He received his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 2012, and subsequently held a joint appointment in the departments of history and economics at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. His interests lie in cultural histories of the economy with a focus on the Indian Ocean world. Johan’s first book, Margins of the Market: Trafficking and Capitalism across the Arabian Sea, was recently published by the University of California Press, and he is now working on a new project on the global history of narcotics and labor.