Laleh Khalili
In this lunchtime talk, Laleh Khalili (Queen Mary University of London) joins Nancy Reynolds (Washington University) and David Warren (Washington University) to discuss her wonderful new book Sinews of War Trade: Shipping and Capitalism in the Arabian Peninsula.
Sinews of War and Trade is a unique contribution to the study of the Arabian Peninsula, and charts the story of what the making of new ports and shipping infrastructure has meant not only for the Peninsula itself, but for the region and the world beyond. The book is a masterful account of how maritime transportation is not simply an enabling companion of trade, but central to the very fabric of global capitalism. Khalili details how the Peninsula's enormous ports, which serve maritime trade, logistics, and hydrocarbon transport create racialized hierarchies of labor, engineer the lived environment, aid the accumulation of capital regionally and globally, and carry forward colonial regimes of profit, law and administration.