This project explores the moral and social dynamics of trade in the city of Aleppo, then Syria’s commercial hub, before the outbreak of the Syrian uprising in 2011. It starts from the assumption that Aleppo was not simply a second city to Damascus, nor a site of political opposition to the Baathist regime, but had been fashioned by Aleppo’s merchant families into a dynamic node in an expansive Asian economy, connected to markets in China, central Asia, the Gulf and beyond. As well as identifying these connections, this project seeks to describe the local understandings of economy, value and circulation in which trade in Aleppo was embedded. Drawing on fifteen months of fieldwork in Syria, conducted in 2008-09, this project explores the forms of value, dynamics of trust, and notions of moral personhood, that underpinned trade in Aleppo’s wholesale and retail suqs and textile factories in this period.
Articles
| Games of Civility: Ordinary Ethics in Aleppo’s Bazaar, Ethnos, 84:3, 2019 |
| “An Abundance of Meaning”: Ramadan as an Enchantment of Society and Economy in Syria, HAU Journal of Ethnographic Theory, Volume 18(3), 2018 |
| “Order” and “Civility”: Middle-Class Imaginaries of Citizenship before the Syrian Uprising, Anthropological Theory, vol. 18(2-3), 2018 |
| Aleppo’s Yarn Market: Trust and Speculation in a Time of Economic Transformation, , 2014 |
| Money and Commerce in Aleppo: the success and failure of a businessman in Aleppo, 1980s-2009, , 2014 |