March 6, 2026 12:00 pm
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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.
Registration opens December 10, 2025.
About the speaker
Adam Hanieh
Professor of Political Economy and Global Development, Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies (IAIS), University of Exeter, Joint Chair in Area Studies (Middle East), IAIS (Exeter) and IIAS (Tsinghua), Distinguished Visiting Professor, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China
Adam Hanieh is a Professor of Political Economy and Global Development at IAIS, University of Exeter, and Joint Chair in Middle East Studies at the Institute of International and Area Studies (IIAS) at Tsinghua University, Beijing, China.
His research focuses on oil and capitalism, energy transitions, and the political economy of the Middle East. To date, he has published five books—four single-authored and one co-edited—the most recent being Crude Capitalism: Oil, Corporate Power, and the Making of the World Market (Verso Books, 2024). His third book, Money, Markets, and Monarchies: The Gulf Cooperation Council and the Political Economy of the Contemporary Middle East (Cambridge University Press, 2018), received the 2019 British International Studies Association International Political Economy Group Book Prize.
Before joining the University of Exeter, he served as a Professor of Development Studies at SOAS, University of London, where he taught for a decade. At SOAS, he was a founding member of the Centre for Palestine Studies, an active participant in the London Middle East Institute, and co-chaired the SOAS Centre for Migration and Diaspora Studies from 2018 to 2020.
Beyond academia, he holds positions on the Board of Directors of the Middle East Research and Information Project (MERIP) in Washington, D.C. and is a Research Fellow at the Transnational Institute (TNI).
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