Apr 6, 2022 11:00 AM Eastern Time (US and Canada)
Free and open to the public, registration is required.
This virtual roundtable brings together several leading scholars of Egypt to challenge conventional histories of the modern Middle East and rethink the categories of land, labor, and capital. Aaron Jakes will revisit the long history of the Suez Canal to question concepts central to rentier state theory, much of which has been based on claims about the relationships between capital accumulation, state finance, and political representation in the Middle East. Ahmad Shokr will reconceptualize the institutions that dominated the production and trade of Egyptian cotton as a type of hybrid monopoly, tying developments during the Great Depression to the Nasserist state in the 1950s and 1960s.
Aaron Jakes is an assistant professor of history at The New School for Social Research and Eugene Lang College.
Ahmad Shokr is an assistant professor of history at Swarthmore College. He was a junior research fellow at the Crown Center from 2016-2017.
Hannah Elsisi, discussant, is a junior research fellow at the Crown Center.
Hosted by the Crown Center for Middle East Studies at Brandeis University.
Co-sponsored by the Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies program, Department of History, Department of Politics, and the International and Global Studies program at Brandeis.