The world is not flat, nor has it ever been, but empire's apologists have been claiming otherwise for a very long time. A full decade has passed since Thomas Friedman published his manifesto on behalf of neoliberal globalization.Footnote ¹ But if Friedman's reductionism and mangled metaphors still make him an easy target for critical scorn, his “brief history of the twenty-first century” offers a remarkably compact distillation of several key ideas that organize mainstream globalization discourse well beyond his fortified outpost on the op-ed page of The New York Times. The first is a presentist assertion that globalization is new, that a recent intensification of worldwide flows of capital, goods, information, and people represents a sharp rupture with the past. This historically dubious account of global connections in turn undergirds two further claims about the character of the transformations taking place in the current moment. Globalization, in Friedman's telling as in so many others, appears as a process of convergence, synchronization, and unification. And new technologies such as smart phones, laptops, and the Internet, themselves described as the unambiguous products of Western ingenuity, hold out the promise that this “flattening” of space will advance the spread not only of economic opportunity but also of liberal, secular values. Neither the forms of global connection and movement that Friedman purports to reveal nor his ways of writing about them, however, are as novel as his breathless exclamations would have us believe. It is these paired critical insights that provide the common thread between the five new histories of globalization and technology under consideration in this essay.

James Gelvin and Nile Green open the introduction to their co-edited volume Global Muslims in the Age of Steam and Print with a frank rebuttal of the presentism that continues to distort so many contemporary accounts of globalization: “The fundamental assumption of this book is that, however defined, the current age of globalization did not begin with the fall of the Berlin Wall or the invention of the microchip. Rather, this era was made possible and in many ways was defined by earlier globalizing events, such as those of ‘the Age of Steam and Print’” (p. 1). Focusing on the multiple, complex, and contested reconfigurations of space and time that these two technologies enabled, the twelve case studies in this collection offer a remarkably rich diversity of perspectives on this prior era of globalization in the period from roughly 1850 to 1930. Taken together, the chapters advance a powerful and compelling argument against simplistic narratives that equate new means of communication, trade, and transport with a gradual homogenization of the world. Rather than a singular, even, and unified global space, new technologies of movement and interaction helped to produce a dense and shifting field comprising many distinct and overlapping geographies. It is no accident that these decades of rapid transformation witnessed the emergence of both new internationalist labor movements and new conceptions of an integrated Islamic world.

At the same time, by seeking to interrogate and historicize, rather than simply jettison, the category of “globalization,” the volume throws into question the received spatial units that continue to shape contemporary scholarship. The political, religious, and literary communities, smuggling and trade routes, pilgrimage journeys, and geographic imaginaries of the historical actors who populate the pages of Global Muslims do not map easily onto the established boundaries of nation-states or area studies regions. Rather than a methodological presupposition, the geographic framing of each chapter emerges instead as a crucial component of the analysis itself. In this respect, technological processes play a double role throughout the volume as both a material substratum that “defined the realm of the possible during a particular phase of global history” (p. 3) and a conceptual vocabulary for mapping and describing connections in space. In Ilham Khuri-Makdisi's contribution, fin-de-siècle Egypt thus appears as an important “node” or “nexus” in the “networks” of radical politics that linked activists, authors, and labor organizers in Cairo and Alexandria to comrades and fellow travelers around the Mediterranean and across the Atlantic. Amal Ghazal's biographical sketch of the itinerant statesman and activist Sulayman al-Baruni emphasizes the “networks of Islamic reform” through which he worked and operated as he moved about the late Ottoman Empire (p. 44). Ronit Ricci deploys the concept of the “literary network” to explore the Sri Lankan Malay community's reading of a Javanese conversion narrative, the “Hikayat Tuan Gusti,” a text that itself harkened back to “an earlier era of globalization, during which Islamic civilization was spreading to places ever farther from its site of emergence, including Southeast Asia” (p. 185). And Zvi Ben-Dor Benite's chapter on the near-simultaneous appearance of the first Arabic translation of the Analects of Confucius and the first Chinese translation of Muhammad ʿAbduh's Risalat al-Tawhid (The Theology of Unity) reconstructs the “circuits of (Islamic) intellectual exchange between China and the Middle East, particularly Egypt,” that made such acts of mutual translation and cross-cultural dialogue possible (p. 250).

