‘Zahra, come here! I’m going to hospital …’. These are the words of Mariam, a thirteen-year-old ‘crippled carpet weaver’ leaving her ‘dark and damp’ home in a hill village in Iran. Years of carpet-weaving had left her legs stiff and twisted. Travelling on a lorry and donkey for a day, she reached the Church Missionary Society (CMS) Hospital in Kerman the following morning. Compared to her home, the hospital was ‘bright’, Mariam noticed. Once in hospital, she ‘squatted’ in the courtyard of the outpatients’ department to receive a ‘numbered ticket’ while listening to the message of Christianity. The doctor saw her in the afternoon, following which she was brought to one of the hospital’s wards, where she changed into the hospital’s clothes before being put to bed. On the bed next to her was another girl, who was reading a Bible; she told Mariam, ‘when the sun goes off the veranda they will come and move our beds out there. Then we shall be quite close together and I’ll read to you and tell you fine stories’. Mariam found the entire experience an ‘adventure’. After a few days, she was ‘whisked down’ a long corridor to the operating theatre, where her legs were straightened. A long period of recovery followed. Afterwards, she returned to her village, ‘there to tell others something of Jesus in Whose Name she had been healed’.Footnote 1
Mariam’s story is fictional. It is also not narrated by a Mariam; rather, it accompanies a children’s cut-out model, produced for the CMS in the 1930s (Figure 1).Footnote 2 We start with Mariam’s story, not to examine its ‘truthfulness’ or to criticise its rather obvious use of contested, imperial ideas of darkness and dampness, but to highlight the interrelation between the introduction of new world orders and the making and remaking of material forms and everyday lives. Mariam’s story captures this interrelation well: by entering the hospital, Mariam also set foot into a different world order, an ecological and cosmological order of some magnitude, indeed a different reality characterised by imposed mono-rhythms and interactions – between doctor and patient, patient and patient, patient and air, patient and plants, patient and God and patient and death. Although fictional, there were patients like Mariam at the CMS Hospital in Kerman, some of whom travelled from other towns and villages. According to Dr Winifred Westlake, the doctor in charge of the women’s part of the Hospital, ‘the crippled carpet-weavers’ formed ‘a considerable proportion of the cases’.Footnote 3 Figure 2 shows three such patients, who were hospitalised in 1915, exposing their apparent passiveness and indebtedness to the gaze of audiences in the metropole, while concealing altogether the role of British and Western companies in their exploitation.Footnote 4 The CMS was an Anglican missionary society that sought to create a new world order, or an ‘Empire of Christ’, through ‘practical Christianity’ in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.Footnote 5 To this end, it built a chain of seventy-seven hospitals alongside churches across Asia and Africa. In practice, the creation of such a world order was messier than Mariam’s story suggests. It sometimes involved allowing patients to stay in the hospitals with their family members, wear their own clothes, bring their own bedding, cook their own meals, drink tea, smoke a water pipe and so on.Footnote 6 Diverse world orders, material forms and everyday lives were present ‘at the same time, [but] not [always] in the same time’.Footnote 7 They sometimes mingled, at times entangled and occasionally made and remade one another, although in an unequal manner.
Kerman Hospital. CMS/H/H5/E2, Church Missionary Society Archive, Cadbury Research Library, Special Collections, University of Birmingham.
Figure 1 Long description
An instructional diagram for assembling a model of Kerman Hospital in Iran. At the top, the text reads, ′Kerman Hospital in Iran.′ Below, instructions are provided: ′Cut out parts A, B and C. Bend C up at dotted line. Bend all tabs down. Tabs are numbered in red and the place to which they are to be glued bears the same number in blue. Glue tabs 1, 2, 4 and 5 to base and tabs 3 and 6 to back. The complete model should be viewed with the eye on a level with the base.′ The diagram includes three parts labeled A, B and C, each with numbered tabs. Part A shows a structure with arches and tabs numbered 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6. Part B is similar, with tabs numbered 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6. Part C shows a landscape with a building and tabs numbered 3 and 6. The lower section of the image illustrates the assembled model, depicting the hospital and surrounding landscape. The text ′Bend this piece up at dotted line′ is visible near the base of the model. The background features mountains and a clear sky.
