How do we explain the success of the secular project driven by a nascent Turkish state in the early twentieth century, ushered in as it was by the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire? The historiography of intellectual production during the Ottoman nineteenth century duly notes the growing matrices of ideas during this period, betraying unanimous acknowledgment of a problem posed by an emergent Europe. The literature has focused on idealist explanations, pointing to the kind of curricula operative in the newly established military (Mekteb-i Harbiye) and medical schools (Mekteb-i Tibbiye) in the first half of this century that graduated figures such as Abdullah Cevdet, Besir Fuad, and unsurprisingly, Mustafa Kemal, as a way of explaining the emergence of these secular subjects keen on “modernization”. Analyses of the varying set of intellectual currents inhabited by such figures, running the gamut from a positivist vulgar-materialism to a hybrid nationalist-liberalism, and the sort of subjectification undergone in these institutions, are underlain by a theorization of the subject as a discursive formation. This paper contends that a theory of the subject as decoupled from the material is inadequate. By turning to the material by way of an appraisal of technological transfer and its attendant bearings on shifting conceptions of work and time during the second Constitutional era, I argue that conceiving of the secular subject on the eve of empire is unimaginable without a consideration of a coeval change in production apparatuses, technological tools, logics of extraction, as well as a temporal reconfiguration of the soul ushered in by capitalization. To do so, I bring together the existing historiography of the period bifurcated into ‘the economic’ and ‘ideological,’ as well as focus on a short-lived publication of the Ottoman Socialist Party, Istirak. This turn toward the history of capitalization in the empire, then, not only complicates the familiar story of secularism as an ideological imposition, but also provides an occasion to reconsider the regnant dualisms that structure our conceptualization of the subject.

My paper explores the emergence of working class delinquency in World War I Egypt. Specifically, my paper examines the labour codes and regulations that governed railway labourers while it was under construction and after it began to operate. These codes were repeatedly sabotaged by the labourers, who were subsequently punished, dismissed, or tried by a “Special Council”. Notably, the severity with which a certain offence was met mutated according to changing political circumstances. During the First World War, offences previously punishable by fines began to cost labourers their jobs. New categories also emerged. Whereas before the War, only “Punishments” were recorded in official administrative reports, in 1914 a “Blacklist” and a list of those “Dismissed and not to be Re-engaged in any Department” also emerged. How did these categories emerge? And how were railway labourers constructed as specific kinds of delinquents who were fitted into these categories? My paper answers these questions in two ways. First, my aim is to examine the ways in which the subjectivity of the labourer was informed by the specific materiality of the railway. The labourer is not a subject whose traits and class identity can be assumed. Rather, the labourer was constructed through a certain set of material, legal, and epistemological practices specific to the railway and to how the British imagined a railroad system should function. At the same time, labour resistance was precisely what engendered the “delinquent”. Since, in the eyes of colonial Britain, a labourer was to be hard-working and disciplined, someone who committed an “offence” had to be something else, a delinquent whose punishment could now be justified. Second, I examine the relationship between debt and the nature of these “offences”. The labourers who built and operated the railway were largely indebted due to rising prices and war-time fiscal policies. To make ends meet, they often stole railway-transported cargo either for immediate consumption or in order to re-sell it. How Britain punished these “offences” depended on the significance of the stolen material to its war machine and to its commerce. In addition to secondary sources, my analysis is primarily drawn from the Fortnightly Traffic Notices, a series of confidential reports issued by the Railway Department of the British colonial administration. I also consult a broad range of financial and “Debt Review” reports which include detailed information on the material transported on the railway and the financial conditions of Egypt.

The nationalization of Iran’s oil industry in 1951 is often held to be a key turning point in the story of Middle Eastern oil, supposedly marking when the domination of transnational oil corporations started to wane amidst popular nationalism’s demand for sovereignty over natural resources. But in this focus on sovereignty, there has been a tendency to take for granted the conversion of a subsoil resource into national revenue, overlooking the ways in which oil is produced through a set of arrangements intricately linked with politics, as Timothy Mitchell argues. The nationalization of Iranian oil has been studied little with a view to the particular assemblage of knowledge, practices, technologies and infrastructures that produced oil in the first place. This paper turns attention to this oil assemblage by examining the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company’s operations in the Abadan refinery in c.1939-51. Refineries were key nodes for the standardisation of oil according to the transnational regulatory norms of what Barry terms a ‘technological zone’, helping companies in their attempts to create a seamless, controlled flow of oil from the wellhead to the individual consumer. In Abadan, aside from crude oil itself, one overlooked local factor that created friction to flow was labor. The subjectivities of this ‘human factor’ had to be calculated, controlled and augmented through disciplinary mechanisms in the same way as crude. Through these processes, expertise was produced through the separation of mind and body, whereby materialities (including workers’ bodies) were subjugated to abstract, disembodied knowledge in refinery operations. The refinery, then, was supposedly an automated, self-regulating and objective “city of science” disentangled from locality, including politics. This helped conceal the highly exclusionary practices that (re)produced expertise as a white, male domain. Using archival sources from Iran, the UK and the US, in addition to newspapers, oral histories and memoirs, in this paper I highlight both how this production of expertise worked in practice and how it was contested. I show that workers challenged it in two ways: first, by resisting disentanglement through acts of ‘everyday resistance’, sabotage and strikes, connecting the refinery to the politics of the town; second, by undermining the very ontological basis of this expertise through their subjectivities and ‘tacit knowledge’ blurring mind-body dualisms. Ultimately, I argue, this contributed to nationalization’s demand for access to expertise. However, nationalisation did not contest the content of that (seemingly objective) expertise, helping transnational oil corporations in the years ahead.