Amidst the impressive and rewarding range of topics covered, the case studies in this volume share a common approach towards the “tremendous variety of Muslim responses to a world transformed” (p. 3). Each author proceeds by tracing movement and circulation—of particular commodities, printed journals, pilgrims on hajj, political operatives, religious ideologies, or literary and musical forms—across space. It is in contradistinction to this particular method of rendering global history manageable that Valeska Huber advocates for her own approach in Channeling Mobilities. Through her creative study of the Suez Canal region between 1869 and 1914, Huber sets out to show that “the history of globalisation can best be understood by analysing one specific—and specifically global—locality” (p. 1). As Huber notes in her introduction, few events loom larger in accounts of imperial expansion and quickening global movement in the 19th century than the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869. Over the course of eight densely researched chapters, she demonstrates that the predominant historiographical emphasis on the overall speed-up in communication, migration, and trade that ensued from the Canal's completion is at best one-sided. The turn of the 20th century was characterized not by a singular, uniform process of acceleration so much as by “the channelling of mobility, or to be more precise, the differentiation, regulation and bureaucratisation of different kinds of movement” (pp. 2–3).

By maintaining her focus on this single, strategic “global locality,” Huber is able to show that the Canal functioned as a kind of “filter or semi-permeable membrane, simultaneously serving to keep traffic flowing and controlled” (p. 242). And as the long history of interimperial struggles and outright wars over Suez attests, the permeability of that membrane was never politically neutral. Drawing on a wealth of material from state archives in Britain, Egypt, France, Germany, and the United States, Huber devotes much of her study to the shifting tangle of regulatory practices that contributed to the “simultaneous acceleration and deceleration that was characteristic of this global junction” (p. 1).

The opening of the Suez Canal compressed global space and time, making feasible the thrilling wager of Jules Verne's fictional hero Phileas Fogg to circle “around the world in 80 days” (p. 10). Even the privileged Western travelers whose journeys were rendered objectively shorter by the new route, however, often experienced their travels through the Canal as paradoxically slow. For many others, Suez was less a passageway than a “chokepoint” obstructing their movement across the innumerable boundaries imposed by competing imperial powers (p. 8). The camel caravans between Cairo and Damascus that had traversed the Sinai Peninsula for centuries now had to wait on passing steamers before ferrying across the new waterway (p. 153). The opening of the Canal similarly gave rise to new forms of rivalry and struggle between the “imperial circulatory system” of Western steamers and the trading, fishing, and pearl-diving vessels that had long plied the waters of the Red Sea (p. 172). As the Canal “came to be interpreted as marking the frontier of civilization” between East and West, a new regime of international conventions for the abolition of the maritime slave trade subjected the dhows sailing “‘east of Suez’” to stringent surveillance and bureaucratic controls (p. 178).

Like several of the authors in the Gelvin and Green volume, Huber notes that the advent of steamships and the completion of the Canal created the conditions for a staggering increase in the number of Muslims making the hajj each year. For the imperial powers vying to control the Canal region, these annual global flows of pilgrims “fostered fears of contagion both of disease and political ideas” (p. 204). The growth of pilgrimage traffic also raised a number of practical concerns about the care and repatriation of indigent travelers. As the ranks of those participating in the hajj swelled, the British, French, Ottoman, and Egyptian governments developed a range of new surveillance and identification procedures for tracking the movement of pilgrims. The specter of steamers packed with cholera- and plague-infected Muslims was also a major impetus for the series of international sanitary conferences that gave rise to the Conseil sanitaire maritime et quarantenaire d’Egypte (p. 245). Throughout the closing decades of the 19th century, the Canal region thus became a key site for the experimental elaboration of fumigation, medical inspection, and quarantine techniques. The enforcement of these sanitary regulations was just one among a range of tasks that now required the local consulates in the Canal cities to compile and transmit new kinds of statistical data. As Huber shows in other chapters, the consuls were also responsible for tracking migrant workers and monitoring imperial troop transports through the Canal. In this respect, the Suez Canal became not just a travel route but also “a relay station for both infrastructure and imperial flows of information” (p. 94).