Crippled carpet-weavers, Kerman. They are sitting on a bench. CMS/M/EL 2/19, p. 78. Cadbury Research Library, Special Collections, University of Birmingham.
This Special Section of Transactions emerges from a concern that the interrelation between world orders, material forms and everyday lives is desperately underexamined. Over the past few years, studies have begun to consider the interrelation between world orders and material forms, whether by looking at architecture, infrastructures or spaces and places (broadly defined),Footnote 8 yet they have predominantly focused on internationalisms.Footnote 9 At the same time, these studies have not given due consideration to everyday lives as material, temporal formations. Against this backdrop, the Special Section furthers two insights: firstly, internationalisms are forms of world order.Footnote 10 That is not to say that world orders always fit neatly into the category of internationalism, with its preoccupation with border-crossing, links, circulation and networks. Rather, world orders can exist at different levels, from the micro to macro levels, including the human and the non-human, the planet, the individual, the community and everything in between. What is more, they can contribute to the formation of one another, which brings us to our second point: material forms and everyday lives are embedded in world orders or even constitute world orders of their own.Footnote 11 Their making and remaking reshape world orders, with broader socio-political implications. The CMS’s Empire of Christ was an international, and part of a larger imperial, world order.Footnote 12 It sought to remake the pluralistic modes of being and living, to which patients like Mariam belonged, into a universalised, exported model, on a global scale, based on missionaries’ narrow, localised experiences of culture and genealogies of spiritual attachment. The modes of being and living to which Mariam belonged reflected, and were constitutive of, world orders that were dynamic and polyfocal, with little correlation to political (and nationalist) categories of space, place and belonging. Nor did these world orders map neatly onto maps.Footnote 13 Missionaries’ remaking of these pluralistic ways of being and living turned vibrant places to ‘peripheral and isolated borderlands’.Footnote 14
Our concern with the interrelations between world orders, material forms and everyday lives is also a response to, and responsive of, our current Anthropocentric climate crisis and its planetary catastrophe. As a new world order, the climate crisis has resulted from the intersection of imperialism, capitalism and the distribution of Western, modern forms of life, with their rather violent remaking of the everyday, beyond the human species.Footnote 15 The Anthropocene is not one of the afterlives of imperialism, or modernity and capitalism; it itself constitutes the material, cognitive expression of imperialist, capitalist forces, with unequal consequences for everyday lives and material practices worldwide, shaping a new epoch in human, and beyond human, history. Perhaps nowhere are these unequal consequences more visible – or life-threatening – than in ‘processes by which toxic substances, industrial wastes or human-made chemical compounds gradually accumulate in living tissue’Footnote 16 of those who are assumed to be not-quite-humans.Footnote 17 Samia Henni’s exploration of the French colonial regime secret nuclear experiments in Algeria’s Sahara between 1960 and 1966 is demonstrative of these unequal consequences.Footnote 18 As Henni shows, the resulting toxication of the Sahara continues to contaminate bodies, buildings and environments across North, Central and West Africa as well as the Mediterranean, creating, in the words of Marco Armiero, wasted relationships and stories among human and non-human beings.Footnote 19 Rob Nixon calls such gradual processes of accumulation ‘slow violence’, ‘incremental and accretive, its calamitous repercussions playing out across a range of temporal scales’.Footnote 20 There are now widespread calls across and beyond academia for reassessing our everyday lives and material practices under, with or against ‘the cloud of the Anthropocene’.Footnote 21 Yet such reassessments are not a choice, if a possibility, for Algerians and others, who live ‘with sustained environmental brutality’ through ‘slow observation’,Footnote 22 which goes a long way to show that rethinking everyday lives and material practices in the Anthropocene is not an equal game either. In the light of Anthropocentric unequal adversities, there is a sense of urgency to contemplate world orders, material forms and everyday lives and their interrelations.
