by Disha Karnad Jani
On this episode of In Theory, Disha Karnad Jani interviews Ahmad Shokr about his monograph, Harvests of Liberation: Cotton, Capitalism, and the End of Empire in Egypt (Stanford University Press, 2025). In Harvests of Liberation, Shokr examines Egyptian decolonization through one of the nation’s most valuable commodities: cotton. In so doing, he weaves a history comprised of various strands and passed through numerous hands—from colonial advisors and nationalist leaders, to agrarian reformers and rural workers—to demonstrate how changes in the cotton economy ultimately led Egyptian nationalists to “embrace policies of land reform and industrialization and adopt a new conception of history.”
Ahmad Shokr is an Associate Professor of History at Swarthmore College.
Disha Karnad Jani is a Postdoctoral Researcher in the Research Training Group (RTG) “World Politics” at Universität Bielefeld. Her current book project is an intellectual history of the League Against Imperialism, 1927-1937. She is the co-host of In Theory, the podcast of the JHI Blog.
Featured image: Cover of Harvests of Liberation: Cotton, Capitalism, and the End of Empire in Egypt (Stanford University Press).
