Defining a framework for the economic history of early-modern Egypt -- Artisan entrepreneurs: capitalist practices in a precapitalist environment -- A period of unprecedented social mobility for nonelites -- The Jalfis: oil pressers and emirs -- Competition between different forms of capitalism...

<italic>The study proposes an approach to the history of literacy in the Islamic world that uses a flexible and gradated definition of literacy. It goes on to propose some factors that lay behind the acquisition of certain forms of literacy and of the way that they were put into practical use. Among...</italic>