Middle East more or less as equivalent to Islam. Okay, so that's the first step.

And then the second step is that they think of Islam as a set of institutions or a set of culture. A set of institutions, like think about, for example, the lack of separation between the secular sphere and the religious sphere. Religion and the state are quite intertwined in Islamic law.

You can think about the inefficiency of the Islamic legal system and why it leads to this authoritarian equilibrium. On the other hand, you can also the decentralization of Islam. They think of the religious institutions as being too decentralized that essentially leads to this sort of persistence.

Then there is also the explanation of Islam as a culture, meaning as a set of beliefs, as a set of values, as a set of attitudes of people. So maybe people have different beliefs about the world. They don't believe in the value of effort, for example, to achieve economic success. They rely on metaphysical factors. They are less reliant on materialistic factors.

So that's like one example of these attitudes.

The second set of explanations is about, that's an older or equally old, I should say, set of explanations that essentially talks about hydraulic civilizations. It's not about the Middle East at large. It's essentially about, you can think of the Fertile Crescent, the Nile Valley, and it goes beyond essentially like any river civilization. And the idea is that in these hydraulic civilizations,

You need coordination between people to essentially administer and manage the water, the scarce water resources, and this leads them to concede to a central power, a state.

So this big concession leads to this emergence of an absolutist state that has not only the monopoly over violence, which is like the traditional explanation or the traditional definition, I should say, of states, but more importantly that they also concede on their civil rights. They make many concessions essentially in order to get this coordination right.

coordination over water resources. The third set of explanations is coming from a different tradition. It comes from typically history and from more nationalist historiographies. And it talks about colonialism, not only nationalist historiographies, but of course like in the post-colonial historiographies and not only the nationalist, but more broadly you also see this explanation. So essentially the idea is that

The roots of authoritarianism has to do with colonialism and the type of regimes that were established and supported and installed in place by colonial authorities either under the direct colonialism or the direct colonial rule or afterwards.

The fourth explanation is about rentier economies. So for example, the idea here is that the state does not really need people to govern in the sense that they don't need people for revenues.

They are rentier economies in the sense that they rely on oil. They rely on foreign aid. They rely on remittances from abroad. And this leads these countries in the Middle East to be less reliant on taxation of their own citizens. And this leads to an interesting equilibrium in which the citizens essentially do not feel like there is... It's essentially the corollary of what you think about as taxing

the connection between representation and taxation. So if you don't have this connection, then people may not even demand democratization. So, of course, you know this picture, right? Like the Egyptian 2011 revolution, you can think of this as, this is Tahrir Square during the revolution. In many ways, until now, it's a failed revolution, so you might think that this is...

Reinforcing actually this narrative, right? Like it's a failed, it's again you see this is another failure. There are structural reasons for the persistence of authoritarianism that this revolution did not succeed in generating democracy. But the viewpoint of and what I'm trying to do in this project is to put this view under scrutiny.

So, historically in the interwar period, many countries in the Middle East actually had functioning parliaments. They had functioning parliaments with varying degrees of democracy. So they were not as full democracies, whatever that means, as you might think, you know, about the United States or the UK or France in most of its history. But

But they were not absolute authoritarian regimes either. They had functioning parliaments. These parliaments were sharing substantial, they had substantial share of power with monarchs. And this happened in, this was the case in countries like Egypt, in Syria, in Iraq, in Jordan. And this was, this is well known.

It may be less known that in the late 19th century the Ottoman Empire and Egypt produced vibrant and credible democratic movements. And these democratic movements, they varied in their degrees of success. In the Ottoman case, they had an early success and then they failed. In the Egyptian case, also more or less the same. But

Nevertheless, they had vibrant democratic movements that led to some sort of democratization. I think the bottom line and what I'm trying to persuade you with in this project is that no region is doomed to be authoritarian. History is about conflict and change.

There is nothing called fate or destiny in history. As economic historians, we don't think of the world in this way. History is totally about change and we need to understand change.

So what this project is trying to do is to study the details of the social conflict and democratization forces, whether they succeeded or failed in more depth. That we want to understand the reasons of failure and the reasons of success.

For example, one thing you would see, and maybe I don't know how many of you have seen this picture before. This is the exact same square, Tahrir Square, but during the 1919 Egyptian revolution. This is about 100 years earlier. They had more or less the same demands, but it was also anti-colonial movement, so it was pro-independence.

But more importantly, it was also very strongly pro-democratic movement. It was not only about colonialism, it was about democracy. This is a picture of the 1876 Ottoman constitution. This is just the cover page, the basic law or qanun-e-sasi. This was one of the earliest pro-democratic documents in the Middle East.

This is a painting of the Ottoman parliament in 1877. There were attempts essentially at building a democracy. This is a picture of the Egyptian parliament in the 1920s following the 1919 revolution.

So this project is trying to get at this in-depth study of social conflict and democratization, focusing on Egypt, which is one of the largest and most populous Middle East and North African countries from 1824 to 2020.

Throughout the talk today, I will try to show you why Egypt matters, why it's an interesting case. I view this as a step in an even bigger project in which I want to study other countries of the region, especially you can think of Greater Syria, the Levant, Iraq, and North Africa.

Egypt during this period passed through multiple episodes in the pre-colonial period from 1824 to 1822 to 1882, followed by British colonialism from 1882 to 1922. The 1919 revolution, which I've just shown you, resulted in a semi-constitutional monarchy between 1923 and 1952.

There was a military coup in 1952 which happened and was echoed in many other countries in the region. I think Iraq was the first leader in this respect and then many countries had these military coups. And this resulted in a military republic that more or less still governing until today except during the 2011 revolution for a couple of years and then they came back. The project relies on novel data.

which I digitized from primary sources. So these data are essentially the universe of members of parliament from Egypt from 1824 to 2020 and the parliamentary speeches in these two episodes in the pre-colonial period and then in the interwar period.

