Itamar Toussia Cohen

Itamar Toussia Cohen is a historian working at the nexus between Indian Ocean World studies, imperial history, and New History of Capitalism. His dissertation, provisionally titled Imperial Offshore: Aden and the Infrastructure of Empire, focuses on the British colonial port of Aden (modern-day Republic of Yemen), theorizing the port as an imperial precursor to infrastructural sites of the modern, neoliberal offshore economy, such as Dubai. With particular attention to the port's Parsi and other Gujarati merchant communities, Itamar is interested in the generative role of native merchant capital in propping up and sustaining imperial spaces such as Aden, as well as in unearthing social histories of Indian communities in Arabia.

Itamar is the convener of the Indian Ocean at the Age of Empire seminar, a fortnightly online seminar focusing primarily on themes of economic activity and change in account of society, culture, institutions, and the state across the Indian Ocean littoral, such as the intellectual, cultural, material, and legal underpinnings of trans-regional mercantile relations; vernacular forms of capital accumulation and incorporation; and the manner in which these practices informed relations of gender, race, and identity across oceanic space.

Details and links to talk can be found on the seminar website, www.capitalismsoftheindianocean.com

Supervisor: Faisal Devji