Historians of the Middle East have long ignored the middle class in general and the activities of Arab capitalists in particular. For many, capitalism is synonymous with colonialism, and prevailing narratives have not been able to accommodate entrepreneurs who resist characterization as “comprad..
Graham Auman Pitts
Graham Auman Pitts is a scholar of environmental history and especially famine and foodways in modern Lebanon. In 2016, he received a PhD from the History Department at Georgetown University. Currently, he holds the American Druze Foundation fellowship at Georgetown’s Center for Contemporary Arab Studies. For two years, he was a postdoctoral teaching scholar in the International Studies department at North Carolina State University. His work has appeared in a number of popular and scholarly venues including the Arab Studies Journal, Cahiers de l’Orient, Environmental Histories of the First World War (Cambridge, 2018), Raseef22, The Ottoman History Podcast, and The World During the First World War (Klartext, 2014). In conjunction with the Khayrallah Center for Lebanese Diaspora Studies, he produced this interactive map of the impact of cash remittances on the Eastern Mediterranean.