Harvests of Liberation: Disha Karnad Jani Interviews Ahmad Shokr

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.”