Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2008. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 69-11, Section: A, page: 4405. Advisers: Joseph Mahoney; Paul Vaaler. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 146-154) Available on microfilm from Pro Quest Information and Learning.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Texas Woman's University, 2007. / (UMI)AAI3295477. Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 68-12, Section: A, page: 5141. Adviser: Deborah D. Young.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2006. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 67-11, Section: A, page: 4257. Adviser: Anju Seth. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 187-192) Available on microfilm from Pro Quest Information and Learning.

Meaningful mediums is a study of the political economy of writing in the first Ottoman city to develop a sustained urban print culture. Cairo’s writing economy comprised the longstanding manuscript industry, the governmental printing industry from the 1820s, and the for-profit private press printing industry from the 1850s. I investigate these industries’ functions, interactions, and reputations to explore why Cairene printing developed and how contemporaries ascribed meaning to textual production during this period of flux. This study relies on the texts themselves to generate the history of their production. I aggregate the names, dates, and other information contained within their openings, contents, and colophons to chart the work of their producers and vendors for the first time. I then contextualize this information through contemporary iconographic and descriptive depictions of Cairene texts. My sources are drawn from libraries and private collections in America, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, and France. They include formal and ephemeral manuscripts and printings. Against narratives that invoke printing as a catalyst for modernity, I argue that printing was simply a tool. Its adoption increased because it was useful for different actors like the state, private entrepreneurs, and scholars who employed it to respond to specific political, economic, and intellectual needs. My argument reverses the causality of modernization narratives, in that I establish that printing was the result of practical demands instead of the origin of new demands. As a tool, printing was deployed by Cairenes flexibly. Some used it to appropriate western norms, including the idea that printing is a civilizing force. Others used it to enact manuscript tradition. The history of this process is important to social practices, like the creation of new professions. But it is also important to historical legacy. Nationalism, Enlightenment, and civil society are assigned their origins and proof in Cairene printings from the 1870s and 1880s. Yet this narrative of the Middle East’s generic print modernity draws from the expectation for printings to engender public discourse and galvanize society, instead of from the words that these texts actually contain or an understanding of who made and consumed them and why. To counter the prevailing idea that printing is fixed and universal in its value and effects, Meaningful mediums examines printing as both a social and economic practice, and itself a space for ideas. It therefore emphasizes the significance of human agency, local context, constraints, and continuity during a period of momentous technological, textual, and cultural change. In conclusion, this study documents Cairenes’ incorporation of printing into their political economy of writing and revises the widely held notion that this process was an agent of social change, a marker of modernity and colonial restructuring, and a foreign disruptor of local textual tradition. / Middle Eastern Studies Committee

This thesis posits that governments around the world have failed to account for a vast percentage of the economic output of their citizens in their recordkeeping and policy-making. Through ineffective measures such as the GDP, governments have long attached their nation’s value to arbitrary measures of “growth,” which reflect average wealth, or unsustainable industrial output, or other shortsighted and unreflective measures. The rise and popularity of Bitcoin and other digital age “crypto-currencies” reflect both the convenience and ease of use of these new systems, but also an impulse toward moving past government as an economic gatekeeper. The last decades, which have been tracked with the rise of GDP as a measurement of economic wellbeing, have seen the general failure of government to take into account measures aside from economic output – such as happiness, childcare, and housework – when it tallies up the nation’s values and sets its economic policies and priorities. In addition to Bitcoin and other “crypto-currencies,” this work will examine the history and current ramifications of policies that are reflective extensions of the growth- at-all-costs model of governance seen in GDP, particularly through fiat currency, economic deregulation, as well as the social ramifications of heedless growth on often- spurious grounds, which has characterized the last decades. Through an unwise and irrational adherence to growth-oriented policies (reflected in GDP), the U.S. government has – perhaps unwittingly – ignored the true needs and welfare of the American people. Yet Bitcoin, which is unregulated and stateless, may represent by its now years-long popularity a testament to millions of economic actors who feel that government has failed to focus its attentions and energies on proper measures of economic output and wellbeing. Bitcoin – by its true value, as opposed to the “fiat” nature of conventional currencies – may yet prove a means by which economics again reflects reality.

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