Charles Issawi

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Charles Issawi was a prominent academic economist and historian of the Middle East at Columbia University and Princeton University in the United States. He was a pioneer in studying the late economic history of the Ottoman Empire and the Arab Middle East.

Born in 1916 in Cairo, Egypt, to Syrian Orthodox Christian parents, Issawi studied at Victoria College in Alexandria, where he was the number one student in his class, and at Magdalen College, Oxford. He had a brief career in the Egyptian government's finance ministry before moving into academia. His first post was at the American University of Beirut, during the Second World War. In 1951 he moved to Columbia University in New York, where he taught economics until moving to Princeton University in 1975 where he became a close friend of Bernard Lewis while often sharply disagreeing on political issues. Issawi died in 2000.