Capital and Crisis in the Middle East and the World

How are crises imagined, named, and categorized? How do economic crises intersect with pandemics, violence and environmental disaster to redefine the workings of capital? This course approaches these questions through critical reading in the histories of capitalism, crisis, and intersections between political economy and legal history. Moving beyond the tendency to center the history of Western Europe in understandings of global phenomena, this course uses the Middle East region as a starting point. We will examine the ways in which constructions like race and ethnicity, gender, and the human/non-human divide have mediated the social and spatial expansion of capital in the region, especially through legal categories and instruments that transform rapidly in times of crisis. Temporally, we will focus our examination between two moments experienced as crises: the ¿long depression¿ of the late nineteenth century and the financial crisis of 2008. We will also ground our historical reading in attention to current events, in particular the Middle East¿s ongoing experience of the financial crisis triggered by the Covid-19 pandemic, in global perspective.