Laleh Khalili teaches at the University of Exeter. Her books include Sinews of War and Trade: Shipping and Capitalism in the Arabian Peninsula, Heroes and Martyrs of Palestine: The Politics of National Commemoration, The Corporeal Life of Seafaring and, most recently, Extractive Capitalism.
Two years after the end of the Civil War, William Seward, the US secretary of state, negotiated the purchase of ‘Russian America’ – Alaska – for $7.2 million, equivalent to $165 million today. The New York Times noted that the acquisition
includes the strip four hundred miles long, which extends down the coast, thus excluding a large part of British America from the...
In October 1961, John F. Kennedy and the entire White House press corps decamped to Fort Bragg, North Carolina, to watch US airborne forces put on a show of power. It was the president’s first foray out of the Boston-Washington DC corridor to ‘meet the people’, and in his acerbic book The Best and the Brightest, published a decade later, David Halberstam described it as...
You may remember Palantir as the company that was given access to all of NHS England’s data in November 2023, in order to create a Federated Data Platform. The cost was £330 million – the largest NHS technology contract to date. Palantir’s first sales pitch to a UK agency came much earlier, in 2008, when its representatives gave a demo to an enthusiastic audience at...
When I started developing software for the management consulting firms I worked for in the mid-1990s, we still had to connect to the World Wide Web on slow and clunky lines to access our coding work. The laptops we carried weighed at least five kilogrammes and couldn’t be used for actual programming. One of our clients was a matchmaking company, which operated a number of...
The declarations about Greenland and the Panama Canal are more than just another example of Trump’s trolling-as-policymaking. They are expressions of US imperial atavism.
Laleh Khalili talks to Tom about the mythology of covert military operatives, through romance novels, self-help books and, more recently, the business guru, in the form of retired US army general Stanley...
Laleh Khalili joins Tom to discuss the case of Arif Naqvi, who for many on the right epitomises the idea of the 'woke capitalist', and what goes wrong when private equity firms look to profit from public...
The shipping industry has worked hard to hide itself from view, and we have colluded with it. We don’t want to think about how that 90 per cent of everything got here. The labour of an entire industry...
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