Winter Talks: Laleh Khalili

Join us for a new season of Winter Talks, our lecture series with distinguished speakers pushing forward critical discourse, presented with The New York Review of Books. These evenings invite the public into in-person conversations on cultural issues significant to artists, scholars, and cultural workers. Invited speakers share material in development that bridges culture, technology, and economics. This event is free with RSVP.

In this season’s final program, Laleh Khalili will address the less visible effects of resource sovereignty on political economy, knowledge production, and social relations across the globe. In 1959, nearly 60% of the global reserves in oil were held by five US-based companies, another 18% by two British firms, and the remainder by the USSR, Mexico, and smaller producers. Thirty years later, after the tumultuous struggle for resource sovereignty, nationalization of oil had enacted what has been called “the most concentrated peacetime transfer of wealth in history”. The lecture will focus in particular on the ways the politics of nationalization cascaded into ostensibly apolitical realms including finance, the pricing of oil, geophysics, and the arcana of fiscal legislation.

The presentation runs approximately 45 minutes, followed by a Q&A session.

Laleh Khalili is a professor of Gulf Studies at University of Exeter in the UK and the author or editor of seven books, most recently Sinews of War and Trade: Shipping and Capitalism in the Arabian Peninsula (2020) and Extractive Capitalism: How Commodities and Cronyism Drive the Global Economy (2025).