INDIAN OCEAN EMPIRE
I N T H E
AGE OF
ABDEL RAZZAQ TAKRITI (University of Houston)
Southern Arabian Revolutions: Challenging Colonial Capitalism
in the Indian Ocean
From the early 1960s until 1990, a revolutionary wind swept across the British-controlled areas of Southern Arabia and their Indian Ocean shores. This resulted in the independence of South Yemen in 1967 and the creation of liberated areas in the southernmost Omani province of Dhufar between 1965 and 1976. It also led to the proliferation of socialist experiments that challenged dominant colonial economic models. This talk will explore these experiments, accounting for their political, economic, social, and anti-colonial significance at the height of the Cold War.
Abdel Razzaq Takriti is Arab-American Educational Foundation Chair in Modern Arab History and Founding Director of the Arab-American Educational Foundation Center for Arab Studies at the University of Houston. He is currently serving as the Mahmoud Darwish Visiting Professor of Palestinian Studies at Brown University. He is the author of Monsoon Revolution: Republicans, Sultans, and Empires in Oman, 1965-1976 (Oxford University Press, 2013).