There are four papers in this project. The first paper is about democratization in the pre-colonial period from 1866 to 1882. This is currently a working paper. It's joined with Alison Hartnett at the University of Southern California. The second paper is about the colonial period, the colonial redistribution of political power, and this has been

published in the American Political Science Review this year, 2025, again joined with Allison. The third paper is about the post-colonial period, the redistribution of political power up until 2020, which is joined with Ruaida Mushrif at Paris School of Economics, who's here actually, and Allison Hartman.

And then the fourth paper is, for now it's a data paper, data documentation of the Egyptian parliamentary minutes from 1924 to 1952, which is joined with John Zang, who's also here from our department, and Jasser Ahmed, who's, I don't know if he's here, but he's also on the project. He's also at our department.

So what I will do during the rest of this talk is that I will try to, of course, too ambitious to give you all the details of all these papers, but I'll try to see how far I can go the best I can, and then I will conclude. So the first paper is about the pre-colonial period. It's titled The Other First Wave. So this paper starts from the idea that

There is this influential thesis in social sciences, in political science, and in economics that democratization happens when an economically rising elite that is at the same time politically marginalized demands power sharing with the incumbent elite. This is a very old thesis. Empirically, this thesis has been supported by empirical evidence from the so-called first wave industrializing autocracies.

in the 19th and early 20th century Europe. So you may be familiar with "No bourgeoisie, no democracy." This is a very well-known quotation by Barrington Moore. The idea is that in

Many of so-called first wave industrializing autocracies had this rising urban bourgeoisie, rising capitalist class that clashed and challenged the incumbent elite, which was the landed elite, the aristocracy. And this led to democratization, partial democratization, and then extension of the franchise and so on. But then...

The issue with this thesis is that agrarian autocracies, countries that do not have an urban bourgeoisie, countries that do not have an industrialist capitalist class in that sense, have been largely excluded from the theory generation and from empirical testing in first wave democratization.

However, this is, I would say, is an important omission. Why? Because there is a long history of rural power sharing and of eventual democratization in many modern agrarian autocracies. This happened in countries such as Greece, such as Denmark, and Chile. So our argument in this paper is that democratic shifts should be expected to occur

in both agrarian and industrializing autocracies alike. So it doesn't have to be an industrializing bourgeoisie under the following conditions. The first condition is that there has to be an economically rising capitalist elite. This capitalist elite emerges within the agrarian sector. So it's an agricultural capitalist class.

And it accumulates sufficient wealth that it becomes credibly engaged in an economic conflict with the incumbent elite. This economic conflict could be over factors of production, could be over inputs, labor and land. It could be over output markets. It could be over all other types of economic resources.

The argument goes is that this creates a latent desire by this rising elite, this disenfranchised elite, to instigate institutional reforms because they want to level the economic playing field with the incumbents. So they want equal access to factors of production, for example, or they want equal access to markets.

This latent desire would be translated into a demand for democratization when a favorable shift in the intra-elite balance of power occurs. So when the incumbent elite is weakened because of some shock, think about shocks such as wars, such as conquests, such as defaults, which I will be talking about,

And this creates this opportunity for the rising elite to actually pressure, credibly, the incumbent elite to concede power. Now you might think, okay, so how do we define democratization in this paper? What is democratization?

Following Dahl 1971, we think of democratization as including two sets of features. The first one is institutional democratization. So the idea is think of democracy as constitutions such as laws, procedures that widen the political participation

put executive constraints, parliamentary oversight, free and fair election, extension of the franchise. These are like the rules of the game, so to speak, that govern the relationship between the people and the state. But then there is a second feature of democratization that essentially defines liberal democracies, which are civil rights. These include freedom of expression, access to information, freedom of organization.

In this paper, we focus on the first aspect of democratization, institutional democratization. And the reason is that even in industrializing autocracies in Europe that democratized during this period, first wave democratic reforms generally favored the institutional features. And you even see this in much of the political economy literature. When they talk about democratization, they define it as extension of the franchise, for example.

or executive constraints, power sharing between the parliament and the king and so on. They talk less about civil rights. Sometimes they are silent in the sense that they take it for granted, or sometimes they are silent because it really didn't exist.

So this is a picture summarizing our argument. So you start from this economic conflict between the two elites, the incumbent and the rising elite, that leads to this latent demand for institutional reform, the economic reforms by the rising elite. Then you've got this shock to the intra-elite balance of power, which translates into demand for democratization or political reforms. So we test this argument in 19th century Egypt.

So to fix ideas, I know most of you may know nothing about Egypt during this period, so I'll try to go slowly over this just to make sure that people follow me. Between 1805 and 1882, which is like the pre-colonial period, Egypt was an autonomous Ottoman vassal state. So it was part of the Ottoman Empire, but it was a vassal state. It was quasi-independent.

And it was agrarian. There was a failed attempt at industrialization, state industrialization during the first half of the 19th century. It failed, but then throughout the 19th century you can think about it, especially in the second half as an agrarian economy. There were two elites. The top elite, the incumbent elite, is Ottoman Egyptian landed elite.

So this is essentially Ottoman-Egyptian because it was created by often intermarriage, often by creation of a new Egyptian landed elite class. And these were like the big landowners. Importantly, they controlled the cabinet. They controlled the executive branch of the government. The second tier rural elite, which is less known, is the rural middle class.

So the rural middle class are medium land owners, are village headmen and professionals in villages, in rural areas. And this controlled the parliament. Actually, the parliament was created for them to accommodate their interests. In the aftermath of the cotton boom that happened in the 1860s, right after or because of the U.S. Civil War, prices of cotton went up.

and Egypt, India and Brazil were major producers of cotton. So this created higher demand for land and labor by both the landed elites, I'll keep using these abbreviations, LE for the landed elite, RMC for the rural middle class, in the cotton productive areas. Because they wanted to cultivate, to expand on cotton cultivation. In 1876, a very important event happened, which is that Egypt defaulted on its foreign debt.

And our argument is that this weakened the landed elite, the Khedive, who's the Ottoman viceroy, and the landed elite vis-a-vis the rural middle class. It increased the relative bargaining power of the rural middle class. In 1879 to 1882, you have a series of events that form part of this democratic movement.

