Camille Cole recipient of 2020 AGAPS Gwenn Okruhlik Dissertation Award

Empire on the Edge interrogates how a small group of capitalists in Basra appropriated specific tools of governance such as land deeds and plantation agriculture, and produced new forms of wealth stratification and conspicuous consumption in the region and beyond. Drawing on a broad range of scholarship in history and adjacent disciplines, as well as a wide array of archival sources in multiple languages, this dissertation contributes to analyses of global capital in the Middle East in the 19th century. It is also a colorful environmental history of agriculture in the region, paying attention to the materialities of blank forms and date and rice alike. We find this dissertation important because it places Basra in the Gulf world, while communicating to the larger field of Middle East Studies. Beyond showing us what elite worlds looked like in Basra in the 19th century, this timely manuscript is able to foreground the links between capitalism and the environment, leading to productive questions on how and why these relations may have transformed. We also believe that this dissertation will be an important book, which will spotlight the role of Basra in the region, and challenge unidirectional narratives on the production of capitalist ethics, norms and practices.

 

Dr. Gökçe Günel, Department of Anthropology, Rice University

Dr. Kevan Harris, Department of Sociology, UCLA

Dr. Michael Christopher Low, Department of History, Iowa State University