Dr Paul Anderson

Exchange Ideologies: Commerce, Language and Patriarchy in Pre-Conflict Aleppo

My new book (2023), Exchange Ideologies, documents the social world of Aleppo's traders before the destruction of the city, exploring changing conceptions of commerce in Syria. Syria's traders have been seen as embodying a timeless culture of "the bazaar," or an ahistorical Islamic culture of trade. Other accounts portray them as venal figures, motivated only by profit, and commerce as a purely instrumental pursuit. Rejecting both approaches, Paul Anderson traces the diverse social structures, and notions of language, through which Aleppo's merchants understood and construed commerce and the figure of the merchant during a period of economic liberalization in the 2000s. Rather than seeing these social structures and representations as expressions of a timeless bazaar culture, or as shaped only by Islamic tradition, Exchange Ideologies relates them to processes of politically managed economic liberalization and the Syrian regime's attempts to ensure its own survival in the midst of change. In doing so, Anderson provides an account of economic liberalization in Syria as a social and cultural process as much as a political and economic one.

The Afterlives of Urban Muslim Asia: Alternative Imaginaries of Society and Polity

It is widely accepted the conflict and large-scale migrations over the past century, of minorities and Muslims, have led to "decosmopolitanisation". However, interreligious relations sometimes persist in older and newer diasporic contexts, and in appeals to shared urban heritage. This comparative research programme, led by the University of Sussex and in collaboration with the Universities of Copenhagen and Cambridge, analyses the ways in which both everyday living and projects of the imagination invoke urban imaginaries, and the extent to which these transcend (or reinforce) religious, sectarian, national and ethnic boundaries. http://www.sussex.ac.uk/global/research/researchprojects/afterlivesofurb...

A New Silk Road? Mercantile Connections across Asia

Another strand of my recent work aims to describe the dynamics of long-distance trading networks connecting China to markets in West Asia and Arabic-speaking countries. It is part of a European Research Council-funded project, led by Professor Magnus Marsden, entitled ‘Trust, Global Traders, and Commodities in a Chinese International City’, documenting the trading networks and activities centred on the city of Yiwu in south east China. The focus of this work, which is also supported by the Centre of Islamic Studies, is on the history of trading routes between China and the Arab world, the social dynamics and identities, and forms of trust/mistrust underpinning these long-distance trading networks.