In 1879, a national manifesto is issued calling for the creation of a new basic law, a new constitution that essentially instigates parliamentary oversight and executive constraints. And this was followed by drafting basic and electoral laws, basic laws meaning constitution, that were eventually ratified by the Khedive in March 1882.

At the same time, apart from this legislative movement, which is less known, there was a well-known movement which is called the Arabi Revolution, the military movement. So this was a militant uprising against the Khedive that happened during this period.

In July 1882, the British occupation defeated the British Intervene. They defeated the uprising and then in 1883 they reversed most of the democratic gains that were made in the 1882 laws. In particular, they removed the parliamentary oversight.

So, okay, so I know that you are skeptical now. Like, did this really happen? Like, what are these demands for democratization? Was this really democratization and so on?

So this is a picture of the 1879 National Manifesto. It's in Arabic. This is the first page. In Arabic, it's called Al-Mahdar Al-Ahly. Here it says that it wants to essentially grant the parliament the full freedom and all rights in all domestic and fiscal affairs as is happening, as is the case in European countries, and that they want to...

essentially amend the basic law and the electoral law to be in line with what is going on in Europe. And they want essentially the cabinet to be totally accountable in front of the parliament. So essentially this national manifesto was signed by many people, this is just one page of the signatures,

And it led to, there are like three other pages of these, it was signed by many notables, essentially, many of the parliamentary members, not only MPs but also a wider set of people. The importance of this historical context, I would say, is manifold. The first thing is that the Egyptian case is very interesting because you observe a parliament long before colonization, okay?

And this provides us with this rare opportunity to understand and to actually observe and study the political attitudes of the pre-colonial domestic elites. So there is no hand waving here. We actually have evidence. We have documentary evidence on what these people said and what they drafted as laws.

The booms in primary exports, the cotton boom in the Egyptian case, this was actually a common thing that happened in many agrarian autocracies during the so-called first globalization era. It led to the rise of a rural middle class in the Egyptian case, also the negative shock to the landed elite's power, which is the default, leading to the rise of these democratic movements,

This is not only confined to Egypt. There are similarities and differences with 19th century democratic movements that happened in Turkey, happened in Tunisia, in Armenia, in Brazil, in Argentina, also with earlier democratization in countries in the so-called global north, such as Greece and Denmark. This is like a very, it's a recurring phenomenon.

So let me summarize what we have said so far. So the US Civil War cotton boom, Egypt's cotton production and exports quadrupled, Egypt transformed into an export cotton economy. This cotton boom led to a rise in the demand for labor and land by both the landed elite and the rural middle class. The landed elite had the state power, so they could coerce more peasantry to work on their large estates.

But this led to, it caused an artificial shortage, it caused a shortage in labor supply facing the rural middle class. So the rural middle class started to purchase more imported slaves from Sudan during this period. The second bit, apart from this rural elite conflict over land and labor, is the parliament.

Egypt had a long-standing parliament since 1824. It was created as a consultative body to help the executive. During the pre-colonial period, there are five cycles from 1824 to 1882. All MPs almost in the pre-colonial period belonged to the rural middle class. They were almost all village headmen, and this was by design. They were elected via secret ballot among all village headmen within the constituency.

The executive, however, was controlled by this Ottoman Egyptian landed elite. These were top military officers, provincial governors, members of the Khedive's family. So the Khedive, again, is the Ottoman viceroy. The third bit is the 1876 default and the legislative uprising. Egypt defaulted on its foreign debt in 1876. As a result, Britain and France assigned two foreign ministers on the Egyptian cabinet.

In 1879, the National Manifesto was issued calling for drafting new laws that should give Parliament oversight on the executive. And this resulted in the drafting of the 1879 and 1882 basic and electoral laws.

And these were eventually ratified, so they became laws. This is an equilibrium, it's not just a demand, right? It resulted in a document that was ratified as law in March 1882. At the same time, there was a military uprising led by Colonel Orabi, who himself was a son of a village headman. We're not studying this, we're not studying the military movement. This is outside the scope of this project.

But importantly that this movement was supported by a cross-class coalition. It was supported by the MPs, obviously, but not only the rural middle class. The uprising was eventually defeated by the British Army in July 1882. So these are pictures of the 1879 and 1882 basic laws. This is the first page of the 1879, the first draft of the basic law. It's handwritten because it was never ratified. The

One here is 1882 basic law. This one was ratified, so it's printed. It was actually printed as law.

So this is a timeline of the legislative history during this period between 1879 and 1882. So starting with Al-Mahdar Al-Ahli or the National Manifesto and ending with the Constitution or the basic law being approved by Parliament and ratified by the Qadith.

So how do we study the parliament, knowing that these drafts existed? How do we study the attitudes of these pre-colonial domestic elites? We rely on a novel source which is pre-colonial parliamentary minutes from 1866 to 1882.

These were recently published by the National Archives of Egypt from 2001 to 2017. We digitized all four volumes, extracted the MP speeches, and labeled the MP speeches based on two approaches. One approach is essentially based on the granular issue that we observe in the minutes, and the second approach is based on human coders. We call it issue-based and coder-based approaches.

In the first approach, we classified speeches into six general topics, and in the second, into 13 general topics. This is an example of the 1868 parliamentary minutes, parliamentary session. Again, you can see that this is printed because, as I said, it was published by the National Archives of Egypt.

We do also observe the members, the universe of members of parliament during this period from 1866 to 1882. We know their names, constituencies, occupation, honorific title, and so on. And this is an example from the 1870 to 1873 cycle showing the names. We have very detailed data on the name of each MP and their constituency and their occupation and so on.

So the first thing, like having this data is to show the evolution of the social class composition. So this is just confirming what we know from historical sources that the vast majority of the MPs during this period belong to the rural middle class. And you can see it here.

Now, how do we measure whether MPs demanded democratisation or not?

So we count the number of speeches that these MPs made under our both approaches, the issue-based topic labeling approach. So we look at their speeches under the basic and electoral laws, their discussions of the drafts of the 1879 and 1882 laws, and the Parliament management draft law.

