On time Barak, On
2013., 20130725, 2013, 2013-07-19
eBook
In this pioneering history of transportation and communication in the modern Middle East, On Barak argues that contrary to accepted wisdom technological modernity in Egypt did not drive a sense of ...time focused on standardization only. Surprisingly, the introduction of the steamer, railway, telegraph, tramway, and telephone in colonial Egypt actually triggered the development of unique timekeeping practices that resignified and subverted the typical modernist infatuation with expediency and promptness. These countertempos, predicated on uneasiness over “dehumanizing” European standards of efficiency, sprang from and contributed to non-linear modes of arranging time. Barak shows how these countertempos formed and developed with each new technological innovation during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, contributing to a particularly Egyptian sense of time that extends into the present day, exerting influence over contemporary political language in the Arab world. The universal notion of a modern mechanical standard time and the deviations supposedly characterizing non-Western settings “from time immemorial,” On Time provocatively argues, were in fact mutually constitutive and mutually reinforcing.
During the long 19th century, British coal proliferated throughout the Ottoman Empire in increasing quantity, rapidity, and regularity via junctions and political arrangements that became evermore ...stable and dominant. The British used coal export to project their power elsewhere, offshoring the Industrial Revolution by building an infrastructure that could support it overseas and connect it to existing facets of the imperial project. Examining this “outsourcing” and the importance of foreign coal markets to industrialization helps provincialize the steam engine and anchor it in a global context. It also allows us to explore the impact of fossil energy on the Middle East and the ways coal both set the stage for the arrival of oil and informed the possibilities for translating carbon power into politics. Coal, the article suggests, animated political participation in England while reinforcing authoritarian tendencies in the Middle East.
In this pioneering history of transportation and communication in the modern Middle East, On Barak argues that contrary to accepted wisdom technological modernity in Egypt did not drive a sense of ...time focused on standardization only. Surprisingly, the introduction of the steamer, railway, telegraph, tramway, and telephone in colonial Egypt actually triggered the development of unique timekeeping practices that resignified and subverted the typical modernist infatuation with expediency and promptness. These countertempos, predicated on uneasiness over "dehumanizing" European standards of efficiency, sprang from and contributed to non-linear modes of arranging time. Barak shows how these countertempos formed and developed with each new technological innovation during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, contributing to a particularly Egyptian sense of time that extends into the present day, exerting influence over contemporary political language in the Arab world. The universal notion of a modern mechanical standard time and the deviations supposedly characterizing non-Western settings "from time immemorial, " On Time provocatively argues, were in fact mutually constitutive and mutually reinforcing.
This article questions the viability of separating technology from politics by examining how the introduction of modern streets in Alexandria - newly paved with a hard and durable surface, fitted ...with tram-rails, lined with poles, illuminated, and built over a modern network of drainage and water supply pipes - affected the city's evolving politics and social life. This history, most literally 'from below', aims to reinstate the agency of materials and networks as a key element of the complex social evolution of the city.
Discusses changes to the calendar in Egypt. The author notes that the 'Hijri' calendar based on Islamic history began to be supplanted by the Gregorian calendar in the late 19th century, refers to ...the cultural implications of the change with reference to the increasing influence of Europe and European media at the time, and considers issues relating to the simultaneous existence of worldviews and practices with reference to Arabic media and telegraphy. He traces the increasing use of Gregorian dating systems in Egypt noting that their use was often combined with that of Islamic and Coptic calendars, highlights the influence of commerce on the growing use of the Gregorian calendar, and explains that the gradual supplanting of the Hijri calenadar and its relegation to religious uses were mediated by a number of Islamic reformers. He focuses on the influence of the international and national telegraph systems, international news and the Egyptian railway system on Egyptian culture, and assesses the overall impact of the new approach to time-keeping on Egyptian life.
Times of Tamaddun On Barak
Women and the City, Women in the City,
09/2014
Book Chapter
Tamaddun, a key concept standing in turn-of-the-century Egypt for “civilization” or “urbanity,” is usually associated with space, and particularly with the space of the city (madina), which was ...undergoing dramatic transformations, involving significant social change. For example, with the introduction of the tramway into Cairo in 1896, the city tripled its size within roughly two decades, witnessing new rural-to-urban migration, suburbanization, and various other transformations that drew much criticism as well as ample praise. Technologies such as the tramway, as well as the telephone (introduced into Egyptian cities in 1881) or the automobile (appearing in 1903) allowed urban centers simultaneously
THE GROWING DEPENDENCE OF THE colonial project in Egypt on technologies of rule such as railways, tramways, and telegraphs—its “networked” nature—made it pervasive and effective. Yet it also opened ...up unforeseen avenues of anticolonial contestation for the Egyptian operators and users of these technologies. As a result, the technological aspects of colonialism in Egypt helped demarcate the spectrum of possibilities for anticolonial action and informed the shapes and foci of anticolonial modes of affinity, first and foremost nationalism.
It has become commonplace to assume that by connecting distant places and peoples and creating a shared temporality, technological networks
THE TERM MIDDLE EAST WAS born in the beginning of the twentieth century.¹ It would have been unthinkable without a series of spatial transformations in the nineteenth century, including the ...deployment of new steamer and telegraph lines, railways, and the Suez Canal, which together constituted a new West-East route via Egypt and gradually replaced the long sea voyage to India around the Cape of Good Hope. The geography we now deem natural was produced by these technologies of transportation and communication.
The longue durée expansion of European trade and colonialism was shaped by the monopoly of Muslim merchants, cities, states,
