Dr Rana Baker

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.