And then under the coder-based topic labeling, we have these two labels, parliamentary oversight and parliament management. So the striking thing once we plot this chart is the rise in the discussions on what we call democratization, the cabinet-parliament relationship. The substantial rise in this category or in this label post the default.

So the default is here, we have two cycles before, we have two cycles afterwards. You can see that the first cycles, they were mainly talking about agriculture, they were talking about labor and land, but not about politics really. They were not talking about democratization. Democratization speeches happened only afterwards, after 1876. And we also observe the same thing when we do the coder-based topic labeling.

This is showing the word clouds. That's another approach to forget about our topic labeling. We look at the actual words that they talk about in the parliamentary minutes. And again, it confirms the same message. So between 1866-69, the first cycle, the top ten words, I translated them here, they are all about agriculture. Cotton, agriculture, and land. 1870-73, same thing.

1876 to '79, they start talking a bit more about parliament, especially towards the end after the issuance of the National Manifesto.

And then in 1881-82, you start to see the discussions, the words shifting towards words such as elections, such as parliament, such as constitution. And that's not surprising because most of these parliamentary minutes, they were talking about the drafts of the 1879 and 1882 laws.

So having documented that at the aggregate level, like now we can document at the aggregate level, we know that there was this rise in parliamentary demand for democratization. Then we try to say, okay, what does this have to do with elite conflict? So then we try to measure the elite conflict between the incumbent elite, the landed elite, and the rural middle class using cotton productivity in 1877, at the time of the default.

And this map shows you the variation in cotton productivity. So the delta in the north was much more fertile when it comes to cotton, much more productive, while the Nile Valley didn't have any cotton, at least during this early period.

So the main findings is that although the speeches on democratization by rural middle class MPs increased overall after 1876, we observe a much greater rise among rural middle class MPs from provinces with higher cotton productivity. These provinces, the cotton productive areas, had higher rise in democratization speeches.

Then you would argue, okay, is this really democratization? They are just talking about something that we don't really know what it is. So then we conducted a qualitative analysis comparing the basic and electoral laws drafts in 1866, 1879, the non-ratified version, and 1882. And then we do a qualitative analysis of MP speeches that are connected to these discussions of these drafts in 1879 and 1882.

So, for example, the percentage of eligible voters in 1866 was about 3% of the adult male population, the village headman only. In 1879 draft, it increased to about 15%. So that's a substantial rise. In 1882, there was a bit of compromise. So 1882 was always compromising in comparison to 1879. And it went down to 11%.

Parliament oversight, there is none in 1866. It was only a consultative body. In 1879, it was very clear that the parliament has legislative power over taxation, veto power. Any draft cannot become law without the parliament approval. If the parliament doesn't approve, the cabinet cannot come back with the same draft in the same session. They have to amend it and come back again in the following year, etc.,

1882, same as 1879 when it comes to Parliament oversight, but with one important concession, which is that the Parliament cannot have oversight on foreign loans and treaties. And this was essentially to reassure the European creditors, and especially the British and French creditors.

So this is an example from an MP speech in 1882. So it's a long one, I'm not going to read it all, but the main idea is essentially defending and advocating for the expansion of public mass education. And I like this statement a lot because it's possible for every patriot to contribute to society even if he has no other duties than to elect deputies.

So they had this notion of representative democracy, of parliamentary democracy. Then we say, okay, that's cotton. It's not about conflict of two elites over land and labor. We dig deeper. We show that it's actually the conflict over labor in particular rather than land that was a key driver of this conflict.

We also show that the MP demanded a wider set of reforms, not just democratization. They demanded capitalist economic reforms. So these were capitalists that would reduce the state monopoly over land and labor. Particularly, they were calling for more privatization of state land in agricultural areas.

less corvée, so they wanted to reduce the state coercion of labor and to expand on welfare expenditures. At the same time, they demanded more nationalist and I would say protectionist policies that would reduce European capital intervention in the economy. These are like the two bits. They were capitalist but at the same time protectionist nationalist.

Overall, in this paper, we show that this rise in the intra-elite economic conflict in agrarian autocracies can lead to democratization when there is this economically rising second-tier elite and a politically weakened incumbent elite.

Our view in this paper is that economic conflict may matter more than ideology. That's a statement that doesn't come directly from what we have shown because I didn't show you evidence on that ideology did not play a role. But what I have shown you, and this is what I... That's my viewpoint so far, is that...

These MPs, these village headmen were not necessarily progressive in the sense that they were, they themselves were slave owners for example, right? They were not progressive as liberals in that sense. But at the same time, the economic conflict led them to demand certain reforms that would level the economic playing field. So it's the economic interests that mattered here.

And we think that the existence of an assembly that is elected or selected independently of the state is very important because it facilitates this democratization from within the system. So one might argue, okay, without the military movement that was going on, these folks would not have been able to pressure the Kadif to ratify the constitution. However, without the MPs, without the parliament, there would have been no draft constitution.

So that's why we think that this legislative history is extremely important because it gets at this institutional democratization view. So in the remaining time, I will just give you more brief view, like just a summary essentially of these two other papers. So this paper on the colonial redistribution, as I said, this has been published in the American Political Science Review. I'd love you to read it.

It's essentially about colonialism and the persistence or lack thereof of pre-colonial institutions. So there is a large literature showing that indirect colonial rule in general is associated with persistent pre-colonial paradigm and pre-colonial institutions, as opposed to direct colonial rule or settler colonialism, which essentially create new institutions and so on.

And this is especially the case in places with highly centralized pre-colonial states. So they leave everything as is and then the pre-colonial system kind of continues.

However, there is substantial evidence from case studies in history and in political science that show that indirect rule can actually introduce profound changes to the power structure even if on the surface it leaves a pre-colonial institution as is. So we need to distinguish between the pre-colonial institution

as an aggregate and the elites, the actual people that populated these institutions. So in this paper our argument is essentially applying and expanding on insights from the literature on power sharing in authoritarian regimes to colonial indirect rule. So we think of colonialism as a subtype of authoritarian rule and under indirect rule

So this is essentially the idea that colonialism, you can think about it really at the core that this is a foreign dictator. And as foreign dictatorship, the colonizer shares power with pre-colonial elites and that happens more under indirect rule, hence the name indirect, it's by definition. So such power sharing arrangements are institutionalized using these pre-colonial institutions.

