Sheharyar Imran

Sheharyar Imran specializes in the field of international relations theory with a focus on global political economy. He teaches courses on race and racism in global politics; capitalism and empire; political ecology and environmental politics; and anticolonial and abolitionist politics.

Sheharyar’s current research examines the colony as a laboratory for the (re)production of capitalist modernity. He is working on a book manuscript titled Colonial Worldmaking: Race, Capital, and Abolition in the Indo-Atlantic World. The book examines the colonial roots of the liberal-capitalist international order, particularly its formation within the British empire across the Indian and Atlantic Ocean worlds around the historical hinge of nineteenth-century abolition. It takes the abolition of the slave trade within the empire as key to the production of an international order structured simultaneously around liberal ideas of commerce and the widespread expansion of imperial relations, notably across Asia, in order to sustain the colonial global economy. Analyzing core liberal pillars upholding this system, including private property, free labor, and the open circulation of capital—and their formation within colonial plantations, commodity frontiers, and carceral environments—the book argues that liberal economic principles have been shaped through illiberal processes of land theft, ecological degradation, and anti-Black/anti-Asian exploitation and containment.

Sheharyar has received grants and awards from the American Political Science Association (Foundations of Political Theory Section); the Chloe Center for the Critical Study of Racism, Immigration, and Colonialism; and the Program in Medicine, Science, and the Humanities at Johns Hopkins University.

• BA: Vassar College
• MA: Johns Hopkins University
• PhD: Johns Hopkins University