This paper reinterprets the Ottoman public debt crises of the late nineteenth century as part of a global history of modern accounting and statistics. Scholars have devoted much attention to public debt in the late Ottoman Empire’s economic and political transformations. From 1881 until World War I, an increasing number of the Empire’s most productive sectors fell under the aegis of the Ottoman Public Debt Administration, which introduced new techniques in agriculture, mineral extraction, and transportation. Meanwhile, in Cairo, the Caisse de la Dette helped pave the way for indirect colonial rule under the British Occupation. These developments are centerpieces of a rich literature in late Ottoman economic history, political and diplomatic history, and political economy. But public debt can also be understood, using methods from science studies, as a problem of knowledge. In addition to posing economic, political, and legal challenges to the late Ottoman state, the negotiation and management of public debt also posed new problems of quantification for Ottoman bureaucrats, as well as European investors, financiers, and statesmen. In fact, what economic and political history have treated as fundamental facts of the Ottoman debt—how much of it there was, and to whom it was owed—were questions that eluded easy consensus in the late nineteenth century: a period, as historians of science have shown, when the growth of bureaucratic nation-states and empires drove the emergence of new forms of statistical reasoning. In this light, it becomes necessary to ask how particular social groups, from the OPDA in Istanbul to the Council of Foreign Bondholders in London, came to agree on the premises and techniques that would govern the quantification of Ottoman debt. In pursuing an answer to this question, this paper demonstrates how public debt linked late Ottomans with the newly independent states of Central and South America, the other major region in which European bankers facilitated ruinous loans in the late nineteenth century. Focusing on the network of the English banker Haim Guedalla, and drawing on the records of the Council of Foreign Bondholders, the paper argues that Ottoman financial crises were shaped by, and contributed to, the emergence of globalized techniques for managing public debt.

This paper examines the processes and politics that characterized technological innovations pursued in the name of increasing “scientific” or “modern” agricultural practices in late Ottoman and interwar Syria. While scholarship has dealt with a number of the economic and social aspects of agricultural developments during this period, it has not examined in any detail the technological changes that accompanied these developments and their implications. Starting in the late nineteenth century, government administrators and officials, at first Ottoman and later French and Syrian, embarked on a range of activities to facilitate the introduction of new technologies into agricultural practice, albeit on different scales and with varied motives and goals. In so doing, they applied machines and translated practices that had often originated in other social, economic, and ecological spaces. These efforts confronted a number of challenges, which inspired, on the one hand, a variety of strategies to accommodate local practice to the exigencies of these technologies and, on the other, attempts to adapt technologies to local practice. Using reports, periodicals, and correspondence from archives and libraries in Turkey, France, and Lebanon, this paper traces three aspects of this process. First, it highlights examples of the economic, social, and ecological challenges that confronted officials aiming to implement these new technologies and considers the solutions proposed and the resistances these at times provoked. Second, the paper demonstrates how the shift in imperial space precipitated by the imposition of the French mandate after World War I subjected the circulation of technology and the processes implicated in its adoption to a new set of political considerations. Finally, it traces how throughout both the late Ottoman and the interwar period, the rhetoric used to justify and promote these technologies worked to ensure a distinction between them and existing practice, obscuring these technologies’ dependence on local knowledge for effective adoption. I argue that the gradual and piecemeal adoption of technology during this period was not only a consequence of social, economic, and ecological obstacles, but was also a product of the highly politicized process its transfer and implementation involved, a politicization that only increased in the post-war period as the region transitioned from being Ottoman provinces to mandates within the French imperial sphere.

In 1906, the Palestinian-born educator David Yellin published an article on Hebrew education, in which he identified Palestine as the ideal location to “train up a [new, Jewish] generation rich in scientific and general knowledge.” In saying this, Yellin was voicing an attitude that was prevalent among all Zionist statebuilders, from Theodor Herzl to Arthur Ruppin, Chaim Weizmann, David Ben-Gurion, and many others. Indeed, it is often overlooked that those Zionists who had the greatest impact on the actual creation of a Jewish community in Palestine were not just committed nationalists, but also committed high modernists, striving to become “modern” by organizing society according to rational scientific principles. Moreover, scientific achievement would serve as a justification of the Zionist project to the outside world. In fact, non-Jewish support for Zionism often homed in on the potential of a Jewish state to contribute to science. The prominent British statesman Leo Amery, for instance, saw Zionism as a “great constructive experiment” whose chief virtue was in making Palestine into “a kind of colonial laboratory” that could test “the latest developments in science and agriculture.” Drawing on archives in Israel, Palestine, and Britain, this paper seeks to recover the importance of science to Zionist statebuilding. It explores how cutting-edge science informed Zionist state-building efforts on the ground in Palestine; and how members of the Zionist movement organized scientific research in Palestine so as to project an image of progress and modernity. It argues that in order to understand science’s role in the making of the Jewish state, we must consider the scalar entanglements that defined scientific ideals in the interwar period, and gave it its epistemically privileged position, not just in the field of knowledge production, but also on the arena of high diplomacy. It thus brings together, among other things, the reorganization of scientific research after a model pioneered by the German Kaiser-Wilhelm Gesellschaft, founded in 1911; munitions research during World War I; and the “colonial” science of managing commercial flows and calories.

The Qatar Biobank, an institution within the Qatar Foundation for Education, Science and Community Development (founded in 1995 by Sheikh Hamad Bin Khalifa Al Thani and Sheikha Moza Bint Nasser), collects bodily samples and measurements of Qatari nationals and long-term residents to provide data for researchers investigating the biological basis for disease. Recruitment to the pilot program was initiated in December 2012, and 1,200 samples were collected between September 2013 and October 2014, with the aim of collecting over 60,000 samples by 2019. The stated goals of this facility include: to provide data for biomedical research that focuses on the primary health concerns of the region (cardiovascular disease, obesity, diabetes, and cancer), to understand connections between the health/genes and lifestyle/environment of residents of Qatar, and to improve and safeguard the health of future generations of Qataris. Moreover, the Biobank is presented as filling a lacuna in a global network of large-scale population based studies by providing the first facility for this form of research in the Gulf region. This presentation examines the Qatar Biobank in the context of the institutionalization of medical practice in the Arab Gulf from the early twentieth century to the present. I argue that the Biobank research repository serves to legitimize narratives of exclusionary Qatari ethno-national identities by engaging with global scientific networks of mapping the human genome and forming population categories. Finally, I suggest that the Biobank narrates a particular version of the Arabian Peninsula’s genetic history in the processes of framing disease and stating which of the region’s residents will define the future of Qatar’s health status. Using the Qatar Biobank as a case study, this presentation examines how global scientific networks and concepts of genetic communities adapt to Qatari society and state agendas. Following the work of Sandra Soo-Jin Lee, I approach biobanks as “unique social artifacts that concretize assumptions about population boundaries to organize and sort human samples” (2015). Specifically, I analyze how the Biobank project defines the Qatari community by engaging with a global scientific discourse, methods of recruiting participants and fashioning them as research subjects, and how the Biobank presents itself as simultaneously complying with Islamic law and modern research methods. My research on this institution is based on an interview with the acting director of the Biobank, a site visit, local news coverage, and publications and recruitment material produced by the Biobank.