Why do they do that? In this literature on authoritarianism and power sharing, they say it's because they want to reduce, to mitigate the threat of revolt, the threat of rebellion by these elites. So the dictator essentially wants to co-opt the elites and they share power with them to mitigate the threat of revolt. So we can think of a similar strategy in the colonial rule. So essentially the indirect colonizers would redistribute political power

within the national level pre-colonial institutions. However, this literature, the authoritarian literature, is essentially silent on the question of heterogeneity of elites. They are talking about elites as a unified elite. So the dictator is facing some elites that are unified. They are not different from one another.

In our case, we think that it's very important to distinguish between different social classes of these domestic elites that the colonizer was facing. And our argument is that the colonizer would shift power toward the pre-colonial elite that is most congruent with the colonizer's strategic objectives. Congruence, elite congruence, can be essentially in the political sense, in the sense of the elite that has the lowest threat of revolt,

And it can be in the strategic sense, in the economic sense, the elite that is most capable of achieving the colonizers economic objectives. So in this paper we build on what we have done in the first paper and we study how the British colonial rule redistributed power between these two classes of the domestic elite, right? Between the landed elite and the rural middle class.

within the national level pre-colonial institution, which is the parliament. So we look at the class composition of MPs after the British occupation. So remember, before the British occupation, most MPs belonged to the rural middle class, right? And I said that was by construction from 1866 and even from 1824. So we use the parliamentary members' data set, and this is what we see. We see essentially a substantial shift

From the rural middle class, you see a punishment, a reduction of the share of the rural middle class following the British occupation. Instead, the share of the landed elite, that used to be the incumbent elite, it increased substantially over time.

So that's the paper in a nutshell. And then we also show that this shift, this expansion of the, or this shift away from the rural middle class towards the landed elite was bigger in the cotton areas.

Why cotton areas? Because not only because of the rural elite conflict that we showed in the first paper, but also because the cotton areas were the most exposed to the colonial objectives. These were the revenue generating, the economic surplus generating provinces, and so it was very important from the viewpoint of the British who wanted to recoup their debt, the loans they gave to Egypt, that they focused essentially on cotton areas.

So, interestingly, there are multiple tools that the British used. We look at the dynastic and MP persistence. We show that after 1882, you start to see higher persistence of MPs and of dynasties. The British created an upper house. Maybe that's not surprising. So they created something like House of Lords. And the Khedive would now appoint 50% of MPs in the upper house for life.

So essentially this persistence, big part of it is because of this. It was by design, essentially. They were there for life. And after they die, their son usually followed them. And they typically belong to the landed elite.

Then we dig deeper again to the mechanisms. We look at the political and economic congruence. We find that the political congruence of the landed elite was very important. Importantly, they enabled the British colonial regime to survive until the eruption of the 1919 anti-colonial revolution.

But importantly, I would say more important than this is that the economic congruence promoted the British goal of maximizing economic surplus. This economic congruence was that the landed elite were pro-les-sé-faire policy. And this essentially resulted in the British recouping all the outstanding debt by World War I. So essentially it was mission accomplished in a way.

So we argue that it's very important to disaggregate the social forces in both pre-colonial and colonial societies. And essentially the role of the colonial

in re-engineering the domestic politics should not be overlooked. This effort undermined the economic and political power of the rising elites and it changed fundamentally the status quo. So even if on the surface it appears you look that the parliament remained, everything remained so it looked like persistence, but in reality there is no persistence.

The final bit, the final paper I would like to summarize here is about the post-colonial period, like focusing on the 20th century. So here we look at like 60 years later or 70 years later at the mid-20th century, and we look at what happened after the land reforms, after the military coup that occurred in 1952 and the subsequent land reforms.

These were very important tools, redistributive tools in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. And their main goal was quite explicit, to weaken the economic power of the colonial era landed elite. There is a growing literature on their economic effects, on economic effects on productivity, for example, and so on. But the political effects are somewhat understudied. There are some papers, but not big literature.

And these land reforms were quite common, especially by these revolutionary regimes seeking legitimacy, right? Like they were revolutionary regimes in the sense that the land reform here happened from outside the system. It was not happening structurally from within the incumbent system. So in this paper, we look at the political turnover, which is the probability of an incumbent winning the seat in the next parliamentary cycle.

We think that land reform can affect this turnover through various mechanisms. To summarize, it's essentially whether the, like you can think that the land expropriation would weaken the landed elite and this landed elite would have less chance in getting into parliament. At the same time, the redistribution would probably create new beneficiaries and these beneficiaries may themselves, like in a very optimistic world, may themselves become MPs one day. Okay?

So we ask how the land reform affected political turnover, how it affected this at the individual level, at the political family level, and how did it affect the share of dynastic politicians, the politicians that belong to a dynasty. A dynasty is essentially a family that has at least two MPs in parliament throughout its history. So it's producing MPs.

So we study these questions in Egypt's land reform from 1952 to 1961, in the aftermath of the 1952 Free Officers Movement. These are main milestones. I'm going to skip that for the sake of time. The important bit here is in 1952, there was an element of expropriation. So land ownership ceiling was set at 200 fedans, about 84 hectares.

And then there was an element of redistribution which was not immediate, right? So the beneficiaries would get full property rights only after full payment. And in the meantime, they were automatically enrolled in cooperatives.

Same data source, but now we look until 2020. We look at cyclical turnover, meaning from cycle to cycle, whether the MP has served in the previous cycle or not. And then we also look at entry rates at the MP level and at the family level, like what

like the proportion of people who are totally new entrants, they have never served before, or they belong to families that have never produced an MP before. So these are like the entry rates, which is probably a better measure of competitiveness. So this is showing the same map, but now showing the land reform intensity, essentially, the proportion of land that was expropriated or confiscated.