Having the climate catastrophe in mind means that the introduction and creation of world orders do not just involve, and have consequences, for humans. In this context, ‘planetary order’ or ‘planetarism’ might appear to be a better phrase than ‘world order’.Footnote 23 As Jeremy Bendik-Keymer has pointed out, however, a single framework of ‘planetary governance’ cannot capture the sheer variety of ways in which people understand and relate to the planet.Footnote 24 Far from rejecting the notion of the planetary, Bendik-Keymer recognises that it ‘is not something that one can grasp for others’.Footnote 25 Siding with his argument regarding ‘relationality’, we opt for world order and believe that it is broad, or conceptually open, enough to include planetarisms. In doing so, we invite the reader to see worlds within and without planet Earth. The intimate dimensions of a single life, each of us a world, no matter how disorderly, and the geological worlds of rocks, water, plants and atmosphere are within the planet and each other. Yet they could also be experienced without. The planet is crossed by many worlds operating at different scales and speeds. What does exist on a planetary scale is the totalising ambitions of uncontained forces, capitalism above all, to make the single rhythm of accumulation stand for the rhythm of the world.Footnote 26 Everyday life could resist these all-consuming ambitions and impede their realisation.
Our Special Section, ‘World Orders, Material Forms and Everyday Lives’, explores how the three core concepts in the title intersected, and were formative of one another, in the (creation of) nineteenth- and twentieth-century Western and South and Southeast Asia. The intertwining questions that animate the Special Section are: What do world orders become when we look at them through the lens of everyday life? What material forms and mundane imaginations, even fantasies, do shape the experiences of being in and shaping a world order? And how do world orders and everyday lives interact and contribute to the formation of one another? The remainder of the Introduction will further historicise and decentre understandings of world orders, material forms and everyday lives by considering their interrelations, before introducing each contribution in turn.
An (old) call for historicisation
By pushing the boundaries of existing scholarship, the Special Section calls for historicising everyday life as both a material and temporal formation. Inspired by Alltagsgeschichte (Everyday Life History), a school of thought pioneered by the German historian Alf Lüdtke, scholarship has employed everyday life in opposition to a historiographical tradition concerned with grand events, sociological trends and abstract portrayal of human processes of change and continuity. Central to its understanding of history is a thinly veiled anthropological turn towards the category of ‘culture’, understood as the broad range of material and ideational elements which are part of the human worlds and to which humans assign, overtly or surreptitiously, a value or meaning.Footnote 27 In this regard, the everyday is a lens to study life in the quotidian rhythms of anticlimactic processes and events, the ‘day-to-day lives’, and ‘lived experience’ of ‘ordinary’ people across time and space, and beyond the usual geographies that characterise the historiographical tradition.Footnote 28 Everyday life histories have complicated the understanding of power dynamics and of dominator and dominated by inserting the question of agency in grounded historical moments. However, these histories have left the temporal dimensions of the everyday on the margins of their empirical-conceptual approach. Just as history cannot be reduced ‘to a temporal horizon’ and ‘a unified human consciousness’, neither can everyday life.Footnote 29 To treat everyday life as a temporal existence is to pose questions about its material characteristics, and in doing so, consider whether everyday life has ‘existed’ as a way of being and becoming across time and space, and how its existence has had multiple rhythms and qualities and has varied with time.Footnote 30 In other words, rather than regarding everyday life as mono-temporal and mono-rhythmic, this Special Section considers how it can be ‘multiple, mediated, formed and formative’.Footnote 31
In calling for historicisation, we echo Henri Lefebvre’s words that ‘the history of time and the time of history should include a history of rhythms, which is missing’.Footnote 32 More than thirty years have passed since the publication of Lefebvre’s Éléments de rythmanalyse (1992), yet such a history of rhythms remains far from mainstream. Its recovery may appear trivial – after all, why talk about a history of rhythms when other pressing issues are at stake? But, as Helge Jordheim and Sine Halkjelsvik Bjordal’s recent edited volume, Lifetimes, shows, rhythms and world orders are formative of one another,Footnote 33 something that Lefebvre also recognised.Footnote 34 The history of rhythms and of world orders are, thus, mutually constitutive. The everyday and everydayness are far from universal, ahistorical mono-rhythms. Anthropocentric forms of world order turn them into such mono-rhythms by destroying diversities of rhythms (including multispecies rhythms) and of material forms. Viewed in this light, the importance of calling for historicising everyday life becomes self-evident. A history of rhythms does not consign to oblivion what Rita Felski calls the ‘non-intellectual’, ‘inauthentic’, ‘grey’, ‘aesthetically impoverished’ textures of existence.Footnote 35 It is, rather, a history of many world orders, of forms of existence and of their destruction, contestation and preservation. It has much to tell us about the messy intersections and interactions of imperialism, capitalism and modernity, their critiques and alternatives and the many (imagined) worlds besides and beyond them.
