Fictitious capital: silk, cotton, and the rise of the Arabic novel

The ups and downs of silk, cotton and stocks synchopated with serialized novels in the late nineteenth-century Arabic press; time itself was changing.

Khalil al-Khuri, Salim al-Bustani, and Jurji Zaydan wrote novels of debt, dissimulation, and risk, increasingly legible as tools of French and British empire.