This panel examines the ways in which modernizing discourses on such themes as health, literacy, or public order found expression in physical and material realms at the turn of the twentieth century in Egypt and the Ottoman Empire. By juxtaposing how Ottomans, Egyptians and colonial officials thought and wrote about new developments such as the sewer system, street lighting or calendar reform on the one hand, and how those thoughts and plans were executed and experienced on the other, the panel aims to understand different courses social and cultural change had taken in Egypt and the Ottoman Empire during this period. It also aims, through this juxtaposition, to enrich our understanding of the set of concepts, practices and institutions that characterizes the modern.
The panel draws upon methodological approaches that focus on materiality. It suggests how examining material objects, whether small and personal artifacts such as almanacs, or large infrastructural objects such as sewers, agricultural roads and city lights, can inform the study of the interaction between discourses and experiences.
The papers in this panel are brought together specifically to illustrate these theoretical and methodological concerns. The first paper traces the various schemes of Cairo's sewers between the 1880s and the 1920s. It places the story of the sewers in the context of the politics of health under British colonial oversight and the authorities' response to cholera epidemics. The second paper examines calendars and almanacs printed in the late Ottoman Empire and early Turkish Republic as material texts, and traces how these popular items of reading were received, circulated and used by their readers at a time when both calendar and scriptural systems were undergoing sweeping changes. The third paper focuses on the transformation of urban morphology through city lighting in fin de siècle Istanbul. It explores the implementation of artificial lighting and analyzes different facets of it under discourses of lower class vice and elite fear between 1876 and 1920 in nocturnal Istanbul. The final paper investigates the campaign to build thousands of kilometers of “agricultural roads” across the Egyptian countryside in the early decades of the British occupation. Moving between high-level ministry correspondence and petitions from Egyptian villagers, it examines how struggles to allocate the land, labor, and dirt required to build these roads revolved around conflicting interpretations of the concept of “public utility.”
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This paper examines the campaign to build thousands of kilometers of unpaved “agricultural roads” across the Egyptian countryside as a case study in the changing nature of the Egyptian state under British occupation. Drawing on materials from the Egyptian Council of Ministers and the Public Works Department housed in Dar al-Watha’iq al-Qawmiyya, I argue that new state projects of this kind represented instances of a contradictory process of “state rescaling”. On the one hand these projects, evaluated through the use of new and more abstract measures of public utility and general interest, employed new technologies and institutions to augment and accelerate flows of water, goods, law, credit, and knowledge more evenly throughout the Egyptian countryside. On the other, such efforts to project state power on a national scale depended crucially on the reconstitution of the village and of village authorities—‘umdas, shaykhs, tax collectors, and ghaffirs—as local agents of the central state.
I will begin by charting the emergence of “public utility” (al-manafi‘ al-‘umumiyya) as a central organizing concept of the Egyptian state in the years following 1882. After commenting briefly on the wider imperial circulation of this term, I will turn to the deployment of the category of “public utility” in debates about state acquisition of land for the construction of roads and other public works. While the term quickly assumed the status of a mere formula in such land confiscation procedures, I suggest that the very extent of such everyday usage rendered the category available for alternative interpretations. From the minutes of ministerial meetings to petitions from individual villagers, the new roads sparked heated debates over how and for whom such “utility” should be construed. Finally, I will examine the varied forms of law and justice invoked at different levels of the state in the planning, building, and maintenance of the new roads. In particular, I seek to highlight a contrast between the protracted and cumbersome adherence to formal protocols in negotiations between the Council of Ministers and the various local and provincial assemblies and the concern with efficiency that motivated new institutions of “administrative justice” in the person of the village shaykh.
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Dr. Ceyda Karamursel
Walter Benjamin once called calendars as monuments of historical consciousness. For him the first day of a calendar could be likened to a “historical time-lapse camera,” and that same day recurred over and over again, “in the guise of holidays.” Thus, calendars did not measure time, like clocks did by marking the passage of a minute, an hour, a day – dividing time into discreet segments. They, instead, marked what was there to be remembered and inadvertently erased what was not worthy to remember.
