Over the last two centuries, the perceived path to progress has been laid out along large infrastructural networks of telegraph lines, railroads, paved roads for motor vehicles, and electric grids. While these projects were long considered value-neutral transmitters of social and economic development by states and other boosters of modernization, more recent reappraisals emphasize the complex social, economic, political and cultural effects upon the broader societies in which they are situated. They change relationships among a variety of actors involved and users along their paths, as well as between states and their subjects. As they reflect, and carry the same baggage as, their societal contexts, they can, indeed, improve the transmission of information and new ideas, but they also can have negative consequences such as facilitating the spread of disease or widening existing social inequalities.
The papers in this panel position themselves within current trends in the study of science and technology in society in their examinations of infrastructure in various Middle Eastern societies. They analyze a range of instances of negotiation and struggle in the development and distribution of infrastructure. The first paper examines the cholera outbreak of 1893 that was centered on the Western Anatolian town of Eski?ehir and spread along the newly built Anatolian Railroad. In addition to quarantines and other disruptive measures, a general sense of panic spread about the railroad and railroad workers even in unaffected regions, such as Ankara. This railroad, an important centerpiece of Ottoman modernization and economic development could also be converted into a conduit of illness, fear, and death. The next paper examines the laying of privately owned submarine telegraph cables in Ottoman waterways. These projects led to a complex entanglement between the Ottoman state and foreign private capital in a manner that diverged from the state’s centralized control of its land-based network. The third paper examines train accidents in early Pahlavi Iran and the perception of danger due to speed. This perception, in turn, provides insight into the intersection of technological infrastructure with the infrastructure of the emerging Iranian professional hierarchy- both of the railroad employees and the psychiatrists who evaluated the psychological impact of this “dangerous” modernity. The final paper examines the politicization of the electricity grid in Israel. Positing a negotiation between the state and the Bedouins, it demonstrates the ways in which discriminatory grid distribution practices turn solar panels into resistance mechanisms.
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Dr. Alex Schweig
As a centerpiece of Ottoman modernization, the construction of the Ottoman Anatolian Railroad was widely celebrated for drastically increasing the speed and volume of commerce, greatly increasing the personal mobility of travellers, and enabling the deployment of large numbers of troops and military equipment. As was the case in much of the world, the train was considered a miracle of modern technology. While some controversy arose over the German-built railroad’s role in the foreign economic penetration of Anatolia, both the Ottoman state and foreign observers regarded it in a positive light as a modernizing advance.
Local residents along the line, however, experienced negative consequences as well. This paper examines one particularly disastrous effect, the spread of cholera by means of travel along the railroad lines, resulting in a major outbreak in the western Anatolian town of Eski?ehir in 1893. It was precisely the attribute of making faster connections with more distant places that also created the danger of the railroad serving as an efficient conveyor of sickness and death. This paper uses sources from the Ottoman Archive as well as contemporary Ottoman newspapers to investigate the responses of local actors to the circumstances of the epidemic as well as the measures taken to combat it. In addition to the justifiable fears of illness by those in Eski?ehir and other infected areas, there was a panic that the disease would spread further. Among officials, the biggest fear was that cholera could spread to Istanbul. There were also rumors in Ankara that railroad workers there were infected, for which there was little evidence and that the railroad company denied. Thus the train became an infrastructure associated with illness, fear, and death during this period, rather than modernization and public benefit.
The cholera outbreak also threatened Eskisehir’s growth and development in the 1890s. This town, which had been steadily gaining importance, became a location associated with peril. Its increasing commercial and cultural connection with Istanbul was temporarily halted due to the enforcement of a ten-day quarantine at Inönü, a town just outside Eski?ehir. Through investigation of this cholera outbreak, this paper will demonstrate how the railroad could be not only an infrastructure of development, but also one that fostered fear, spread disease and death, reinforced fears of outsiders, and could block newly-acquired connections and influences from the capital.
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Ms. Pauline Lewis
One of the defining features of the telegraph network in the Ottoman Empire was that it was a state-enterprise. Like its counterparts in Europe, the Ottoman government exercised centralized control over its telegraphic network, viewing imperial telecommunications as a critical part of its sovereignty. However, in spite of the Ottoman government’s desire to fully control telegraphic activity in the empire, there was one area in which it was forced to turn to foreign, private entities. The empire, which famously stretched across three continents and many bodies of water, needed submarine cables to fully connect its territorial limbs. But the unique challenges of laying and maintaining underwater cables limited the ability of the Ottoman government to undertake such projects on its own. Instead, the government entered into agreements with a number of British companies, which were also eager to capitalize off of the growing interest in electronic communication between Europe and its overseas markets. With company stations dotting the Ottoman coastlines of the Aegean, Mediterranean, Black, and Red Seas, these private companies came to play a central role in intra- and trans-imperial communication.
