Joan Chaker is an economist and historian of capitalism currently completing her PhD at Harvard. Her dissertation, “A Muleteers’ History of Global Capitalism: Social, Environmental, and Cultural Transformation in Nineteenth-Century Lebanon,” traces the entanglement of mobility, labor, and accumulation in the modern Middle East. She is also a member of Public Works Studio in Beirut. In a previous incarnation, she worked as a money-markets trader in Amsterdam and London.