This panel explores the role of infrastructures and political dynamics in the diffusion of knowledge between Europe and the Middle East (writ large) from the 17th to 20th century. How did the existing political and economic relationships between Europe and the Middle East shape knowledge transfer during the age of globalization? How did transnational and transimperial networks operate to build material and knowledge infrastructures? Existing scholarship mostly engaged with knowledge diffusion in terms of Westernization and modernization, whereas papers in this panel will show that knowledge transfer was not a unidirectional process. Our research shows that local actors navigated knowledge diffusion through existing infrastructures, and consequently reshaped transnational knowledge exchange. Distinct forms of knowledge --namely local knowledge, technical knowledge, and natural knowledge--intertwined and expanded socially, politically and geographically. Drawing on from recent discussions on global history of science and technology, this panel aims to decenter the space of knowledge production by shifting the focus to the networked locations in the Middle East. Beginning with the earliest systematic knowledge transfer from Europe to the Ottoman lands in the 17th-century, we take a longue durée approach on the theme of infrastructure, to ask: How did knowledge diffusion recreate or transgress boundaries across religious, political, and gender subjectivities? What role did medicine and technologies like electricity, radio and railways play in changing local economies? What were the roles of technical and scientific experts in the assessment and dissemination of knowledge? What was the criteria of access to knowledge accumulation within local and transnational dynamics? In the light of these questions, this panel engages with the genealogy of scientific and technical knowledge exchange between the Middle East and Europe through the lens of global infrastructures. By using an array of different methods in history and cultural anthropology, the panel examines how the production and diffusion of knowledge changed --and regenerated-- new forms of political, social, and religious relations in the Middle East.
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Ms. Duygu Yildirim
In the recent studies of inter-cultural knowledge exchanges, translation holds an essential place. However, translation has been conceptualized only as an instrument for practical or useful knowledge, which eventually gave way to cultural appropriation and diffusion of knowledge. The head physician Hayatizade’s (d. 1692) medical treatises based on contemporaneous European sources offer an excellent vantage-point to challenge this argument. Copied multiple times during his lifetime, Hayatizade’s "el-Ris?’ilül-Mü?fiye li’l-emr?z?’l-mü?kile" embodies the first systematic medicinal translations into Ottoman Turkish from European languages. This endeavor of translation remarks not only a turning point in Ottoman medicine, but also reveals how translation was a mode of thinking as the craft of an early modern scholar during the process of knowledge production. By exploring how Hayatizade translated European medicinal texts into Ottoman Turkish, and what was lost and gained within the process, this paper demonstrates that translation was an epistemological instrument for early modern scholars, rather than only being a tool for knowledge transfer. Hayatizade’s decisions during the process of translation and organization of his works also provide insights for what made a medical translation successful in the early modern era. Rather than a commercially driven agenda to promote new materia medica from the Americas, I argue that Hayatizade’s treatise was mainly preoccupied with the state of medicine in the Ottoman lands, which sought a new ontological definition of disease.
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Ms. Christin Zurbach
This paper argues that 19th century Ottoman medical education and was shaped by as well as itself shaped global and interconfessional networks. Until the Imperial Military Medical Academy ’s establishment in Istanbul in 1827, Ottoman Muslim and non-Muslim doctors trained and practiced separately. Armenian, Rum and Jewish physicians often trained at European institutions while Muslim physicians trained at Ottoman medreses. The founding of this school, which trained non-Muslims and Muslims together in military medicine, disrupted these norms and generated a new professional class. This paper explores the networks in which these subsequent generations of doctors participated and the social as well as scientific results of these ties.
For “external” ties, I focus on French and Greek connections. The academy initially used French textbooks and taught its classes in French, and many Ottoman subjects went to France for subsequent medical training, often with financial support from the Ottoman state. Late 18th century changes in French hospital medicine caught global, not just Ottoman, attention, so its influence on Ottoman medical reform is not necessarily surprising. However, I argue that how Ottoman doctors built community abroad in Paris, how those experiences shaped their social and political perspectives, and how they retained those experiences and connections upon returning to Ottoman domains is particular. Athens, in contrast, was not a global medical hub but was, until the 1820s, an Ottoman city, one that after Greek independence eventually became a capital city and, in 1837, the home of the University of Athens and its medical school. The new Kingdom of Greece encouraged Ottoman Rum subjects to cross the border to study and also supported Hellenizing schools within the empire, and this paper examines the exchange of knowledge between doctors in the new Greek state and Rum doctors within the empire.
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Mrs. Cihan Tekay Liu
This paper examines the role of political and economic relationships between the Ottoman Empire, Germany and France vis-a-vis Istanbul’s electrification during the first decades of the 20th century. Drawing on research in financial, diplomatic and state archives in Turkey and Europe, I show that Istanbul’s electrification involved a process in which various European and Ottoman actors participated, resulting in a decades-long negotiation between private investors and state officials. By examining this process of electrifying both public works and domestic consumption, I shed light on political decision-making practices regarding energy production by engineer-entrepreneurs, financiers, diplomats, brokers and state officials. In doing so, I analyze the legacy of electrical infrastructures in knowledge exchange by charting the political and economic networks from which they emerged across Europe and Turkey. Through taking a close look at the inter-imperial politics of Istanbul’s electrification, I argue that electrical technology transfer to the Ottoman Empire was not a unidirectional process, but one that also transformed inter-European relations by contributing to the restructuring of the European financial market during monopolization. The dynamics that shaped this process include finance capital, diplomacy and international businesses on the one hand, and the management of coal mines, refugees, urban service workers, and emerging bourgeois consumers by the political sovereigns on the other hand. Finally, by drawing on a moment in which world war, political and economic competition between global powers, and rapid technological innovation resulted in dramatic transitions, I show the changes in popular and elite imaginaries of the future as reflected in material infrastructures.
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Dr. Mejgan Massoumi
Inspired by dynamic flows of people and ideas through Afghanistan and the rich history of Kabul, the capital city, as an important site of cultural production and intercultural exchange, this paper brings attention to the history of the radio as a medium that connected Afghans to a wider transnational network in the latter half of the 20th century. In so doing, it highlights this form of popular culture as the site in which significant patterns of contemporary movement, regional exchange and connectivity are visible. From the early days of radio broadcasting in the 1920s to its more advanced developments in the 1960s and 1970s, the service drew heavily on the expertise of radio specialists spanning the globe: German, Russian, English, American and Indian technocrats came to Kabul to train the new technical professional workforce. This paper narrates a history of these committed Afghan and international experts alongside dissenting political movements through the decades of the 1960s and 1970s that witnessed two coups and the transformation of the nation from a constitutional monarchy, to a democracy and finally, a communist republic. Following the radio’s traces in music, literature and film, the paper illustrates how the technology’s sonic power created and transformed the Afghan soundscape. In the effort to illuminate one chapter in Afghanistan’s modern history, this contribution also raises questions concerning the historical study of sound, music, and communication technologies in Middle Eastern studies. Sources for this paper are drawn from sound recordings, newspapers, memoirs, historical photographs and a collection of oral histories.
