Aaron Jakes on Colonial Economism and Egypt's Occupation

Who Makes Cents?: A History of Capitalism Podcast

The history of capitalism in Egypt has long been synonymous with cotton cultivation and dependent development. In Egypt's Occupation: Colonial Economism and the Crisis of Capitalism, Aaron Jakes challenges longstanding conceptions of Egypt as peripheral to global capitalism through revealing the country's role as a laboratory for colonial economism and financial innovation amid the turn of the twentieth-century boom and bust. In doing so, Jakes offers a sweeping reinterpretation of both the historical geography of capitalism in Egypt and the role of political-economic thought during Britain's occupation of Egypt.