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Podcast: New Books in Economic and Business History
Episode: Ahmad Shokr, "Harvests of Liberation: Cotton, Capitalism, and the End of Empire in Egypt" (Stanford UP, 2025)
Description: Harvests of Liberation offers a critical reinterpretation of Egypt’s path to decolonization through the lens of its most important export crop: cotton. In this richly detailed and methodologically innovative work, historian Ahmad Shokr shifts the focus from nationalist rhetoric and elite politics to the material infrastructures, commodity chains, and agrarian reforms that underpinned Egypt’s transformation from colonial dependency to postcolonial developmental state.
Spanning the early twentieth century through the era of Gamal Abdel Nasser, the book traces how the cotton economy structured both imperial domination and national aspirations. Shokr examines how British colonial rule fostered monop...