Book excerpt: A balance sheet of thirty years of revolutionary experiment, this work is a comprehensive analysis of the failure of the socialist transformation of Egypt during the regimes of Nasser and Sadat. Testing recent theories of the nature of the developing states and their relation both to indigenous class forces and to external pressures from advanced industrial societies, John Waterbury describes the limited but complex choices available to Egyptian policy-makers in their attempts to reconcile the goals of reform and capital accumulation. Originally published in 1983. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.