And some interesting things to see here, when you look at the MP turnover at the MP level, so of course the maximum you can get is 100%. So that's like, the universal is 100%. So this is essentially if the MP did not serve in the previous cycle, the blue line, so that's the cyclical turnover. The green line is the entry rate, the proportion of MPs who never served before.

So they could deviate as what happened before 1952 here when MPs play essentially musical chairs. They are away for one cycle and then they come back. So then you will have a high level of cyclical turnover because the MP did not serve in the immediate previous cycle, but they served the cycle before that. So that's why you get this deviation between relatively modest entry rate but very high cyclical turnover in the pre-colonial period.

Sorry, in the pre-post-colonial period. And then in 1952, you start to see this spike. Almost 100% of MPs didn't serve in the previous cycle, and they were also new entrants. So essentially, it created this entirely new parliament. Same phenomenon happened here, which is not surprising, in 1924 after the 1919 revolution. So it's like a new regime coming in.

If you look at family turnover, okay, then the story is not as exciting in a way because you see much more modest entry rates. Okay, so the entry rates here are about 20% in the pre-1952 period. After 1952, they increased a bit.

but remained quite modest. So essentially, at the family level, everything is tuned down in a way. It's not as impressive as it might look like when you look at the MP level. And even in the very first parliament in 1956, in which they reshuffled everything, only 40% of families were new entrants.

So they brought new MPs, yes, almost 100% new, but 60% of them roughly were coming from same families that existed before. Here we do a decomposition by the era of the founder of the dynasties. The important thing to observe is that we see an interesting phenomenon, which is the non-dynastic MPs here. So these are MPs that do not belong to a family, meaning that it's a family that has only single MPs.

And all the ones below are dynastic MPs. These are MPs that belong to dynasties. And they are classified by era. So the red one, these are the pre-colonial dynasties. The orange one is the colonial ones. You see, for example, in the paper I've shown you before, this rise in the colonial dynasties. So these are dynasties that were created in the colonial era.

meaning the first MP started in the colonial era. And then you see the 1919 revolution elite here. These are the purple line, the purple color. And then the post-1952 elites. So the post-1952, you start to see also new dynasties. So I am...

Essentially, like what we do afterwards is that we try to link that to the land reform. We find the positive effect of the land reform on cyclical turnover. So essentially the land reform had, like it led to some increase in cyclical turnover in many post-1952 cycles, but no effect on entry rate. And we find some interestingly negative effect on the share of non-dynastic MPs.

Which is quite puzzling, like that's not what you would expect. And essentially we say that, we argue that what happened is that the share of non-dynastic MPs increased overall after 1952, but interestingly this rise was not tied to the land reform. The rise of the non-dynastic MPs happened in areas that were less

confiscated that witnessed less land reform. Instead, in the areas with high land reform, what happened was a replacement of the dynastic MPs that belonged to the pre-1952 era with new post-1952 dynasties rather than post-1952 single MP. So the new guys that replaced them are not actually single MP families. They founded their own dynasties afterwards.

So to conclude, I think these are some thoughts I have for now for this project. Parliamentary democracies can emerge in agrarian autocracies due to the social conflict between elites. However, it's very important to emphasize that although in this project we looked at capitalist-led movements or parliamentary democracies that are because of a capitalist elite,

Future study requires deeper analysis of the workers and peasants mobilization movements behind democratization, especially in 1919 revolution, for example. There was a lot of that happening, and that's why it requires a different type of study.

By construction, colonialism as a foreign dictatorship disrupts the domestic social conflict. So this is like something that has to be understood that this is by construction. This is, otherwise there is no military occupation, right? At the end, at the core, colonialism means military occupation. So military occupation means a disruption of the distribution of power, no matter how they leave things as is or whatever, but they disrupt it just because of their presence, right?

Post-colonial states created parliamentary democracies, and here I'm talking about the 1919 revolution, that these democracies were unstable. Remember the musical chairs example that I gave you? So they had cyclical turnover but low entry rates. Post-colonial military coups, which were led by the middle class, established domestic dictatorships. So they replaced the foreign dictatorship with a domestic one.

And I finish this by saying that there is probably a narrow corridor for democracy when neither elite, neither the incumbent elite and the rising elite is capable of completely disenfranchising the other. Because once one of the two elites is capable of totally winning, then they are more likely to establish dictatorships rather than democracies. And I stop here and I thank you very much.

Well, thanks very much, Mohammed. I forgot to mention one thing before people leave, which is that there's going to be a reception afterwards with free wine and food. So if you would like to join us, please feel free to. It's going to be on the fifth floor of this building, so you'll need to kind of make your way probably up the stairs or in the very slow lifts. But we'll do that after we take a few questions from the audience. So can I ask you, are there any questions? Patrick, here in the center. Thank you.

Thank you, Mohammed. Patrick Wallace, I'm one of Mohammed's colleagues in the department. You draw a contrast between economic interests and ideology, and you kind of questioned ideology as one of the things that might be driving people to be pushing for democracy. But you also mentioned this latent desire

for democracy. And I just wondered, does some of that latent desire include a kind of an ideology, even if it's not a kind of classical ideology, but a kind of more simple ideology about enfranchisement and perhaps what it is to be a property holder, to be a participant in kind of local power that maybe allows you to claim legitimately an entitlement to a kind of broader political voice. So I just wondered,

Is there a way in which this is not just about, you know, I'm not going to argue that you understand this, right? But is there perhaps a space for ideology in here that we also need to recognize as having some significance? Yeah, go ahead. Thank you, Patrick. That's a great question. I think, so certainly, the short answer is certainly. I'm not denying that ideology plays a role. Actually, the institutional reforms that we

documented are about ideologies. We're talking about capitalist reforms, we're talking about nationalist reforms that certainly include element of ideology. You see it even in the speeches. The example of the speech that I gave you here shows this ideology in a certain sense, like this liberal or

calling for mass education to educate people and make them allowed to vote in a way. So certainly, I think what I had in mind instead is not questioning whether ideology mattered. It's a question of what drives ideology to begin with.