Taking Benjamin's observation as its point of departure, this paper looks at calendars and almanacs published in the Ottoman Empire and Turkish Republic between 1870s and 1940s, in an attempt to understand how these items of popular reading helped to construct historical consciousness and served to maintain (or break) cultural continuities. Through a close examination of the content, as well as the paratextual material of two widely read almanacs (namely, Takvim-i Ebüzziya for the Ottoman and Saatli Maarif Takvimi for the republican eras), the first part of this proposed presentation addresses following questions: What events and practices were featured in these calendars and almanacs? How did they change over the decades? What were the concerns expressed by their authors and publishers? In its second part, the paper shifts its focus away from the almanacs and their makers to the readership and explores those who read these almanacs. Did the young and the old, women and men read them the same way or differently? In what ways writing constituted a part in this practice? Finally, through an analysis of such modernizing efforts as calendrical or scriptural change, the paper aims to understand different ways in which cultural practices, continuities or ruptures were experienced at a personal level.
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Shehab Ismail
This paper examines the history of Cairo between 1880s and 1920s from the “vantage point” of sewage and toilet refuse. A mosaic of intersecting and overlapping themes emerges from such an examination. Since 1880 there were numerous plans for constructing a drainage system in Cairo. These plans aborted due to various reasons, chief among them are the protracted financial crisis as well as legal complications related to the system of capitulations. A full drainage system was finally installed between 1915 and 1920 by C. Carkeet James, a British sanitary engineer who had just finished overseeing Bombay's drainage scheme. In the absence of sewers, there is a fascinating story to be told about what Cairenes did with waste, and the larger implications of this on Cairo's subsoil and water resources. This is closely related to how medical and sanitary experts as well as colonial officials were alarmed by the sanitary condition of Cairo, linking it to high death rates and the recurrence of cholera epidemics. Their perceptions of the sources of medical and sanitary dangers, as well as their prescriptions of how to avert them, were filtered in complex ways through categories of race and class. The paper seeks to shed light on these interconnected themes while engaging with broader debates in imperial, medical, and environmental history.
I begin with examining the state's response to the 1883 cholera epidemic, a response that cannot be dissociated from the global context of previous cholera epidemics and the international scientific competition, and diplomatic conflict, over the etiology of the disease. I especially highlight the changing nature of medical theories and social discourses to which the epidemic gave rise, and the concomitant transformations of theories of public hygiene during the final decades of the nineteenth century. In the bulk of the paper I turn to examine various arrangements of the provision of potable water and sewage disposal, including drainage schemes, between 1880s and the 1920s. The paper attempts to be sensitive to the friction created by how the inhabitants of Cairo experienced the state's attempt to stem the spread of epidemics, construct a drainage system, or provide cleaner potable water.
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Ms. Nurcin Ileri
This paper focuses on physical and social spaces of nocturnal Istanbul such as streets, neighborhoods, commercial centers, and entertainment dwellings. It contends that the implementation of artificial street lighting transformed night-time geography in which different historical actors of the Ottoman Empire - be they ruling authorities, merchants, commoners or marginal groups - encountered one another through the second half of the nineteenth century. By exploring the use and regulations of public places and social spaces, this paper shows how the Ottoman ruling authorities established norms and forms of social containment under the discourse of urban order, public security, and public morality. In addition, it evidences how marginal groups such as rebels, criminals, ramblers or prostitutes made use of this new night-time geography and how they reacted against the municipal implementations produced under the discourse of lower class vice and elite fear in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
This study will address a series of administrative, institutional, and organizational transformations regarding the changing urban image of the 19th-century Ottoman imperial capital. First, it will examine how the implementation of artificial lighting changed the urban settlement and how it transformed the night-time geography by making it more penetrable. Then, it will analyze how city lights played a crucial role in the evolution of urban social morphology and the emergence of a distinct urban culture composed of subjective experiences of different historical actors such as state authorities, elite families, and marginal groups such as criminals, ramblers, or prostitutes. It examines who was socially and physically included in and excluded from this urban settlement and what was the reason behind marginalization and configuration of “dangerous classes” under the discourse of urban order and public morality. This paper also aims to speculate on how people incorporated this new technology into their daily lives and how it transformed people’s perception of time and space in nocturnal Istanbul.
