Fouad Makki is a social theorist who studies the historical sociology of Northeast Africa, the postwar development initiative, the political economy of agrarian change, and the place of colonialism in the making of modernity. Educated at Cornell, where he received a degree in Comparative Studies in Society and History, Makki completed his Ph. D. in sociology at Binghamton University. He joined the Department of Development Sociology at Cornell in 2006 where he teaches courses on social theory, theories of development, and the historical sociology of modernity. He has published various essays on state formation, nationalism, and development including most recently; ‘the spatial ecology of power: long-distance trade and state formation in northeast Africa’ (Journal of Historical Sociology 2011); ‘empire and modernity: dynastic centralization and official nationalism in late imperial Ethiopia’ (Cambridge Review of International Affairs 2011); and ‘the empire of capital and the remaking of center-periphery relations’ (Third World Quarterly 2004). His current research examines land grabbing in Ethiopia and Africa in the context of the world economic, energy, and food crises and the great global enclosures of our times.