This essay examines the politics of visibility of the Aramco-affiliated Trans-Arabian Pipeline (Tapline) between 1950 and 1975, and follows Brian Larkin to analyze the “poetics” of infrastructures like Tapline as “metapragmatic objects, signs of themselves deployed in particular circulatory regimes to establish sets of effects.” Rejecting the notions common to consumer- and state-oriented studies of infrastructure that invisibility is a definitional characteristic of infrastructure itself, and that infrastructures are primarily made visible through state propaganda or accidental failure, this essay argues that Tapline was rendered differentially visible to distinct audiences including consumers, workers, citizens, and governments; by multiple actors including corporations, governments, and insurgents; and through distinct mediums including engineering design, print, film, and sabotage. How Tapline was rendered visible or invisible, and to whom, was central to the politics of that infrastructural assemblage. To make this argument, this essay foregrounds forms of visibility typically overlooked in historical studies of infrastructure. First, after acknowledging that Tapline was largely invisible to consumers, this essay will compensate for infrastructure studies’ lack of attention to labor by showing how Tapline’s systems were directly visible and tangible to the workers whose labor made it function. Second, building on work by Brian Larkin and Rania Ghosn, it will highlight Tapline’s use of what I call the “corporate technological sublime,” which framed the pipeline and its construction in awe-inducing print and film spectacles to display the companies’ technical prowess and ability to effect modernizing change through private initiative. Third, it will examine the inverse: the “technological mundane,” used to educate rather than awe audiences by simplifying Tapline’s massive, complex operations to the point of intelligibility. Finally, it will examine the “insurgent counter-sublime”: a political and aesthetic tactic, used by saboteurs including the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, that rendered Tapline’s facilities visible by destroying them and spurring the press to circulate spectacular images of their destruction. In such cases, infrastructure was not just made visible through its breakdown, but through intentional sabotage that framed that breakdown as an insurgent spectacle. This essay is based primarily on official Tapline publications, including the company’s in-house magazine The Pipeline Periscope, articles published in its sister company’s Aramco World, and Tapline-commissioned films such as “The Story of Tapline (Qi??at Tablayn).” It will also make use of Lebanese newspapers such as al-Nahar and Le Jour that published Tapline advertisements and photos of attacks on Tapline facilities.

The reign of Abdulhamid II (1876-1909) brought many changes to Ottoman society, so much so that it has been described as being “one of the most decisive reigns in Ottoman history.” Nevertheless, the Hamidian period was also punctuated by important instances of continuity with origins in the Tanzimat period (1839-1876). The impulse to modernize the Ottoman Empire through state-led reforms was one such continuity; another, one might argue, was the set of anxieties that informed the Hamidian regime’s interaction with the Euphrates and Tigris rivers: irrigation networks needed to be expanded to tap into the region’s agricultural potential; and excessive flooding exacerbated by faulty dam and embankment designs remained a threat to both agriculture and health. As this paper demonstrates, nowhere is the overlap of these trends—that is, the Ottoman government’s expanding bureaucracy and the necessity of balancing the productive and destructive properties of the Euphrates and Tigris rivers—clearer than in the activities of the Privy Purse Ministry (Hazine-i Hassa Nezareti) in the provinces of Baghdad and Basra. As the government entity in charge of administering those plots of lands that belonged to Abdulhamid II’s private estate (emlak-i humayun), the Privy Purse Ministry played a central role in expanding irrigation networks and improving hydrological infrastructure in the sultan’s landed property in the provinces of Baghdad and Basra. Abdulhamid II’s acquisition of large swaths of agriculturally productive lands in Baghdad and Basra for his private estate is well-documented. Left unexplored, however, is the Privy Purse Ministry’s role in managing these lands. Drawing on untapped records from the Privy Purse Ministry, this paper demonstrates how the Hamidian regime, with the help of the Privy Purse Ministry, launched an ambitious program to expand irrigation networks and improve hydrological infrastructure in the sultan’s landed property in Baghdad and Basra between the years 1877 and 1901. It does so in three parts: first, it explains the origins of the Privy Purse Ministry and the process by which it helped Abdulhamid II acquire agriculturally productive lands in Baghdad and Basra; second, the paper discusses the role of a network of committees that the Privy Purse Ministry established in Baghdad and Basra for the purpose of routinely inspecting and surveying the sultan’s lands in these provinces; and third, the paper discusses specific examples of large-scale irrigation and hydrological infrastructure projects that the Privy Purse Ministry oversaw in Baghdad and Basra.