By focusing on the intersection of materialities and everyday life, this Special Section also helps broaden our understanding of, and decentre, the history of world orders in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Our purpose is not merely to extend the influence of everyday life history approaches to the study of world orders. Growing scholarship on ‘internationalism as lived experience’ has already taken up, although often implicitly, the analytical framework of everyday life.Footnote 36 In doing so, they have broken down the ‘apparent homogeneity of international organisations and national policies’ and unsettled assumptions about the category of the international as well as relevant sites of internationalism. However, they are yet to acknowledge and explore ‘the plural temporalities in operation’ in human and non-human life and cultural production.Footnote 37 By bringing the question of rhythms and the history of rhythms to the fore, the Special Section is not concerned with cross-temporal repetitions, imitations, receptions and revival either.Footnote 38 Rather it pursues multiple forms of temporal and material rhythms – be they domestic, work-related, seasonal, geological, toxic and so on. In considering the interrelations between different temporal and material formations and world orders, we demonstrate that a mono-temporal and mono-rhythmic treatment of everyday life results in historical concealment and silences. Historicising the everyday foregrounds histories of world orders that better account for diverse forms of existence and their interactions.
Making worlds (otherwise)
Mariam’s story offers a first lens on the fruitful interplay between the study of everyday life and world orders. Figure 3 shows the hospital as a real-life Mariam might have encountered it. The Kerman Hospital was divided into men’s and women’s sections. The women’s section, in which Mariam stayed for a few months, consisted of four long, one-story wards that stood apart amid a garden.Footnote 39 She had to follow certain imposed rhythms: lie in a bed, look at a garden through the windows, listen to Christian sermons and so on. That, at least, was the idealised image the CMS portrayed, and the Hospital was designed to facilitate it. Now imagine her, or another patient, sitting ‘on the floor’ with their family and friends, ‘surrounded with pots and pans, cups and saucers, teapots, and last but not least, a samovar …, and a galyun or water pipe’.Footnote 40 Florence M. James, a nurse in the Kerman Hospital, penned this image in 1938. If we consider this image carefully, we can discern at least three different rhythms and world orders that were present at the same time, but not entirely in the same time. The first was that of the missionaries who permitted these activities or, in the word of Sister James, ‘innocent things’Footnote 41 to attract the patients, and encourage them to stay in the Hospital. These innocent activities, or ordinary exercises of collective living, enabled missionaries’ medical efforts, making them appear, on the surface, not quite authoritarian. Missionaries sought to build and sustain their imperialist world order not only through controlling and ‘civilising’ bodies, minds and behaviours but also through apparent acts of care and ‘love’.Footnote 42
Women’s section of the Kerman Hospital. It shows one-story wards that stood apart amid a garden. Photograph by Sara Honarmand Ebrahimi.
