Education

B.A. University of Southern California, 2004
M.A. University of Exeter, 2006
Ph.D. Duke University, 2012

Biography

I specialize in the economic and legal history of the Indian Ocean and Islamic world. My book, A Sea of Debt: Law and Economic Life in the Western Indian Ocean, 1780-1950 (Cambridge University Press, 2017) is a legal history of economic life in the Western Indian Ocean, told through the story of the Arab and Indian settlement and commercialization of East Africa during the nineteenth century. It was the recipient of the J. Willard Hurst Prize (awarded by the Law and Society Association), the Jerry Bentley prize (awarded by the World History Association), and the Peter Gonville Stein book award (given by the American Society for Legal History). I'm currently writing an Indian Ocean history told from the deck of a twentieth-century dhow, drawing on the archives of a number of merchant and dhow captain families from Kuwait. The project (essentially a microhistory that unfolds over a broad canvas) takes on issues of global capitalism, international law, empire, and mobility in historical writing. Although I maintain a biding commitment to legal history, I have recently developed an interest in questions of scale and narration in historical writing (particularly in global history, transregional history, and microhistory) and the questions they raise for how we write about more abstract concepts like law and capitalism.