Simon Jackson

I am an Assistant Professor (Lecturer) in Modern Middle Eastern History at the University of Birmingham, where from 2014-17 I also held a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship and where I currently direct the British Academy 'Commodities of Empire' research network. I earned a BA in Modern History from the University of Oxford and a PhD in History from NYU. I have also held Max Weber and Jean Monnet Post-Doctoral Fellowships in History at the European University Institute in Florence.

I'm interested in the political-economy of colonial empire—the ways that power hierarchies interact with economic life, from local contexts to global ones. My approach has often emphasised the impact of war on economic life, and the ways that people imagine possible economic futures in contexts of crisis.

To date I have worked on imperial economic development in the French League of Nations Mandate in Syria and Lebanon, on the history of Fordism in the post-Ottoman Middle East, and on the global history of colonial commodities and natural resources.

My next project is a global and imperial history of North African phosphate, showing how imperial mineral extraction influenced the emergence of modern global food production regimes.