Professor Tehila Sasson

My research and teaching focus on the British empire and the international order from 1850 until the present. I study the social structures of inequalities, particularly their gendered and racial articulations, the history of economic thoughts, and the legal architecture of the economy. Drawing on national, international, and nongovernmental archives from around and beyond the British empire, my work situates Britain’s history within a global and imperial frame. My work emphasizes that a global lens can help uncover both international structures of inequalities as well as the lived gendered and racial experiences of the global economy, whether it is on a high street in Manchester or a factory floor in Ahmedabad. I have written about the history of nonprofits and fair trade, decolonization and neoliberalism, development aid and gender, boycotts and corporate social responsibility, and the relationship between humanitarianism and empire.

I serve as a co-editor for the journal Modern British History (OUP) and sit on the editorial board of the Histories of Internationalism series at Bloomsbury Press. Before joining the University of Oxford, I was an Assistant Professor of Britain and the World in the Department of History at Emory University. I completed my PhD in History at the University of California, Berkeley, in December 2015. I then held a Past & Present postdoctoral fellowship at the Institute for Historical Research, London, and a research associateship at the Center for History and Economics at the University of Cambridge. My work has been supported by numerous fellowships, including the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Mellon Foundation, the American Historical Association, and the British Academy.

Research Interests

My first monograph, The Solidarity Economy: Nonprofits and the Making of Neoliberalism after Empire (Princeton University Press, 2024) is the first economic, intellectual, and cultural history that traces how nonprofits, and especially key NGOs— such as Oxfam, Christian Aid, Save the Children, War on Want and the Intermediate Technologies Development Group— became a major force in the British and the global economy in the second half of the twentieth century. It traces how, between the 1950s and the 1990s, nonprofits used welfare and development programs to create “solidarity markets,” designed to connect consumers with producers in Britain and its empire directly. Drawing on dozens of newly available repositories from nongovernmental, international, national, and business archives, the book follows the political economy of these markets, from handicrafts to tea and coffee production, as well as their limits to deliver fairer trade. It pays particular attention to the gendered and racialized nature of these markets and argues that they inadvertently exacerbated inequalities rather than solved them. I published an article related to the book in The American Historical Review in 2016.

I’m currently at work on two new projects. The first, tentatively titled Discredited: Race and the Politics of Financial Exclusion in Britain and the Caribbean, traces the politics of financial exclusion in Britain and how Afro-Caribbean communities responded to them using alternative banking institutions, from credit unions and informal saving networks to housing and alternative mortgage associations. I have received a British Academy Visiting Fellowship in support of the research for this project.

The second project, working title The Right to Nature, explores how the ownership of natural resources like water, non-fuel minerals, and oil became the heart of international politics in the twentieth century. In support of this work, I have received an International Research Award in Global History administered jointly by the Universities of Heidelberg, Sydney, and Basel.

I also maintain an active research interest in the history of labor, unemployment, and deindustrialization; the history of gender and economics; and the history of feminism.

You can follow me on @TehilaSasson; tsasson.bsky.social; tehilasasson.com