Dr. Paul Anderson (Cambridge): "Syrian Merchants in Yiwu: Locating the Middle East in Asia"

This talk offers an ethnographic account and theorisation of some of the commercial geograpies and economic networks that have connected the market city of Yiwu in south-eastern China to the Middle East over the past two decades. Analysts have also often highlighted the Muslim and Arab ethnic nature of the transnational economic networks which connect Yiwu to markets across the Middle East. Instead of adopting a network governance approach which sees these networks as embedded in a shared culture or ethnicity, which furnishes the possibility of trust, Dr. Paul Anderson takes a structural analysis approach. In this approach, traders act as brokers, moving between different geographies.

Dr. Paul Anderson is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Cambridge. He is a social anthropologist interested in the articulation of economic, moral and religious life. He has conducted ethnographic fieldwork in Syria, Turkey, China, in the US and the UAE. His recent book on Syrian merchants, published in March 2023 with Cornell University Press, is entitled Exchange Idealogies: Commerce, Language and Patriarchy in Pre-Conflict Aleppo.

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