William Gervase Clarence-Smith is Professor of the Economic History of Asia and Africa, at SOAS, University of London. He is currently researching the history of Palestinian, and wider ‘Syrian’, migration to the Philippines. He is also looking at the experience of Nazareth in World War I, with particular reference to Sayyid Wajih al-Kilani, the self-proclaimed shaykh al-Islam of the Philippines.
He has published Islam and the abolition of slavery (Hurst 2006), and co-edited (with Ulrike Freitag) Hadhrami traders, scholars and statesmen in the Indian Ocean, 1750s to 1960s (Brill 1997).
He teaches the history of Islamic reform in Southeast Asia, and is the chief editor of the Journal of Global History (CUP).
Imagining Jerusalem 