This paper examines the activity and influence of these telegraph companies in Ottoman domains, a story which has previously gone unexamined. Built with the permission and subsidization of the Ottoman government, these cables and stations were simultaneously outposts of British commerce and part of the local Ottoman telegraphic network. Through examining government and company records, this paper argues that telegraphy prompted a new, entangled relationship between the Ottoman state and foreign, private capital, whereby companies gained unprecedented influence in the public domain, and the state engaged in entrepreneurial practices as a means to compete with these firms. Overall, it provides an interesting case study on the power and limitations of European private companies in late Ottoman society, as well as the interactions between technology, private capital, and state power in the nineteenth century.
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Dr. Mikiya Koyagi
This study examines how the relationship between speed and danger was conceptualized in Iran during the second quarter of the twentieth century. Specifically, it traces discourses and policies related to railway accidents. Acceleration experienced in Iranian society intensified in the early twentieth century as new modes of transport became part of Iranian daily life. With the development of transportation infrastructure, including Iran’s first long-haul railway, the construction of highways, the coming of the automobile,and the beginning of bus service in the post-WWI period, the speed of travel increased exponentially in the context of the rise of the centralizing Pahlavi state. A Tehran to Ahvaz trip that took almost a month at the beginning of the twentieth century took only one day by train in the late 1930s. As the speed of travel increased, however, deadly traffic and railway accidents became highly visible. From mangled trucks and wailing mothers next to dead sons on the roadside to dismembered bodies on railway tracks, death haunted travelers and transport workers who moved across space for various purposes using old and new modes of transport side by side.
By analyzing discourses of railway accidents in the publications of the Ministry of Roads and the Iranian Railway Organization, this paper argues that the association between speed and danger was not necessarily inherent. Rather, it was the expert knowledge of the first generation of Iranian techno-scientific elites in such fields as engineering and psychiatry that played a pivotal role in defining the danger of speed as a social problem caused by human factors. Their intervention was linked to the desire to carve out their professional position vis-à-vis not only Euro-American engineers but also rank-and-file railway workers as objects of social reform. By using Iranian archival documents, this paper also explores how the authority to define the root cause of railway accidents sometimes translated into specific policies. What was considered adequate training for workers, especially locomotive engineers, who should be blamed in specific cases of accidents, when and how much workers should be compensated, and how to examine the mental conditions of workers all depended on the knowledge of Iranian techno-scientific elites.
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Ms. Esra Bakkalbasioglu
The military rule relocated the Naqab Bedouin in the 1950s. Once military rule got lifted in 1966, the state declared the Bedouin villages “unrecognized.” For the Bedouin, the shift from military to civilian rule was a shift from being ‘dangerous’ to being ‘unrecognized.’ As the villages are not officially recognized, the state institutions refused to provide electricity as well as various other essential infrastructure and services to these localities. While Jewish families migrating to the South from the crowded centers of the country were enjoying services and infrastructure, the Bedouin who had been living in the area for centuries had been denied the basic resources. Bedouin’s access to electricity was conditional. They could get access to electricity is them to drop their land ownership claims and move into high density state-planned Bedouin-only towns to become the new urban proletariat. Tribes refusing to submit to state’s oppressive policies started to use solar panels to produce their own electricity.
Based on ethnographic research conducted in the region in 2014 and 2015, this paper argues that in the Southern Israel, electricity is not only a huge infrastructure system that provides one of the basic resources to the residents. It is also a political mechanism through which the public institutions try to control, tame, and enclave the minority citizens. The same substance became a resistance tool when the Bedouin started to buy solar panels to survive in their villages. Deciding on where the grid will pass, who will get access to it, who will be denied the resource, how much and how consumers will pay for their access, the state agents create new losers and winners as well as new forms of deprivation, dependency, and crime. Yet, none of these categories is one-sided, permanent, or negotiation-free.
Following the electricity which is a quotidian as well as political substance, this paper aims to go beyond the dichotomies of power and resistance and to answer three interrelated questions on the politics of infrastructure. What infrastructure, as well as its lack, means to one who cannot access it? How do the marginalized groups fight discriminatory practices of the state? How do these struggles shape the relation between the state and its minority citizens?
