Dr Itamar Toussia Cohen

Background:

I joined Magdalen as a Fellow by Examination in Asia and Middle East Studies in October 2025. Before that, I completed a DPhil in History at the University of Oxford, after obtaining an MA in Middle East History from Tel Aviv University.

Research:

My research explores themes of economic life across the Indian Ocean during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Drawing on sources in English, Gujarati, Arabic, and Italian, I explore how evolving cultural, material, intellectual, and legal frameworks shaped economic interactions among a diverse cast of actors across the region. Although my work is grounded in the Indian Ocean, the questions that motivate it extend beyond its shores. I am interested in the historical development of global capitalism and the shifting spatial dynamics that, at different moments, have underpinned global interconnectedness. My aim as a historian of the Indian Ocean is to situate its regional history within this broader story of global transformation.

My DPhil dissertation examines the British colonial port of Aden, which between 1839 and 1967 grew into one of the world’s busiest coal and later oil refuelling stations and a key node in the making of empire and global capitalism. I approach Aden not only as a logistical hub but as a laboratory of governance, where experiments in law, labour control, and commercial regulation insulated global capital from local claims and anticipated later developments such as free-trade zones and offshore economies. Drawing on family archives and previously untapped community sources in Gujarati, my thesis focuses on South Asian capitalist groups who, as I show, did not merely operate within the infrastructures of empire but actively produced and sustained them. In doing so, my research rethinks the history of capitalism from the perspective of the infrastructures and intermediaries that connected the Indian Ocean to the wider world.

My main current project traces the history of salt in the Indian Ocean during the first half of the twentieth century. It examines the entanglements between Indian capitalists, British and Italian imperial authorities, and Arab and African workers, showing how Italian state interventions in East Africa challenged British free-trade policy, disrupted labour migrations, and forced a rethinking of British-Indian jurisdictional boundaries. Adopting an oceanic perspective, the project reconsiders salt’s place in the Indian nationalist movement, showing how production by overseas Indian entrepreneurs intersected—and at times collided—with emerging territorial and cultural ideas of economic nationalism.

At the same time, I am pursuing several smaller projects on the intellectual history of sovereignty and statehood in the Indian Ocean, postcolonial infrastructural development, and South Asian merchant networks in the Arabian Peninsula.

Publications:

‘“Lost in Translation”: Extraterritoriality, Subjecthood, and Subjectivity in the Anglo–Yemeni Treaty of 1821’, Law and History Review 42:(4), 2024, 785-807

‘Parsi Capital and Imperial Infrastructure: Shipping and Shopping in the Port of Aden, 1840-1888’, Journal of Global History 19:(2), 2024, 260-280