About Johan

Johan Mathew is currently an Associate Professor of history at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. He previously held a joint appointment in History and Economics at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

Mathew is the author of Margins of the Market: Trafficking and Capitalism across the Arabian Sea (University of California Press, 2016). Drawing on over two years of research in four continents and over a dozen archival collections, this book traces the hidden networks that trafficked slaves, guns and gold across the Arabian Sea in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries. The history of this illicit commerce demonstrates how capitalism is constituted by the constant process of distinguishing and delegitimizing certain forms of exchange as trafficking. Margins of the Market won book prizes from the Middle East Studies Association, the Arab Studies Institute, the Business History Conference and the Economic History Society.

He has published peer reviewed articles on trust in Comparative Studies in Society and History; corruption in History Workshop Journal; economic violence in Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East; and Pan-Islam in The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History. He has also published a chapter on the Khaleeji diaspora in South Asia for a volume that emerged out of an NYU Abu Dhabi Workshop.

While in Abu Dhabi, he is working on his second book, tentatively entitled, “Opiates of the Masses: A Biography of Human Capital.” This research explores the consumption of cannabis, opium and other narcotics with particular concern for how and why they are consumed by the working classes in the global south. Drawing on research in India, Singapore, South Africa and hopefully Morocco, the book uses narcotics as a lens to understand how laboring human beings were reduced to units of human capital.