March 6, 2026 12:00 pm
Livestream
Pay What You WillRecordedLivestreamOpen CART Captioning
Adam Hanieh
While World War I is often framed as a European conflict, its most far-reaching consequences were profoundly felt far beyond Europe’s borders. In the Middle East, the war sparked a sweeping political crisis that ultimately led to the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. In its wake, the European victors imposed new borders and mandates, carving the region into fragmented zones of imperial control and influence.
But this was not merely a story of unchecked colonial dominance. In the postwar moment, a spectrum of fluid, intersecting anti-colonial movements emerged. Palestine became a key site in these struggles, as a racialized order of settler-colonial capitalism took shape under British rule. This talk locates those movements within the broader transition from British to American imperial ascendancy, contending that the political history of the region must be understood as integral to the global history of fossil capitalism.
Moving beyond frameworks centered solely on empire, the talk examines how anti-colonial actors envisioned their futures within a rapidly transforming global system—even as new hierarchies of race, empire, and capital were being redefined.
About the speaker
Adam Hanieh
Director of the Middle East Institute and MBI Jaber Chair of Political Economy and Global Development at SOAS, University of London
Adam Hanieh is Director of the Middle East Institute and MBI Jaber Chair of Political Economy and Global Development at SOAS, University of London. Prior to joining SOAS, he was a Professor and Joint Chair in Middle East Studies at the University of Exeter and Tsinghua University, Beijing, China. He completed his PhD in Political Science from York University, Toronto, Canada in 2009, and has worked at universities in Palestine, Canada, the United Arab Emirates, the UK, and China. Hanieh serves on the Board of Directors of the Middle East Research and Information Project (MERIP) and is a Research Fellow at the Transnational Institute (TNI), headquartered in Amsterdam.
Hanieh’s current research looks at the interplay of fossil fuels, capitalism, and the climate emergency, with a particular focus on the Gulf states of the Middle East. He is the author of four monographs, including Money, Markets, and Monarchies: The Gulf Cooperation Council and the Political Economy of the Contemporary Middle East (Cambridge University Press, 2018), which won the 2019 British International Studies Association IPE Group Book and Crude Capitalism: Oil, Corporate Power, and the Making of the World Market, which came out with Verso Books in 2024 and was co-winner of the 2025 Best Book by an International Scholar, Global and Transnational Section of the American Sociological Association. He most recently co-authored Resisting Erasure: Capital, Imperialism and Race in Palestine (2025, Verso Books) with Robert Knox and Rafeef Ziadah.
Sponsoring Departments: Department of History, Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies, Department of Women, Gender & Sexuality Studies, Department of American Ethnic Studies, The Graduate School