"On Rivercide: The Colonial Origins of Creative Destruction”
We are pleased to welcome Timothy Mitchell, Professor of Middle Eastern Studies at Columbia University, to be our speaker at this year’s Archipelago lecture
"On Rivercide: The Colonial Origins of Creative Destruction”
In 1902, British irrigation engineers in Egypt completed the first stage of the destruction of the River Nile. In destroying the river, they also eliminated an understanding of the forms of life, human and nonhuman, that the river had sustained. The ecological crisis that followed helped shape a different mode of understanding, the modern science of economics, including the idea of capitalism as ‘creative destruction’. This understanding of capitalism’s destructive dynamic continues to misinform our world.
The lecture with Q&A will be 17:00-19:00, followed by a mingle.
Timothy Mitchell writes about colonialism, political economy, the politics of energy, and the making of expert knowledge. Trained in the fields of law, history, and political theory, he works across the disciplinary boundaries of history and the social sciences. Many of his writings explore materials from the history and contemporary politics of Egypt, where he has conducted research over many years. He is the author of multiple books, including Colonizing Egypt, Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-Politics, Modernity and Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil, all of which have had a profound impact on the fields of energy and environmental history and science and technology studies.
He is currently working on a study of durability, examining how the more durable apparatuses for capturing wealth characteristic of late nineteenth-century colonialism (railways, canals, apartment buildings, dams) engineered a new method of extracting income from the future—a future we now inhabit precariously today. Like much of his work, this research combines the study of the built world, technical devices, ecological processes, and the history of economic and political concepts. Mitchell is the William B. Ransford Professor of Middle Eastern Studies at Columbia University. His is based in the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies, for which he served as chair from 2011 until 2017.
