The 2011 Uprising in Egypt was a momentous event in Egyptian history and historiography, and one that changed the direction of my research. I was educated professionally to push against an overwhelming presence of politics in the analysis of the Middle East and to focus instead on the culture, economy and society of the region. Moreover, as an economic historian by training, and though I have been teaching the political economy of the Middle East for many years, changes in the ‘substructure’ often took priority over the political ‘superstructure’ in my research. Prior to 2011, I had studied the consumption and production of tobacco in Egyptian markets. I had also engaged with research on how the oil-boom of the 1970s and the early 1980s transformed Egypt's consumer society. The 2011 Uprising caught me and most researchers in the field by surprise, and led me to change course. In what turned out to be my next book, The Rise of the Egyptian Middle Class: Socio-Economic Mobility and Public Discontent from Nasser to Sadat, I turned to politics, class politics in particular, in studying the impact that the oil-boom, intertwined with President Sadat's liberal Open Door policy, had on Egyptian society. It was in this book that I also began to explore the class history of the Egyptian social contract.

The present book is in some respects a sequel to The Rise of the Egyptian Middle Class. The book expands the scope of analysis of the Egyptian social contract and its timeframe, from the period since semi-independence under a newly established liberal monarchy (1922) until the 2011 Uprising. As such, it picks up from an earlier point in time than most previous studies of the social contract in Egypt and it emphasises persistence over time, where past analysis often saw ruptures or new beginnings. The Egyptian Social Contract sets a broad framework for the study of the 2011 Uprising as a protest against both the breakup of the old Nasserite social contract – the effendi (local middle class) social contract discussed in this book – and the failure to bring a new social contract to Egypt.