This panel instead asks what the history of capitalism might look like if we truly recentered it, both spatially and methodologically. Bringing together work on capitalism across the Middle East, Indian Ocean, and South Asia, this panel uses biography—of capitalist individuals and families—as an analytical angle to reflect on the trajectories of capitalism between the Mediterranean and Indian Ocean from the early modern period to the present day. What accumulation strategies did capitalists pursue? And how did they both reflect and shape broader relations of power? The panel examines how four actors—an early modern Ottoman merchant family involved in intra-Asian commerce, a nineteenth-century Basra grain and weapons merchant, an Aegean tobacco capitalist between the Ottoman Empire and republican Turkey, and a contemporary dhow seafarer traveling across the Indian Ocean—navigated shifting commercial landscapes, opportunities and risks associated, systems of debt, economies of violence, diverse imperial and national orders, and political transitions.

The panel emphasizes the need for research across multiple languages, cultural spaces, and theoretical approaches in order to transcend conventional Anglo-centric narratives of capitalism. By grounding this research in biographies, the panel suggests concretely how we might avoid viewing capitalism as an external imposition or a universal and linear story, but instead uncover diverse trajectories of accumulation at multiple scales.

The first paper traces commercial activities of the early modern Ottoman Çelebi family, in the Indian Ocean, uncovering the tendency of prominent Ottoman firms involved in intra-Asian trade to settle outside the empire and to adopt new identities. The second paper follows Basra grain merchant ‘Abd al-Qadir al-Khudayri to show how capitalists continued to use tax-farms to frame investment strategies into the twentieth century, creating a regional economy of debt and violence and turning an Ottoman politics of order into new forms of disorder. Through the story of tobacco capitalist Adam Adamopoulos, the third paper discusses the shifts in the social, material, and demographic orders that capital accumulation relied on during the transition from the Ottoman Empire to Republican Turkey. The fourth paper traces the movement of dhow captain Yusuf, demonstrating how contemporary seafarers navigate sanction regimes to capture profit opportunities and produce value across the Indian Ocean.

Through these biographies, the panel shows how different arcs of accumulation, value-making, belonging, and violence have shaped the past and present of capitalism in the world between the Mediterranean Sea and the Indian Ocean.