Top Highlights

• History is beyond the awareness of individual actors: they make history, but history bears them along. The focus on continuity does not mean that Braudel ignored ruptures, events, or breaks
• It is clear, however, that a historical materialist approach would identify different ruptures, as well as different explanatory variables for these ruptures and continuities
• Making use of the incorrect characterization of the private sector as inefficient and unproductive, the ruling class began to rapidly privatize key public sector companies in the 2000s. De Smet captures this period by claiming that ‘[s]tanding squarely behind private capitalists and landlords, the Mubarak state undermined the traditional patron-cli...
• he roots of the political crisis that emerged following the protests can be traced as far back as the reign of Muhammad Ali and the incorporation of Egypt into the global capitalist system
• These are also important to temporal analysis, but should not be seen as the crucial driving force of history. He spoke of ‘breaks’ or events ‘bursting forth’ as a way of highlighting these ruptures, but his overall emphasis was on understanding the connecting threads in history

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