Capital and Crisis in the Middle East and the World

(History 283F is an undergraduate course for 5 units; History 383F is a graduate course for 4-5 units.) How do economies change in times of crisis? 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 legal history and political economy, using the Middle East region as a starting point for the study of global phenomena. 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 of economic crisis: the ¿long depression¿ of the late nineteenth century and the financial crisis of 2008. We will ground our historical reading in attention to current events, in particular the Middle East¿s ongoing experience of the pandemic-induced global financial crisis of 2020.