Laleh Khalili teaches at the University of Exeter. Her books include Sinews of War and Trade: Shipping and Capitalism in the Arabian Peninsula, Heroes and Martyrs of Palestine: The Politics of National Commemoration and The Corporeal Life of Seafaring. Extractive Capitalism is due in May.
When I started developing software for the management consulting firms I worked for in the mid-1990s, we still had to connect to the World Wide Web on slow and clunky lines to access our coding work. The laptops we carried weighed at least five kilogrammes and couldn’t be used for actual programming. One of our clients was a matchmaking company, which operated a number of...
The declarations about Greenland and the Panama Canal are more than just another example of Trump’s trolling-as-policymaking. They are expressions of US imperial atavism.
Shah Sulaiman, the 17th-century Safavid monarch of Iran, liked to spend his time drinking wine with his many wives. He avoided war with the Ottoman Empire and was largely uninterested in the European powers. Like many potentates on the Indian Ocean rim, however, he was fascinated by the other kingdoms surrounding this vast watery realm. In 1685, he sent a diplomatic mission to Ayutthaya,...
According to a gushing photo-essay published in Life magazine in 1969, Prince Karim Aga Khan was an ‘outrageously wealthy young man, written off by many as a mere playboy’, who had proved his critics wrong with a display of business acumen – a vast real-estate venture in Sardinia. Sailing across the Mediterranean on one of his yachts, the Aga Khan had fallen in love with...
On 19 November, a helicopter operated by the Houthi-controlled Yemeni navy hovered over the vehicle carrier Galaxy Leader, which was passing through the Red Sea south of Jeddah. Masked and armed men rappelled down to the deck, raised Yemeni and Palestinian flags, and directed the ship to the nearby port of Hodeida. Galaxy Leader has remained there ever since, becoming a selfie hotspot and a...
Laleh Khalili talks to Tom about the mythology of covert military operatives, through romance novels, self-help books and, more recently, the business guru, in the form of retired US army general Stanley...
Laleh Khalili joins Tom to discuss the case of Arif Naqvi, who for many on the right epitomises the idea of the 'woke capitalist', and what goes wrong when private equity firms look to profit from public...
The shipping industry has worked hard to hide itself from view, and we have colluded with it. We don’t want to think about how that 90 per cent of everything got here. The labour of an entire industry...
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