The second rhythm is that of the patients, perhaps even plotting at these small departures from the hospital’s routine. Although not conscious acts of resistance or disobedience, the diversity of rhythms patients created by gathering with their friends and family – the buzzing roar of samovar and the bubbling sound of ḡalyān – connected the temporal and rhythmic imaginaries of the Hospital to that of a nineteenth-century andarūni (women’s quarter of a Persian house),Footnote 43 a factor that perhaps contributed to the complete disruption of missionaries’ imagined world order in the 1950s. Thirdly and finally, we must consider the commodity in the wake of a planetary capitalist turn. Tea and tobacco reached Kerman as plantation products, creating an invisible link between trade chains, the hospital wards and the exploitative regimes of landowners and foreign corporations producing them, and concomitant with them the moral entrepreneurs and experimenters who connote their world order.Footnote 44 In this way, capitalism, as a world order, entered into conflict with everything it incorporates – and everything that attempts to escape it.
The contributions that follow similarly offer epistemic entryways, rather than being tied together by a regional scope or a temporal period. Each contribution begins with something small and material – a builder’s manual, a photographic negative and an opium pipe – and moves outward to encompass a world order, or competing ones. Read from the floor of a ward, the pages of a construction manual, the shipping ledger of a tea estate, the lens of a camera or the tiny room filled with smoke and mattresses, materialities prop up out of a conjecture of the local and the global through the everyday. Here, the everyday is the ground upon which grand narratives of world orders often fall short or shift in meaning.
The first contribution, by Pooja Sastry, draws our attention to construction manuals written by Raghunath Shripad Deshpande, an engineer based in Poona, western India, in the 1930s and early 1940s. Deshpande’s manuals, published in Hindi, Marathi and English, were an authoritative voice in the construction of modern, upper-caste, single-family homes and their daily rhythms of cleaning and ‘purifying’ in the larger Bombay Presidency. These modernist and colonial, yet ‘purely Hindu’, rhythms – inspired, for example, by wada, mansions of Hindu upper-caste aristocrats under the Peshwa dynasty – sought to reiterate caste in ‘iterative feedback loops’. Simply put, these everyday architectural rhythms of upper-caste homes present the mingling of two world orders, sustaining one another in a rhythmic loop. We could still go a step further and consider the tea that had grown somewhere in India’s tea plantations, and upper-caste families were beginning to consume in their single-family households in the early twentieth century, linking them in this way to patients in the Kerman Hospital. If we use our imagination (and perhaps we should), we may then turn to the rhythms and realities of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century tea plantation workers’ lives. While Kerman Hospital’s patients were not aware of plantation workers’ rhythms, residents of upper-caste, single-family households, much like plantation owners, were simply indifferent to them. Imagination, then, is the primary tool at our disposal in the decolonial endeavour of contemplating ‘habitability’ and exploring what ‘liveability means amid immiseration and routine violence that plantations spawn’.Footnote 45
Will Davis’s contribution similarly draws on the imagination to explore the intersection of everyday life and world order. Taking us to the shoreline of a Philippine island in the Celebes Sea in 1940, Davis follows the Michigan-born botanist David Fairchild (1869–1954) as he takes photographs of a plant, Nypa fruticans. These photographs sent Fairchild on a journey towards building materials, notably Nypa fronds that women were weaving into roof shingles. Davis discusses the difference between the time that Fairchild’s camera captured and the time that women experienced through the material labour. Here, the lens of the camera is the meeting place of two different world orders with distinct temporal-material arrangements mediated by the unremitting flow of the everyday. On Biliran, Fairchild photographed Nypa fruticans: first the odd subterranean stems in the river mud, then the women folding its fronds around strips of bamboo into roof shingles. Davis reads this second series as a record of gendered architectural labour, where knowledge of how a plant grows and how it can be made to hold off rain is transmitted between grandmothers, mothers and children, and almost never thought worth recording by architects. In one frame a woman looks back at the camera. This returned glance becomes the seam between the mobile, world-ordering expertise of the imperial expert, whose shutter fixes a moment of existence interrupted, and the slower situated knowledge of building with plants on which his own science silently, somehow parasitically, depended. In May 1940, Germany invaded the Netherlands, and soon enough the expedition was expelled from the Dutch East Indies. The photograph outlasted it – the women pictured still unnamed.