And I'm not saying that what drives ideology necessarily means that ideology is just self-serving or it's not genuine ideology. I don't think anyone, even the people, the individuals themselves would know if they are genuine believers in the ideology or not, or it's self-serving. So that, I think, is not an important question, or at least this distinction, at least for us as social scientists.

But the important thing is what drives this ideology. So in my view, what drives the ideology is the economic interest. And this creates essentially an ideology that is observed in these demands for democratization and in other institutional reforms. So that would be my... We can go here. Thank you.

Thank you. That was a really interesting talk and I liked a lot about what you said about the rising elite, you know, wanting to create institutions that, you know, help level that economic playing field for them. I wondered if you considered your theory in the reverse in terms of what happens when the incumbent elite

senses it is losing power and gets desperate to hold on to it, whether by democratic backsliding or by civil conflict. Obviously we've seen dynamics like that in the civil wars in the Balkans, to an extent in Lebanon and

Iraq. So I was wondering, you know, there's a lot of democratic theorists who talk about that now and warn about, you know, the U.S. I was wondering what is your view on that process of things when the incumbent elite doesn't agree to let go of power and resorts to extreme methods to retain it? Yeah, so that's a great question. And so there are, so let me start by saying that

Much of the literature actually on democratization and the conflict that leads to democratization is talking about the concessionary democratization, meaning it's the incumbents that democratize, that make concessions to the rising elite in order to preempt

a civil war or a rebellion or a successful rebellion. So they sense essentially that they are losing anyways, and then they make these concessions to democratize, right? Or to co-opt essentially the rising elites.

The literature, however, is, and this is just because of its game theoretic nature, I think, it's a bit silent about the question of successful rebellions or what happens if, like, yeah, so essentially the elites cannot predict the success of a rebellion, a success of the elite coup or a rebellion, that they are actually forced to leave power.

There is some intuition, however, to the middle point that I guess you have in mind, which is essentially what happens when you have a military, not necessarily a military coup, but an elite coup or an elite rebellion, and that the incumbent elite, instead of making concessions, they decide to fight nevertheless. Some of this intuition has to do, for example, with the nature of assets that the incumbent elites had. So, for example, there is a paper that shows that

when the incumbent elites had more non-movable assets, so they had land and so on, that this is less movable, they cannot run away with it. So the lack of capital flight or the immobility of capital or the immobility of assets of these elites make them more like resistance, right? They don't want to give up power at all because they know that if they give up power, they will lose everything.

As opposed to elites who have more movable assets, like you can think of capitalists versus landowners, essentially. And they are more likely, essentially, to give up power. So this is like we have some examples of that in the literature. But again, my view on this is that there are many pathways, essentially, and many paths.

equilibria that could emerge it doesn't have to be a successful one is successful revolt one is concessions from the top one is fighting all the way and then essentially leading to unpredictable outcomes afterwards oh yes here in the back um the gentleman in the front and then we can go back in a second oh oh um yeah well okay

Hi, thank you for the talk. Considering this, do you think that democracy is a necessity for progress in an agrarian society where likely the possible electorate will be uninformed or do you think that the only way to get through this stage is through democracy? Do you think it's necessary when it's not always beneficial?

Shall I reply or take it? Yeah, yeah. So that's a difficult question, I guess. I think it's-- so this has been-- there is a huge debate about this, whether democracy is necessary for growth even in non-agrarian economies, even in industrialist economies.

I think in the strict sense, it depends on I think that it is the distributional effects that matter more than the economic growth by itself. Right. So maybe even if it's not clear or it's not obvious all the time that democracy would lead to higher economic growth.

the distributional effects of democracy are somewhat less deniable, right? So that it leads to more egalitarian sharing of economic resources to some extent. Just because of the fact that you enfranchise people, you give them the voting power, even if, as this MP said, even if the guy has no other duty but just to elect deputies, still this gives them some power of some sort, even if they are landless farmers.

So this can lead to some form of redistribution so the distribution effects are quite important I would say. Thank you Dr. Saleh. So the question is about, I mean when you spoke about the land reforms and the differences between post the land reforms, what is the turnover that is seen in family MPs, right?

You know, especially in areas with high percentage of land reform, you said that even though there was a change, but I mean, there was not a turnover was very less, right? I would like to know, you know, is it because of the lack of economic diversity in those regions, which prevents new elites from emerging or contesting, you know, to stand up against the dynastic MPs who are already in place?

Is it something to do with that or is it about the culture, the political culture of those regions meaning the understanding is if those regions were subjected to more reforms which means

Previously it might be one of the most unequal societies. So there is a political culture which is there, so some sort of a messianic sort of an expectation from a leader. So is that sort of contributing to this sort of a very uncomfortable stasis? Thank you, that's a great question. I think I... Short answer, I do not know the answer yet, and part of the reason is that because this last paper is... we're still working on this part, okay?

But the answers we have in mind based on the historical evidence is precisely what you mentioned. So there are like some structural reasons, some structural characteristics of these constituencies even in the pre-reform era that made them more prone to

this elite entrenchment, essentially. You have like this strong elites emerging because of maybe the lack of diversity, as you said, of the sectoral distribution, essentially, in the economy is pretty reliant on agriculture. Or it could be something about culture of clientelism, essentially. And this has been documented,

and even today in parliamentary elections in Egypt and the Middle East, that all of the dynasties, the big families, you have these districts governed by big families for centuries, and they are known as the kings, essentially, in their constituencies, and they remain never, it doesn't matter, they were socialists in some periods, they were capitalists, they were whatever, but they always remain the same people.

So these are the areas we're exploring, but I'm not able to yet tell you an exact answer as to which one seems to be mattering more.

It's interesting because we see some of these characteristics in southern India, especially in the deltaic regions where, as you just said, the ruling elite can be, in some period of time they are communists and in some period of time they are entrepreneurs and sometimes they are very speculative capitalists, but the family persists no matter what. Thank you.

okay i think i'm gonna take a question from online if that's okay um so this is uh um just do you feel that colonialism is the prevailing theory for why democracy hasn't succeeded in the middle east referring to those four theories that you talked about at the start uh so here i i would be careful about this point because i think it partially played a role for sure

in the example, in the historical case studies that we have seen, like how the British occupation essentially disrupted this elite conflict that was going on. It changed the structure, essentially, of the conflict, and it shifted power towards one of the two elites. However, the reason I'm cautious to not push this argument far is because we do not observe the counterfactual under which the rural middle class would have won.

