Aaron Jakes

Aaron G. Jakes is Assistant Professor in the Department of Historical Studies.  He teaches courses on the modern Middle East and South Asia, environmental history, the historical geography of capitalism and imperialism. His first book project, published with Stanford University Press in summer 2020, is entitled Egypt’s Occupation: Colonial Economism and the Crises of Capitalism. Drawing on more than a decade of archival research in Egypt, England, India, Pakistan, and the United States, Egypt’s Occupation is a study of both the political economy of imperialism in Egypt and the role of political-economic thought in the struggles over British rule that ensued from the occupation of 1882. The study traces the long and contested career of “colonial economism,” the organizing discourse of foreign rule according to which Egyptians, as racially distinctive human subjects, were capable of no more and no less than a recognition of their own bare material interests. In tracking the way claims about economic subjectivity and self-interest were both engineered into the design of new financial institutions and mobilized as a basis for sovereign legitimacy, Egypt’s Occupation argues that economism is not merely a methodological disposition.