Harvests of Liberation: Cotton, Capitalism, and the End of Empire in Egypt | Ahmad Shokr & Mona Atia
Please join the Institute for Middle East Studies to welcome Ahmad Shokr as he discusses Harvests of Liberation: Cotton, Capitalism, and the End of Empire in Egypt with Mona Atia.
In the first half of the twentieth century, a major change occurred in Egyptian nationalist understandings of imperialism and economic sovereignty. Where once the volatilities of foreign markets and capital were seen as the main threat, over time large landowners and their imperial allies were targeted as the principal obstacles to the country’s industrial progress. The perceived locus of imperial domination shifted from the realm of circulation to the realm of production. Harvests of Liberation situates this transformation in the midcentury dynamics of agrarian capitalism in Egypt.
Ahmad Shokr tells a story of decolonization through the lens of cotton, Egypt’s prized export. He follows a range of actors—colonial advisors, nationalist leaders, agrarian reformers, merchant-financiers, landowners, and rural workers—whose interactions moved the levers of the cotton trade from institutions that facilitated accumulation on an imperial scale to new sites of control within the nation-state. Amidst depression and war, the transformation of Egypt’s cotton economy prompted nationalists to embrace policies of land reform and industrialization and adopt a new conception of history. Ultimately, Shokr argues, these efforts set the stage for the construction of a postcolonial republic under Gamal Abdel Nasser, where national liberation became equated with national development.
We hope you will join Ahmad Shokr and Mona Atia for this thoughtful discussion about decolonization, nationalism, and agrarian capitalism in Egypt. All are welcome to attend this event in-person or online.
Speakers
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Ahmad Shokr is a historian of the modern Middle East. His teaching and research interests include the history of capitalism, imperialism, and decolonization. He is the author of Harvests of Liberation: Cotton, Capitalism, and the End of Empire in Egypt (Stanford University Press, 2025). Professor Shokr holds a Ph.D. in History and Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies from New York University. His writings on historical and contemporary issues have appeared in Arab Studies Journal, Critical Historical Studies, Middle East Report, Jadaliyya, and Economic and Political Weekly. He is also a contributor to several volumes, including The Journey to Tahrir: Revolution, Protest, and Social Change in Egypt (2012); Dispatches from the Arab Spring: Understanding the New Middle East (2013); The Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Asian History (2016—); Global Middle East: Into the Twenty-First Century (2021); and A Critical Political Economy of the Middle East and North Africa (2021). At Swarthmore, Professor Shokr teaches about a variety of topics, including modern Middle East history, colonialism and nationalism, capitalism, environmental history, and social movements.
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Mona Atia is Associate Professor of Geography and International Affairs at the George Washington University. She is a critical development geographer whose areas of expertise include Islamic charity and finance, philanthropy and humanitarianism, housing/urban development, the production of poverty knowledge and the spatial politics of marginalization.
