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My work focuses on histories of law, capitalism, and infrastructure in the late Ottoman Empire and modern Persian Gulf. In particular, I am interested in how the city of Basra, in what is now southern Iraq, became a hub of capital, expertise, and sociality that reshaped agricultural, economic, and political geographies of the northern Gulf. In addition, I am interested in concessions as a tool which reshaped urban spaces around the world in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Concessions, which often took the form of monopoly, came into conflict with existing ways of organizing and managing urban space, resources, and labor. I am interested in thinking about this as a global process rooted first in the transformation of Middle Eastern cities.

CL Cole, "The radical instability of the present," Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East," 42 (2024): 362-77.
CL Cole, "The Ottoman Model: Basra and the Making of Qajar Reform, 1881-1889," Comparative Studies in Society and History 64 (2022): 1024-54.

Middle East Studies Association
American Historical Association
American Society for Environmental History