This paper contributes to the historiography of development by researching the human labor that went into the construction of a single infrastructure project. I focus on the approximately 35,000 workers who were critical to the construction of the Aswan High Dam between 1960 and 1971, but who were often effaced in nationalist celebrations of the genius of Nasser and his chief engineers, environmental studies of the High Dam’s impact on local ecologies, and scholarly accounts of the hydro-political controversies that it instigated. Hence I investigate the representations and processes of labor at the High Dam so as to elucidate those social dimensions of development that both practitioners and scholars often elide in favor of an emphasis on elite perspectives and technical knowledge. My primary source research has entailed extensive reading of contemporary Egyptian periodicals like al-Ahram, al-Musawwar, and al-?Ummal; governmental project reports; administrator memoirs; declassified State Department records on labor mobilization and infrastructure programs under Nasser; and popular Egyptian films, poetry, and prose. Recently published oral hitories provide a critically important window into present-day attitudes. I utilize these sources to illustrate how the construction site at Aswan was a complex social environment, with its ethnically and geographically diverse labor force, varied work tasks, “company town” characteristics, and intersecting management structures. Moreover, I show how the labor process was itself imbued with cultural meanings regarding the material, personal, and social value of work at the High Dam, value which was to be realized in both the contemporary present and long-term future. Finally, I argue that these narratives of High Dam labor nevertheless belied the complexities of a development project marked by both confrontation and accommodation. Some workers lived and died amid deeply hazardous conditions and went on strike to protest unjust labor policies, while others enjoyed better treatment and opportunities for upward mobility ; state agencies and private contractors successfully obviated serious conflict at the point of production by introducing army officers to discipline the labor force, but also by providing crucial social services and cultivating a sense of community. Ultimately, my research extends the analyses of techno-politics and subject formation put forth by historians of Middle East development like Timothy Mitchell, Toby Jones, and Cyrus Schayegh by considering the social relations and processes of political economy embodied with developmental infrastructures.

This paper examines the malaria prevention program organized by Dr. Ronald Ross from 1902-3 in Ismailia, and later in Port Sa‘id. I also investigate the ecological transformations that were disciplined and moved to make way for the two new cities and two new canals (Fresh Water Canal and Suez Canal). Water, sand, plants, animals and insects were fought against in a variety of ways to make way for the canal projects. Ross made his name in British colonial India where he found that a species of Anopheles mosquito transmitted malaria to birds. He would join the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine in 1899 and from there was invited by the President of the Suez Canal in 1902 to examine the causes of malarial fever in Ismailia and Port Sa‘id. Ismailia was particularly hard it with a high number of incidences of malarial fever. His remedy drew on ancient techniques, known to Egyptian peasants, the idea according to Ross was “drainage reduces malaria.” Thus, draining and cleaning of marshes/waterways, as well as weekly home inspections of every house in both towns, were established. Malaria prevention was also plagued by the difference in legal status between Ismailia and Port Sa‘id. Work in Ismailia was easy due to the original concession of 1856 that stated the town was the property of the Suez Canal Company, thus the company could require the entrance to homes by inspectors. In Port Sa‘id, which was not company owned, but governed by the capitulations and required the approval of residents, the malaria campaign began in 1906 with the help of Governor Abadi Pasha, advertisements in the local press and the Sanitary Inspector. When work began in the “insanitary town,” homes with open cesspools in basements were filled in, sitting water was removed, on top of weekly inspections of each home. Shortly, the “fever” in Port Sa‘id which had plagued residents during the summer months disappeared. Through Ross’s writings, inspection maps, additional archival photographs, and Suez Canal Company documents I examine the interrelated connections between water, cesspools, indoor plumbing, urban infrastructures, sewage systems, marshes, health, malaria, and mosquitos, literally a history of these two urban settlements from below. I argue that an interdisciplinary methodology, environmental and urban histories, will strengthen urban history in general, and add a new narrative to the history of water, health and disease in modern Egyptian historiography.

In the second part of the nineteenth century, Istanbul witnessed a major urban transformation and introduction of new forms of transportation. The establishment of ?irket-i Hayriye steamboat company in 1851 introduced the residents of Istanbul to rapid travel through the major arteries of the city: the Golden Horn and the Bosporus. Along with intensified publication, translation, and communication activities, the steamboat quickly became an integral part of the newly developing prose fiction. While scholars have addressed the importance of carriages and cars in modern Ottoman and Turkish literature, the central role of the steamboat in Ottoman urban modernity has not yet been acknowledged. In this paper, I seek to contribute to the discussion on urban mobility and modernity in the Ottoman Empire and I argue that the liminal space of the steamboat served as a contact zone where established boundaries of gender and identity were challenged. This liminal space became the epitome of the flux, change, and ephemerality that marked modern urban spaces. Particularly two key nineteenth-century Ottoman novels — Ahmet Midhat’s Mü?ahedat (Observations) and Recaizade Ekrem’s Araba Sevdas? (Love of Cars) — use the steamboat as a transient space of simultaneous integration and differentiation in a cosmopolitan setting. By close-reading these two novels, this paper seeks to answer the questions of how these new technologies transformed the way urban dwellers perceived space and how steamboats served as micro-spaces of urban mobility and changing notions of gender in nineteenth-century Ottoman ?stanbul.