I specialize in the economic and legal history of the Gulf, Indian Ocean and Islamic world. I’m the author of two books: A Sea of Debt: Law and Economic Life in the Western Indian Ocean, 1780-1950 (2017), which won several awards, and Monsoon Voyagers: An Indian Ocean History (2025), as well as a number of other pieces on the Gulf, Indian Ocean, and Islamic world. In my writings, I take on big themes like law, capitalism, empire, and the marketplace, but try to think about them through different vernacular categories that I draw from the archival material itself. I am committed to writing the history of the Gulf and Indian Ocean world from the inside out — to asking new questions from new perspectives, and to think with sources from the region.

My history writing displays two impulses: a desire to write “big” narratives while staying grounded in the micro— in people, pieces of paper, objects, and utterances. In much of my writing, I think about how to write about big concepts from smaller places and vantage points, and how doing so affords us the chance to ask different kinds of questions of our subjects and sources.