My presentation will provide some observations on cultural interpretations of the electrical telegraph in the late Ottoman Empire. As the first practical application of electricity, telegraphy not only altered communication patterns and habits, but it also captured the imagination of many who witnessed and experienced the technology. The Ottoman Empire was no exception to this, especially since it was home to one of the world’s largest and most valued telegraph networks. By the 1870s, thousands of miles of telegraph cables stretched from the Balkans to the Persian Gulf. Aerial cables dotted the landscape across the mountains of eastern Anatolia, and submarine cables in the Black, Red, and Mediterranean seas connected the empire with outside networks. Decades before the spread of electrical lighting, telegraphy provided Ottoman society its first engagement with the power of electricity. I have identified a number of literary and visual works that feature the telegraph, sources that can provide insight into how members of the Ottoman public imagined the technology during the late nineteenth century. From these, I have observed two primary themes, each of which contains its own set of contradictions. First, I argue that the telegraph was both intensely international and local, as users personally engaged with a global, standardized network. Second, I argue that the telegraph engendered in the Ottoman public both a sense of excitement regarding the technology’s promise, and a sense of anxiety regarding the technology’s invasive reach. The sources for this analysis include literary works by Ahmet Midhat, Melek Hanim, Nabizade Nazim, and Sadallah Pasa; articles in the pro-science journals of Mecmua-i Funun and Servet-i Funun; and works of public and religious artwork that engaged with the technology.

This presentation will narrate one of the longest and most effective public utility protests in Lebanese history: the 1951-52 campaign against the Beirut Electricity Company. While the movement ended with significant reductions in consumer prices, it also paved the way for the eventual nationalization of the company in the 1953-54 period as an attempt to bolster the government's claims of national independence and economic development. Why was it that of all the public utilities issues, electricity proved most effective as both a target of protest and mobilizing issue? What assumptions were circulating at the time about the relationship of adequate/affordable electric current to political incumbency, national development, and citizenship? What conflicts and alliances did mobilizations around the issue of electricity reveal? How did the legacies of these struggles affect subsequent debates about public utilities and the role of the state in the everyday lives of its citizens? By highlighting key points necessary to address these questions, this presentation seeks to utilize electricity as a means of highlighting often neglected or unseen aspects of state formation, economic development, and social mobilization in early post-colonial Lebanon. It also calls for added attention to the ways in which public utilities and debates surrounding them serve as an important window into historically contingent underpinnings of citizenship, ruling bargains, and sociopolitical orders. The presentation and larger project draw extensively from archival research and oral history interviews. Key in this respect are newspaper articles, development reports, political party leaflets, memoirs, and personal recollections.

My intervention seeks to discuss the ways electricity/electrification comes to matter socially, politically, economically and spatially both symbolically and as a set of materials. An interdisciplinary focus on how these infrastructures are built and governed in Palestine-Israel offers powerful ways of thinking about electricity as a complex assemblage of actors, agents and processes that connect to, and drive, much debated processes of colonialism, modernity, statecraft and development. Focusing on different periods of electrification (between 1923 and 2016) brings an unexplored and fascinating reading of contemporary Palestine-Israel. Drawing on insights from a variety of disciplinary perspectives as well as archival and ethnographic material, I will explore how a close look at electricity and electrification can produce an innovative history of the region; contribute to emerging literature on electrification and electricity infrastructure in both Middle East Studies and social science research; and think about a conceptualization of electricity that destabilizes and reconfigures existing boundaries between technology and society, the material and the symbolic and the human and non human.

Electricity, even when privatized, is an illuminating site for the study of modern state, its politics, and the attempts to wield its power. In studying the US statebuilding experience in Iraq (2003-2006), I begin from a site in which things, institutions, technologies, narratives, violence and expert knowledge are assembled together and maintained to help produce a new stately order: the electrical grid. Under the US occupation, the electrical sector was the recipient of the largest amount of reconstruction aid. Electricity was important not just for illumination and powering of machinery, but also for oil production—the country’s main source of income. The grid, which connected the country together in a network of wires, transmitters, transformers and generators, is a knot in a web of things, experts, narratives and technologies that are assembled together to (re-)build the state. The grid became a site for contesting the shape and scope of state power, sectarian and ethnic reformulations and relations of political and criminal violence. I examine the US state-building project in Iraq, not as an external imposition, but as a manifestation of a modern phenomenon of political engineering. State-building, a set of practices and forms of knowledge that are constantly produced and re-produced in academic and policy centers, is involved in perpetual forms of interpreting and intervening on the empirical reality in order to shape a particular order (the “state”). Interventions in the name of state-building act on all aspects of the state’s life: national narratives, legal, institutional and political arrangements and the “things” that make the state viable—buildings to house state functions, pipelines to feed the economy, methods of border-control to protect “sovereignty,” sewage systems to maintain public health, and, among many other things, an electrical grid to illuminate spaces and power economic activities. I use US government investigation reports as primary source material in constructing the case study. Methodologically, I draw on approaches borrowed from the studies of science and technology used in recent studies of political and economic engineering (e.g. Timothy Mitchell, Stephen Collier, Patrick Carroll; Andrew Barry). Theoretically, I follow a tradition that challenges the view that sees the state as a bounded and cohesive entity, and rather examines the sources of its agency and constant formation on the ground (e.g. Philip Abrams; Timothy Mitchell; Pierre Bourdieu).

In 1961, Dubai Electric Company built its first power generation plant, and strung the town with wires, allowing for artificial lights as well as newfound luxuries such as fans, refrigerators, radios, and air conditioners. These public infrastructures arrived in Dubai long after Cairo, Beirut and Saudi Arabia, and enabled Sheikh Rashid to legitimize his position as the new ruler of Dubai. As the demand for electricity grew, this small electric grid became connected to other parts of the UAE and the Arab Gulf. In the early 2000s, the investment in electric infrastructures lead to the formation of a region-wide power grid among six Gulf countries: UAE, Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, and Oman. The integrated power grid is expected to reduce outages and increase power exchange across seasons and time zones. At the same time, the construction of the new grid allows the actors in the Arab Gulf to engage in economic diversification projects, specifically by investing in renewable energy power generation and nuclear energy. This talk explores the production of the GCC power grid, known as “the backbone,” and understands infrastructures of power as sites of political claim making, economic diversification and the articulation of novel forms of publicness. It also examines how the investment in electric infrastructures becomes a “launch-pad,” extending the Gulf’s economic and energetic connections to Europe and North Africa, while at the same time facilitating the planning of other cooperative projects such as water and railway interconnection grids within the GCC.