Ecologies of Capital in Egypt

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Environment in Context / Ecologies of Capital in Egypt

Environment in Context

{{langos=='en'?('03/09/2020' | todate):('03/09/2020' | artodate)}} - Issue 7.2

Hosted by Huma Gupta

In this episode, Huma Gupta and guest host Camille Cole discuss Egypt’s occupation and the history of capitalism as both a social and an ecological process with Aaron Jakes.

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Huma Gupta

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About this Interview:

In this episode, Huma Gupta and Camille Cole discuss Egypt’s occupation and the history of capitalism as both a social and an ecological process with Aaron Jakes. Jakes is the Assistant Professor of History and Co-Director of Capitalism Studies at the New School. His forthcoming book Egypt’s Occupation: Colonial Economism and the Crises of Capitalism examines how the capitalist boom - and then bust - in early twentieth-century Egypt unfolded socially, politically, and environmentally. Cotton came to dominate the Egyptian economy and ecology by the late nineteenth century, and many scholars have written about how it fueled Egypt’s dependent status in the world economy. Today, we go beyond cotton’s economic role to talk about how colonial administrators and Egyptian nationalists alike understood Egyptian peasants and the Egyptian environment. These ideas about Egyptians as “fundamentally materialist” fueled the implementation of agricultural policies framed as “experiments” in governance. When those experiments, by the early twentieth century, produced adverse ecological and economic results - from cotton worm infestations to a credit crisis - British officials blamed Egyptians, without sacrificing an economized view of the environment that remains with us today.

References:

1. Nancy Fraser, "Behind Marx's Hidden Abode: For an Expanded Conception of Capitalism." New Left Review, no. 86 (March-April 2014): 55-72.
2. Aaron Jakes, "Boom, Bugs, Bust: Egypt's Ecology of Interest, 1882–1914." Antipode 49, no. 4 (2017): 1035-59.
3. Andrew Sartori, "Global Intellectual History and the History of Political Economy." In Global Intellectual History, edited by Samuel Moyn and Andrew Sartori. New York: Columbia University Press, 2013.

Guests

Aaron Jakes

Aaron Jakes specializes in the modern Middle East and South Asia, environmental history, and geographies of capitalism

Aaron G. Jakes is Assistant Professor of History at The New School, where he teaches on the modern Middle East and South Asia, global environmental history, and the historical geography of capitalism. His first book Egypt’s Occupation: Colonial Economism and the Crises of Capitalism was published by Stanford University Press. He is currently working on two new projects. The first, entitled The Fanatical Radical and co-authored with Hussein Omar (University College Dublin), is a political biography of the itinerant scholar, educator, journalist, and activist ‘Abd al-‘Aziz Jawish. The second is tentatively entitled Renting the Waters: The Suez Canal in Global History. This research takes up the history of the Suez Canal from the early 1800s into the present as a unique vantage from which to explore the shifting and contested relationships between state rents, debt, taxation, and profit that have shaped the geopolitics of capital accumulation.

Camille Cole

Camille Cole is a scholar of the environment, political economy, and the Middle East

Camille Cole is a Junior Research Fellow at Jesus College, Cambridge University. Cole completed her PhD in History at Yale University. Her dissertation, “Empire on Edge: Land, Law, and Capital in Gilded Age Basra,” examined how wealthy elites in late Ottoman Basra used state tools and vocabularies alongside legal and illegal environmental manipulation and novel financial practices to accumulate land. Her work can be found in the Journal of Social History, Middle Eastern Studies, and South Asian History and Culture.

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Environment in Context / Ecologies of Capital in Egypt

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