Traditionally renowned for their dislike of settling outside their own country, the Egyptians started to become active emigrants in the early sixties. In noting this fact we do not, of course, mean to imply that Egyptian emigration has never taken place. There are reports that quite a few peasants emigrated from Egypt to the Levant to escape from Muhammad 'Ali's tyranny in the nineteenth century, while more recently, several thousand Egyptians emigrated around the period of the First World War to Iraq, Turkey, Greece, and France.

One of the most dramatic developments in the social structures of third-world societies in the post-World War II era has been the expanding role of the state. While the extent and precise form of the state's involvement in economic, political, and social activities has varied from place to place, the trend toward a more important role for the state has been pervasive and the basic pattern in which this role has expanded seems to have been repeated in nation after nation. As a result, a growing number of scholars have begun to speak of a generalized form of political/economic organization in the third world—state capitalism. They seem to agree on a number of characteristics of state capitalism at the descriptive/ empirical level.

While the literature on ideology is long-standing and considerable, it is also very controversial. On the one hand, the term ideology remains in such poor repute that many authors apologize for using it or substitute other words or expressions. On the other, many scholars employ the term without definition as though its meaning was well understood.

This paper is an attempt to show how the economy and society of rural Iraq was affected by a combination of changing world economic circumstances and structural innovations in the pattern of land tenure. Iraq's gradual incorporation into the world market in the latter part of the nineteenth century was assisted by the application of the legislative and military reforms of the Tanzimat, which served generally to extend the powers of the Ottoman state over its provinces. Although the effects of the application of the new system were less direct than the Ittomans desited, it did set in motion a gradual process of detribalisation, which tended to reduce the powers of tribal shaikhs and promote the emergence of private prooerty in land.

By resolution of the ruling Command Council on 19 March 1977, a new judicial organization known as the niyāba (formal name: al-niyāba al-'āmma) was introduced in the Yemen Arab Republic. Derived ultimately from a French model, the new institution has been provided with wide statutory powers, many of which are new to Yemen. Essentially, the niyāba is an agency of investigation and prosecution, with jurisdiction in criminal cases and other areas of “public” rights, It has responsibilities also in family law, especially in cases involving the dissolution of marriage and the protection of minors. In addition, the niyāba has authority over the “officials of judicial enforcement,” and it is charged with the oversight of jails. Although the niyāba's institutional ancestry is traceable to the French ministère public (or parquet), the transfer of the European institution to Yemeni soil was not direct, since Yemeni legislators modelled their niyāba on an Egyptian legal organ of the same name. The Egyptian niyāba was instituted in 1876 as a copy of the ministère public, but evolved considerably since its introduction there (Hill, 1979). The arrival of the niyāba in Yemen thus was mediated by an interval of one hundred years of development outside of France.

Scholars who have conducted research on the different peoples of the Ottoman Empire in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have, as a general rule, focused their studies on the process by which the various national minorities gained their independence from “Turkish” rule. To study this complex problem, historians of the Balkans and of Middle Eastern countries other than Turkey have selected a methodological framework which seeks to analyze the nature of the struggles that led to the eventual emergence of nation-states such as Albania, Greece, Bulgaria, and Syria.

For a generation of scholars aware of the informal ways in which power is acquired and built up in the Middle East, yet dissatisfied with Western “institutional” approaches, Albert Hourani's insightful essay on the politics of notables has had a profound impact. Describing a form of politics that existed in the urban centers of the Ottoman empire, Hourani distinguishes between two political roles: that of governing, which belonged to the Ottoman authorities; and that of directing and mobilizing local opinion, which lay in the hands of certain urban grandees. grandees. These two kinds of power were interrelated. The grandees became truly influential only by having connections with the Ottoman authorities, who in turn needed them because of the social influence they possessed. When Ottoman power became weakened, or during interregnums, these notables came forward to form coalitions that were used to lead revolts and occasionally displace the ruling authority altogether. A politics of notables, therefore, exists when men possessing an independent source of power and access to the ruler are able to attain a measure of free action and so shape political activity.