Environment in Context: Ecologies of Capital in Egypt

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Oct 30, 2020 Egypt

Environment in Context: Ecologies of Capital in Egypt

By : Status/الوضع Audio-Visual Podcast Hosts

In this episode, Huma Gupta and Camille Cole discuss Egypt’s occupation and the history of capitalism as both a social and an ecological process with Aaron Jakes. Jakes is the Assistant Professor of History and Co-Director of Capitalism Studies at the New School. His forthcoming book Egypt’s Occupation: Colonial Economism and the Crises of Capitalism examines how the capitalist boom - and then bust - in early twentieth-century Egypt unfolded socially, politically, and environmentally. Cotton came to dominate the Egyptian economy and ecology by the late nineteenth century, and many scholars have written about how it fueled Egypt’s dependent status in the world economy. Today, we go beyond cotton’s economic role to talk about how colonial administrators and Egyptian nationalists alike understood Egyptian peasants and the Egyptian environment. These ideas about Egyptians as “fundamentally materialist” fueled the implementation of agricultural policies framed as “experiments” in governance. When those experiments, by the early twentieth century, produced adverse ecological and economic results - from cotton worm infestations to a credit crisis - British officials blamed Egyptians, without sacrificing an economized view of the environment that remains with us today.

Aaron Jakes


Aaron G. Jakes is Assistant Professor of History at The New School, where he teaches on the modern Middle East and South Asia, global environmental history, and the historical geography of capitalism. His first book Egypt’s Occupation: Colonial Economism and the Crises of Capitalism was published by Stanford University Press.

Camille Cole


Camille Cole is a Junior Research Fellow at Jesus College, Cambridge University. Cole completed her PhD in History at Yale University. Her dissertation, “Empire on Edge: Land, Law, and Capital in Gilded Age Basra,” examined how wealthy elites in late Ottoman Basra used state tools and vocabularies alongside legal and illegal environmental manipulation and novel financial practices to accumulate land. Her work can be found in the Journal of Social History, Middle Eastern Studies, and South Asian History and Culture.

Huma Gupta


Huma Gupta is a scholar of environmental planning and the political economy of architecture. Gupta is a postdoctoral fellow at the Crown Center for Middle East Studies at Brandeis University, where she is working on two book projects: "Dwelling and the Architecture of Dispossession" and "Dwelling and the Wealth of Nations." In 2020, she completed her dissertation "Migrant Sarifa Settlements and State-Building in Iraq" at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where she was a fellow in the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture.





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Jun 8, 2020 Lebanon
Status/الوضع Audio-Visual Podcast Hosts By :
Status/الوضع Audio-Visual Podcast Hosts

Environment in Context: Cement, War, and Toxicity: The Materialities of Displacement in Iraq

This is the second episode of the "Environment in Context" podcast. In it, co-editors of Jadaliyya's Environment Page, Huma Gupta and Gabi Kirk, discussed with Kali Rubaii how ecologies of war have produced multiple waves of displacement and have intimately shaped the lives of displaced Iraqis through the materiality of cement.

News agencies and international organizations often talk about displacement in abstract, statistical terms. For instance, in Iraq, there are currently more than one and a half-million internally displaced people. However, today we will discuss how ecologies of war have produced multiple waves of displacement and have intimately shaped the lives of displaced Iraqis through the materiality of cement. In the early twentieth century, British occupying forces and the subsequent mandatory government popularized the use of Portland cement. The developmental projects of the Monarchic, Republican and Ba'athist regimes further promoted the production and use of cement, which is an integral component of concrete in infrastructure projects, like dams, prisons, and mass housing. More recently, after the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq, the Coalition Provisional Authority built thousands of t-walls and blast-proof wall segments in the name of security. Though, in cities like Baghdad, they often functioned as sectarian borders. Thus, the global concrete industry represented by corporations like the LaFarge Group and local cement factories play an important role in the securitization of space. But these are the more familiar stories of the lives and after-lives of modern building materials in major cities across Iraq. We are speaking today with Dr. Kali Rubaii, who will take us to the “cement valley” in Bazian, which is 30 kilometers away from Sulaymaniyah in Kurdistan in order to defamiliarize us from the ways in which we think about cement.

References and Resources


1. Kali Rubaii's Academia.edu profile and list of publications
2. Concrete and Livability in Occupied Palestine
3. The Islah Reparations Project
4. Envisioning the Postwar: Kali Rubaii Speaking at NYU

Dr. Kali Rubaii


Dr. Rubaii is an assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology at Purdue University. She has a joint appointment as a Chancellor's postdoctoral fellow at University of California, Davis. Before that, she was an Andrew Mellon postdoctoral research fellow at Rice University. She earned her PhD in Cultural Anthropology at University of California, Santa Cruz and her BA in International Relations at University of California, Davis. Dr. Rubaii is also the co-founder of the Islah Reparations Project.

Gabi Kirk


Gabi Kirk is a PhD Candidate in Geography with a Designated Emphasis in Feminist Theory and Research at the University of California, Davis. Working between political ecology, feminist geography, and geographies of colonialism, her dissertation project examines how Palestinian farmers and sustainable development organizations in the northern West Bank use agro-ecology in projects of identity formation and struggles for sovereignty.

Huma Gupta


Huma Gupta is a scholar of environmental planning and the political economy of development. She is currently a Humanities Research Fellow at New York University - Abu Dhabi. Her book project “The Architecture of Dispossession: Migrant Sarifa Settlements and State-Building in Iraq” examines state-building through the architectural production of rural migrants in cities. She did her doctoral training at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where she was a fellow in the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture and the Social Science Research Council. 



For more from Status/الوضع, visit www.statushour.com and subscribe to the podcast on Apple Podcasts!