Fictitious Capital: Silk, Cotton, and the Rise of the Arabic Novel

The ups and downs of silk, cotton, and stocks syncopated with serialized novels in the late-nineteenth-century Arabic press: Time itself was changing. Novels of debt, dissimulation, and risk begin to appear in Arabic at a moment when France and Britain were unseating the Ottoman legacy in Beirut, Cairo, and beyond. Amid booms and crashes, serialized Arabic fiction and finance at once tell the other’s story.

While scholars of Arabic often write of a Nahdah, a sense of renaissance, Fictitious ...