On “Everyday Egypt,” an Instagram page committed to countering reductive media coverage through visual storytelling, an eye catching image surfaced on 16 June 2020. The picture, taken by Ali Zaraay, an Egyptian photographer intent on depicting daily life at a distance from Cairo, captures a wedding taking place in the Nile Delta four years earlier. In the shot, a group of men, sporting traditional clothing, sit cross-legged, socializing, into the night. Before them, beer bottles and cans, largely drained of their contents, blanket a beige canvas. Unlike the comments of Instagram users, which vary widely from the critical to the comedic, the containers on display feature a single brand: Stella. The untold story of this alcoholic beverage is the subject of Omar D. Foda's new book, which adopts Stella as a starting point for reimagining Egypt's modern history.

In Egypt's Beer: Stella, Identity, and the Modern State, Foda sets out to explore how Stella became the beer of Egypt by tracing the ways through which the beverage, its breweries, and the technologies surrounding it were “Egyptianized” (p. 2). In the process of documenting these historical developments, Foda ultimately charts not only the course of one commodity, but the trajectory of a modern nation. The temporal scope of Foda's original study is expansive. Beginning with the rise of Egypt's beer industry against the backdrop of the British Occupation, which witnessed the establishment of Stella's two eventual producers, Crown Brewery in 1897 and Pyramid Brewery a year later, Foda concludes with the beer's decline nearly a century onward in the 1980s and 1990s. Archival materials from multiple collections (Dutch, Egyptian, American) substantiate his sweeping investigation of “Egypt's beer” and the inner workings of the industry behind it. The result is what the author calls a “hybrid history,” or one that places cultural matters into conversation with economic affairs, as opposed to studying each in isolation of one another (p. 3).

Over the course of eight chapters, which progress chronologically, Foda explores the making of modern Egypt and its beer. In Chapters 1 and 2, he chronicles the advent of Egypt's beer industry and traces Stella's origins to a partnership between Crown and Pyramid Breweries in the 1920s. In Chapter 3, Foda pivots to two influential players in this arena: Heineken and the Egyptian government. If the former's relationship with Stella's creators is based on “mutual interest,” then “opposing desires” characterize the government's interactions with the beer's makers, whose international elements were both an asset and a liability (p. 76). The tensions arising from economic nationalism and the multinational connections of Crown and Pyramid gain greater clarity in Chapter 4, where Foda details the birth of Stella as a “brand” in the 1950s and highlights how the “foreign” became increasingly suspect under Gamal Abdel Nasser's rule (p. 80). In Chapters 5 and 6, the author proceeds to unpack the impact of Egypt's union with Syria on Stella and its manufacturers and the nationalization of Crown and Pyramid in 1963. As Foda goes on to show in Chapters 7 and 8, the newly formed al-Ahram Brewing Company enjoyed success under Nasser's successors, but neither Stella's popularity nor government ownership were destinated to last. Poor leadership and rising religiosity contributed to Stella's subsequent downturn, while a multinational investment group purchased the beverage's producer in 1997, only to then sell the company to a familiar face in 2002, when Heineken added Egypt's breweries, once more, to its global empire.

In crafting this narrative, Foda flourishes on two major fronts. First, he breaks new ground in recording the histories of businesses. Foda's close reading of personal correspondence, in particular, provides a unique window onto company politics and elucidates the trials, triumphs, and internal dynamics of Stella's two breweries. Here, the author's discussion of technology and efforts to modernize and master it in Egypt and abroad is especially informative. Second, the beer industry that surfaces in Foda's book does not exist in a vacuum. The author places it in dialogue with Egyptian society. At times, the connections introduced by Foda are direct, such as when he recounts a conversation between Nasser and a brewery director that brilliantly illustrates the power wielded by Egypt's president over economic affairs (pp. 121–3). In other moments, these links are less immediate but equally instructive, such as when Foda considers how Nasser's populist policies and criticisms of foreign capitalists resonated with Egyptian workers (pp. 100–4). The outcome is a socioeconomic history that writes Stella and the beer industry, more generally, back into Egypt's historical memory and presents a fresh perspective on a period of immense change.

At the same time, this perceptive study raises several questions. First, Foda's discussion of “Egypt's beer” left me wanting to know more about Stella's social life beyond the breweries responsible for its creation. Notably, the author begins to explore the brand's appearance in newspaper advertisements and its presence in the writings of Ihsan ʿAbd al-Quddus and the films of Husayn Kamal, but refrains from diving much deeper into Stella's cultural biography. At one point, for instance, Foda mentions in passing how all “public traces” of Stella have vanished in Egypt (p. 2). How did these disappearing acts play out in practice and what are we to make of them in relation to Stella's continued consumption? Later on, Foda notes that portrayals of alcohol were permitted in films but prohibited on television in Egypt (p. 155). Why was this the case and what may this reveal about Stella's status in Egyptian society? There is then the matter of Stella's audience. Foda identifies multiple communities that came into contact with alcoholic beverages. The voices of these actors, though, receive relatively little attention. What did beer and Stella, specifically, mean to the Islami, infitahi, effendi, and urban worker, and did these views change over time? Lastly, in meticulously tracing Stella's ascent, Foda clearly demonstrates that alcoholic beverages, perhaps contrary to popular belief, played a prominent part in the past of at least one Muslim majority country. The exact relationship between Egypt's Islamic Revival and Stella's decline, however, is less evident. In a time of rising religiosity, how did Stella surface in contemporary debates and what work did public critiques of it perform for those intent on speaking in the name of Islam? Answers to such questions stand to shed valuable light on Stella in action and lend further support to Foda's claim that it was “an inseparable part of Egyptian culture” (p. 1).

Notwithstanding these questions, which merit further research, Egypt's Beer constitutes an important contribution to the study of Egypt, consumer goods, and the history of technology in and outside of the Middle East. Foda skillfully scrutinizes the transformation of a multifaceted industry and uncovers the story of an iconic commodity at its center. The resulting history weaves together a wide array of economic, political, and social phenomena integral to the making of modern Egypt. Foda's book, moreover, is well written. The monograph is approachable, engaging, and assumes little in the way of background knowledge, making it accessible to a broader audience, including graduate students and upper level undergraduates. At times, I wondered how chapters organized around particular themes, such as colonialism, nationalism, and capitalism, may have impacted Foda's exploration, but the book's chronological organization works in the end and is easy to follow. For all of these reasons, Egypt's Beer would make a wonderful addition to courses on consumer culture, Middle East history, and the history of technology and businesses. Ultimately, those who read this book will enjoy not only its content, but the inquiries inspired by it. How may the histories of other commercial ventures impact our understanding of the Middle East? In what ways may scholars operating in different historical contexts similarly intertwine the economic, social, and political in the spirit of crafting more panoramic narratives? And what insights may be gained by thinking creatively with, and critically about, objects we often take for granted?