Twelve distinguished scholars from Egypt and Turkey offer insiders' views of the interaction between politics and economics in these two nations. Focusing on major historical turning points in the twentieth-century development of Egypt and Turkey, these essays juxtapose and compare trajectories of change in the context of social and economic transformation and political outcomes. In terms that are easily translatable to the historical and analytical traditions of comparative social inquiry, these essays about the specific and significant cases of Egypt and Turkey help introduce the Middle East into a field of inquiry which for too long has ignored its rich and increasingly relevant contributions.