Joan Chaker is a PhD candidate in the History Department at Harvard University. She received a BA in Economics and an MA in History from the American University of Beirut as well as an MSc in Economics from the London School of Economics. Her previous research focused on the Ottoman tobacco market. She is currently working on a study of the social transformation of the countryside as it joined the global market over the long nineteenth century, told as a collective biography of the mule drivers of Ottoman Lebanon. More generally, her research interests range over Ottoman history, global history, the history of capitalism, and the legal history of money. In a previous incarnation, she worked as a money-markets trader in Amsterdam and London.