Capitalism and Belonging in Late Ottoman Iraq

with Camille Lyans Cole

hosted by Ayah Aboelela and Chris Gratien

| At the turn of the twentieth century, Basra was a provincial center on the southeastern edge of an Ottoman Empire undergoing a paradoxical process of fragmentation, expansion, and centralization. Yet as our guest in this episode, Prof. Camille Cole, shows in a new book, it was not marginal in the remaking of the late Ottoman Empire or the story of capitalism in the modern Middle East. In Basra, local elites utilize what Cole describes as "technologies of the state" — bureaucratic instruments, discourses, and symbols — to attain imperial status, harness resources, and accumulate capital. In this episode, we explore how the port of Basra became an important center for the business ventures of families straddling the modern borders of Iraq, Kuwait, Iran, and beyond, and how their legal, financial, and ecological entanglements chart a new history of Ottoman belonging in the Gulf region during the empire’s last century.