University of Pennsylvania ScholarlyCommons Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations 2015 Grand Plans in Glass Bottles: The Economic, Social, and Technological History of Beer in Egypt 1880-1970 Omar D. Foda University of Pennsylvania,
[email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations Part of the Economic History Commons, Islamic World and Near East History Commons, and the Near Eastern Languages and Societies Commons Recommended Citation Foda, Omar D., "Grand Plans in Glass Bottles: The Economic, Social, and Technological History of Beer in Egypt 1880-1970" (2015). Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations. 1055. https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/1055 This paper is posted at ScholarlyCommons. https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/1055 For more information, please contact
[email protected]. Grand Plans in Glass Bottles: The Economic, Social, and Technological History of Beer in Egypt 1880-1970 Abstract Contrary to common perceptions, the history of beer (and indeed of other alcoholic beverages) in the Muslim-majority context of Egypt has not been a history of government officials desperately seeking to extirpate the evil of alcohol as rumrunners, backyard brewers, and moonshiners stayed one step ahead. Rather it was a history of a commercially-marketed product that enjoyed relatively wide popularity and robust growth from 1880 to 1980, and sat at the cutting edge of technological innovation in Egypt in that same period. Its success was not only evident from the profitability of the companies that sold it, but also from its increasing appearances in all popular forms of art and media. The title of my dissertation is "Grand Plans in Glass Bottles: An Economic, Social, and Technological history of Beer in Egypt, 1880-1970".