In the final contribution Kamyar Salavati and Maziyar Ghiabi examine the everyday experiences in opium dens, known as taryak-khaneh, shireh-kesh khaneh, chay-khane and kharabat depending on their organisation and context, in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Iran. Adding another layer to our exploration of rhythms, material forms and world orders, Salavati and Ghiabi’s study of opium dens demonstrates how everyday life flowed in a slow rhythm within the concealed walls of the dens, and as such ran counter to the future-oriented nature of societal and state plans during the tumultuous and excited times of the Iranian Constitutional Revolution (1905–11). While the state-making project seemingly annexed Iran to an emerging modernist world order, inspired by Western and Russian models, opium dens continued to offer an alternative spatial-temporal approach to life, one that found supporters in unlikely social agents, including religious leaders, antinomian mystics and the plebeian working class. The contribution explores the ways in which bodily and psychic experiences of the built environment become a claim about world order. Bodies matter as ground on which broader question of political order and forms-of-life come to thought and defined, contested and crucially rendered inoperative. The modernist order arrives with capitalism and the adoption of anti-opium internationalism (Shanghai 1909, The Hague 1912), and an architecture of transparency, verticality, hygiene, whiteness and the right angle. It is opposed by the den’s counter-order – darkness, smoke, low ceilings, thick walls, smell, the reclining body, time slowed to neutralise the relentless tumult of the world. Where modernism spatialises simultaneity and speed, the den cultivates time-unawareness. In this, the contribution shows the rationale behind the state ban on the dens, and the coterminous non-ban of opium.
Historians of empire and internationalisms have tended to accept the temporal frames supplied by their sources – the fiscal year, the mandate, the five-year plan – and to treat everyday life as the material that fills it. Reversing that order means asking whose clock the archive keeps, which durations it cannot register and what was happening in the interval between two reported events. If the present climate catastrophe we are witnessing in full force is the product of imperial and capitalist ordering, then the ability to live at one’s own pace – and the power to deny that ability to others – is a political question with a long history. Reclaiming the everyday materiality of world orders is a first step towards rethinking them – and putting them into practice – otherwise. We co-edited this Special Section during the US–Israel war on Iran, which placed our own lives on hold. Colleagues ask us how do we keep working. Perhaps a better question would be, why should we keep working. Changing the question reveals much about the world order we reluctantly inhabit with little to no agency to enact change. We keep working because the world – indeed the planet – would not wait for us and chronicling the past and those forms of living otherwise concealed is one way to imagine different possible worlds and to identify the potential for change. This Special Section is in many ways a product of time not spent waiting.
Acknowledgements
The idea for this Special Section grew out of an international workshop we co-organised at the University of Exeter in November 2023 entitled, ‘Toward a Multifaceted History of Internationalism & Architecture’. We thank Johanna Quandt Young Academy at Goethe for funding the workshop through an International Liaison Fellowship and Katharina Welling, the Managing Director of the Academy. Our special thanks also go to our three contributors for their excellent scholarship. Finally, we thank the editors of Transactions and the anonymous reviewers for their invaluable feedback.
Financial support
Sara Honarmand Ebrahimi’s contribution is funded by a British Academy International Fellowship, ‘Building for Holistic Healthcare: A Global Health History from Within, 1860s-1970s’ (Grant number IF25\100971) and an Alexander von Humboldt Fellowship for postdocs (2022–24). Maziyar Ghiabi’s contribution is funded by the Wellcome Trust (Grant number 219771/Z/19/Z) titled ‘Living “Addiction” in States of Disruption: A Transdisciplinary Approach to Drug Consumption and Recovery in the Middle East’, and by the Philip Leverhulme Prize of the Leverhulme Trust.
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