The Gezira Scheme was a cotton irrigation project established by the British when they occupied Sudan on the heels of one of the most impressive 19th century anti-imperialist resistance movements: the Mahdiyya. Considered the largest farm in the world under a single management, the centrality of the Gezira Scheme persists until today. Built on the fertile, triangular region between the Blue and White Niles, the Scheme would come to span some one million acres, engaging at its peak half a million farmers and migrant labourers: in short, it formed the lifeblood of a newly constituted colonial economy. The Scheme’s tripartite organisation meant that profits were divided between the government, a corporation (the Sudan Plantations Syndicate) and the peasants working the land. The Scheme transformed not only the Gezira plain’s ecological and agricultural landscape, but reconstituted the native population as tenant farmers: their land forcibly rented from them by the government, resized and redistributed into geometrically organised plots, and their crops subject to regimes of agricultural inspection and the cycles of agricultural credit and debt. (Perhaps unsurprisingly the Gezira—along with the railway hub in Atbara—would become a hotbed of Sudanese labour resistance). While this agricultural scheme has often been conceived of as a means through which the metropole extracted resources from the periphery—that, providing cotton for the textile mills of Lancashire—less explored have been the ways in which the Scheme was a project of political control, an attempt to reformulate political identities in the face of the continued spectre of Mahdism. Drawing on critical political economy and STS, and archival material from Sudan and the UK, this paper re-examines the establishment of the Gezira Scheme. It considers the ways in which colonial (and capitalist) modernity was assembled in Sudan through the production of a pacified peasant identity. It does so by looking at the constitutive role of the corporation exploring how new forms of peasant discipline and productivity were organised, how profit-maximising and political imperatives were negotiated, and, finally, how the very boundaries of government and the ”state” came to be constituted through the financial and material possibilities afforded by corporate power. Ultimately, this paper asks, to what extent were the “fanatical”, insurgent subjectivities present during the Mahdiyya repressed in favour of a new subjectivity—one of a ‘sedentary’, ‘prosperous’ and pacified peasant proprietor, with a stake in the new regime? In what ways did they persist?

On December 8, 1987, an Israeli tank transport struck a Palestinian mini bus near Jabaliyya refugee camp in Gaza, killing four and injuring 10, and setting off demonstrations in Gaza the next day that are widely considered to mark the beginning of the first Palestinian Intifada. Such brief accounts as appear in the historical record of “the most consequential traffic accident in both Israeli and Palestinian history” can rarely avoid the question of whether it was indeed an accident, also in so far as these accounts set out to question the Israeli narrative of things. Drawing on historical and ethnographic research in the West Bank between 2014 and 2018, including Palestinian retrospectives on the 30 year anniversary of the uprising, my paper sets out to interrogate shifting Palestinian semeiotics of automotive accidentally and their underlying techno-political “narration of things,” so as to rephrase questions of historical agency and revolutionary subjectivity still adumbrated by the first Intifada. To this end, I read accounts surrounding the 1987 crash against a more recent phenomenology of auto-eventfulness in contemporary Palestine, set against the backdrop of an explosion of car ownership in the West Bank over the past decade. Drawing on legal case material, interviews and news material I treat legal and scholarly forensics of road death including a collision on 19 July 2017 between an Israeli truck in the northern West Bank and a van carrying Palestinian workers, five of whom were killed - alongside a spate of putative attacks by Palestinian motorists on Israelis, which gave rise in 2015 and 2016 to the terms Amaliyat Ad’das, Car Operations and Intifadat ad Da’as, Auto-Intifada. Through my reading of these events I seek to extend an understanding of accidental, collateral violence as a characteristic modality of the violence of late capitalism, while also exploring how the very form of the accident may come to host new forms of insurgent eventfulness. How, I ask more broadly, can an interrogation of Palestinian auto-motion in multiple registers help us rethink 'agency' not as the sovereign act of liberal fantasy, but as a leap-into the always-already of the accidental? How might an attentiveness to the modalities of Palestinian “narratives of things” impart new sense to Michel Foucault’s much quoted admission, that “[a]t the root of what we know and what we are lies neither truth nor being, but the exteriority of the accident.”?