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Rana Baker

Dr Rana Baker

Lecturer in the History of the Middle East

Contact details

Biography

Rana Baker is a Lecturer in the History of the Middle East. Her research brings together history, critical political economy and STS to study transformations in debt, land and money in modern Egypt. She uses Ottoman-Egyptian sources as conceptual repertoires and sites of theoretical production to rethink standard categories in the study of the Middle East.

Her current book project explores the history of prosperity in nineteenth and early twentieth century Egypt. It examines how Ottoman-Egyptian forms of organising material and spiritual abundance were transformed through colonial practices which produced new forms of life based on financialised relations to land and credit. The book also situates “economic development” in the emergence of "land development" along the Egyptian Nile valley at the turn of the twentieth century.

Before joining the History Department at King's College, Dr Baker completed her PhD in the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies at Columbia University and her MA at SOAS, University of London.

Research interests and PhD supervision

Critical political economy, histories of capitalism; colonial modernity; land and debt; histories of money; Egypt and the Middle East.

Research

HistoryPolicy
History and Political Economy Research Group

The History and Political Economy Research Group at King's College London

Capitalism
Histories of Capitalism in the Middle East, South Asia and Africa

Rethinking capitalism’s conceptual categories, theoretical frameworks, spaces and intellectual trajectories.

Mappe Munde de Ch'on hado
Global History

Research about how historicities from past, to present, and future, differ across societies.

STM
Centre for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine

Engaging directly with policy-makers to change understandings of history and of the world in which we live today.

Events

05Jun

A collaborative discussion about Global Capitalism research at KCL

A platform for academics to explore setting up a multi-disciplinary, trans-departmental Center for Global Capitalism at King's.

Please note: this event has passed.

Research

HistoryPolicy
History and Political Economy Research Group

The History and Political Economy Research Group at King's College London

Capitalism
Histories of Capitalism in the Middle East, South Asia and Africa

Rethinking capitalism’s conceptual categories, theoretical frameworks, spaces and intellectual trajectories.

Mappe Munde de Ch'on hado
Global History

Research about how historicities from past, to present, and future, differ across societies.

STM
Centre for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine

Engaging directly with policy-makers to change understandings of history and of the world in which we live today.

Events

05Jun

A collaborative discussion about Global Capitalism research at KCL

A platform for academics to explore setting up a multi-disciplinary, trans-departmental Center for Global Capitalism at King's.

Please note: this event has passed.