So we don't know what would have happened if the Arabi movement, the military movement in particular, was completely successful and they managed to, because they were actually winning the war, that's the reason the British intervened, because they were winning. And that's the reason why the Khedive also ratified this law, because he was under military pressure. So...

would they have established a democracy with the landed elite or would they have established a dictatorship of the rural middle class? So that's a big question. We don't know the answer. We will never know the answer. And that's why I would say yes, colonialism played a role for sure.

But I don't think that in the absence of colonialism, it's not clear that you would have ended up with democracy. And that's why I mentioned in the end, at least that's where my thinking is heading now, is that there is this narrow corridor, essentially, where the two elites are both strong enough, sufficiently strong, but they are not too strong. Because if one of them is too strong, I think you are likely to get dictatorship. All right, any other questions? Let's go to the gentleman in the back there.

Thank you, Dr. Saleh, for such an excellent lecture. My question basically is sort of diverse a little bit. From the subtitle, it says, why has democracy struggled to thrive in the global south? My question would be, why has the rule of law struggled to thrive in the global south? Because I'm from Nigeria, and a lot of what you said is of great relevance, but I always...

saw the problem as illiberal democracy is what spreads in the global south. You could argue that's what's happening in the US right now. And does your research touch on that as an important factor? Because I look at, in Nigeria, a lot of, there's a trend now, a lot of intellectuals look towards Singapore as a standard. And what made Singapore to move from the

Third world to the first world was basically a rule of law that was established over like 30, 40 years. And that should be like a prerequisite before democracy. Because what we have in a lot of places is non-democratic practices hidden beneath a veneer of democratic institutions.

So does your research touch on that? Thank you very much. It's a very deep question and I would say it's... So this has to do, I think, with this distinction between institutional features and civil rights features of democracy. I would say when you look at 19th century or the first wave democracies, even in the global north or in industrializing countries,

The rule of law actually emerged not from, like, not giving the civil, the same rights to the peasantry, for example, in comparison to the king. This didn't happen initially this way. What happened was, I think, the balance of power, the checks and balances in particular, between two factions of the elite.

And these two factions of the elite actually, because of their fighting, they agree on at least applying a systematic, a universal rule of law, at least among themselves. But that they agree that if one of them is in power, they apply law on the one that is not in power and vice versa. So that within the elites, at least you have this rule of law.

And then it expanded from there. You can think of the extension of the franchise and the expansion of the legal system to cover the wider population from there. And that's why I think the

on constitutions and the emphasis on the executive constraints and checks and balances in particular are very, very important because that's what essentially would eventually bring rule of law. Thank you very much. I wanted to ask if you've looked at Kuwait. Kuwait has the

arguably the most vocal parliament in the region as a bit of a parliamentary landlocked. My understanding that's more of a merchant class dominated elite. I'm not that well versed in the history of it. And then I was just keen on maybe I missed that point with the agrarian land reform because you said the Nassau has a free

officers who was, well, that regime was mostly supported by the middle class. I was just wondering if the redistribution of land to landless farmers did kind of expand support for that regime within the sort of previously landless classes. Thank you.

Yeah, so thank you very much. So on the first point, actually a dear friend of mine, Daniel Tavana, a political scientist, has worked, he has a paper at the American Journal of Political Science about the Kuwaiti parliament in particular and the Kuwaiti politics. I haven't studied Kuwait myself, but my understanding is that there is this yesterday, this important intra-elite kind of politics

conflicts and different factions that are voiced in the parliament. So it's actually for those who do not know Kuwait has interestingly one of the most vibrant or to some extent vibrant democracies or vibrant parliaments, at least power sharing among elites in the Middle East. So that's what I can say about the first point. I do not want to delve more into an area that I do not know that much. On the second point, yes, so the

One thing I haven't talked about is middle class, the rural middle class during the land reforms. And our initial results suggested actually the land reform because it targeted by design the top land owners. The biggest beneficiaries of the land reform were not the people at the bottom. They were actually the ones right below the land, the big land owners. Because these ones were not targeted, they did not have

such big amounts of land that they would be targeted and they were not part of the king's family and so on. But these ones are actually, in my reading of the history, these are the ones who replaced the landed elites. So it's essentially a revival of the rural middle class. It was a coup supported at least by the rural middle class.

And there is a book by Binder at UCLA who essentially has this book about Egypt's second stratum, so the rural middle class as supporter of the military coup in 1952.

I know we have a number of questions left, but I'm afraid I'm going to go to the online questions for our final question today. For a kind of a big question, but the question is under what conditions do you think a country like Egypt could move toward democracy in the present day? What does your research tell us? Do we need to foster inter-elite conflict in Egypt today in order to get toward democracy in the future? What do you think?

- Yeah, that's a difficult one. I guess it's, yes, I think the main point in my view is you need to have this genuine, in my view, because I'm more materialist, more like economic interest based interest in democracy that is translated into ideologies as I was discussing with Patrick.

And this push essentially has to be genuine, has to be that this elite is not fully co-opted by the incumbent elite. The reason Egypt is a dictatorship today is that

the incumbent elite is capable of co-opting the main elements of the, let's say, the big capitalists, the big businessmen and so on, who are capable of essentially challenging this incumbent elite. But for now, their interest is with the army, right? Is with the incumbent elite. And hence, you don't have democracy. So whether you can have like a divergence of interest, I doubt, but maybe different class of people like the,

like maybe the second tier capitalists, I would say. That's what I think. Well, thank you very much, Mohamed. Thank you for listening. You can subscribe to the LSE Events podcast on your favorite podcast app and help other listeners discover us by leaving a review. Visit lse.ac.uk forward slash events to find out what's on next. We hope you join us at another LSE event soon.