Rana Baker
Lecturer in the History of the Middle East
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 land, debt, money and development in nineteenth and early twentieth-century Egypt.
Using the Ottoman-Egyptian archives as sites of theoretical production, her book project examines how Ottoman-Egyptian categories and forms of organising of spiritual and material prosperity were transformed through colonial practices and the introduction of 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.
Biography
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
Critical political economy
Histories of capitalism
Colonial modernity
Land and debt
Histories of money
Egypt and the Middle East.