Extract: Although in the news daily, the economies of the Middle East have not attracted the ser rious academic attention one might expect. While highly specialized journal articles abound, there are only a limited number of books that provide comprehensive surveys of the region as a whole. True, masterful descriptive accounts of the region’s economies are available in books such as Charles Issawi’s An Economic History of the Middle East and North Africa, Roger Owen’s The Middle East in the World Economy, and A History of theMiddle Eastern Economies in the Twentieth Century (with Sevket Pamuk). However, with the release of the third edition of Richards and Waterbury’s classic work, A Political Economy of the Middle East, reader and researchers will again have at their disposal a single up to-date volume which not only cover ers the contemporary regional political economy in sufficient detail, but provides a proven framewr work for understanding the growing complexity of forces shaping events in the region.