In the introduction, Huber acknowledges that, “with an emphasis on global mobility and imperial circuits, the perspective of the local population, of Egyptian newspapers or Ottoman travellers for example, is largely omitted” (p. 9). Hewing closely to the optics and concerns of the numerous state archives that comprise its main source base, Channeling Mobilities tells the story of late 19th-century globalization chiefly through a focus on that era's most monumental infrastructure and the contested array of interimperial political arrangements that surrounded it. It is precisely to complement and complicate such an approach to globalization and technology in the age of empire that David Arnold proposes to explore the intimate experiences and perceptions of four small machines that transformed everyday life in India: the bicycle, the sewing machine, the typewriter, and the rice mill. In Everyday Technologies, he explains, “I am consciously moving away from the ‘big technologies’ that have, until recently, dominated the history of technology in South Asia and many other parts of the colonial world” (p. 11). This older tradition of colonial historiography, exemplified for Arnold by Michael Adas’ classic study Machines as the Measures of Men, has offered important insights into how large-scale engineering and public works projects—irrigation dams, canals, railways, roads, and telegraph lines—came to stand as “expressions of the material and political power of the imperial regime” (p. 27).Footnote ² Narratives of “technology transfer” from a Western site of origin to other societies through the agency of the colonial state, however, tend to overlook the many ways in which “the impetus for technological change at the everyday level…came from within a colonial society that was undergoing far-reaching processes of socioeconomic change” (p. 38). Arnold therefore redirects our attention to the Indian colonial subjects who, from the mid-19th century onward, eagerly purchased and adapted small-scale machines to meet their own needs and aspirations. He proposes to provincialize or decenter the history of modern technology by writing the “‘social life’ or ‘cultural biography’ of mechanical objects” as they were used and consumed (p. 5).

In following the movement and appropriation of the material objects at the center of his study, Arnold is able to show that the imperious discourse of Western technical dominance both obscured and also, in some cases, enabled these other lives of modern machines. The case of the Singer sewing machine offers a telling example. Within the genre of colonial ethnography that emerged towards the end of the 19th century, the Indian tailor or darzi often appeared as an embodiment of the backwardness and “technological inertia” that British rule had proclaimed to disrupt. Representations of the darzi as the ignominious foil to an archetypal Western modernity, however, ignored considerable changes in both the tools the tailor employed and the clothes he produced. The darzi's widespread appropriation of Singer sewing machines, moreover, owed a great deal to the ingenuity of Indian merchant entrepreneurs. In Europe and the United States, Singer and other manufacturers had marketed these machines to a growing class of female consumers for domestic use. But in South Asia, racial stereotypes about the inability of Indians, and Indian women in particular, to operate or even comprehend such new technologies left the company pessimistic about the prospect of selling to the non-European population

It was Singer's local agent in Bombay, a Parsi named Nasarvanji Mervanji Patell, who took the lead in expanding the number of Indian consumers for sewing machines. As was also true for the bicycle, the typewriter, the rice mill, and countless other foreign goods, the sewing machine owed its arrival as an “everyday technology” to the initiative of Parsi merchants such as Patell who played a crucial role as “technological intermediaries between Europeans and the mass of the population” (p. 71). In refocusing Singer's sales from the small expatriate European community to the vast numbers of Indian tailors spread across the country, Patell chose to invert the gender roles the company had elsewhere assigned to the sewing machine: “Whether as customers or sales assistants, women were not central to his marketing strategy” (p. 77). Nonetheless, the spread and adoption of this new technology did gradually help both to define and to enlarge the sphere of women's work. By the early 20th century, the sewing machine had become a commonplace domestic appliance across much of India, and growing numbers of women began using the device to do stitching work for their own families and for paying customers outside the home. In this regard, Arnold observes, the circulation of this mundane object “contradicts the idea that the Indian home remained a strictly segregated space, untouched by the exterior world of science, technology, and consumption” (p. 81).

Arnold's analysis of the other “everyday technologies” in the book displays a similar sensitivity to this kind of dynamic interplay between the cultural specificities that conditioned each object's initial reception and the subtle but significant changes it introduced into Indian society: from habits of dress and diet, to patterns of work, leisure, and travel, to the always-contested hierarchies of race, class, and gender that sustained colonial rule. On occasion, Arnold does mention instances in which Indians themselves redesigned and reconfigured these machines for novel uses. Local blacksmiths, for example, reassembled the bicycle into the cycle rickshaw, and enterprising craftsman adapted its crank mechanism for other applications such as experimental foot-powered looms and mobile grindstones (p. 56). But at the outset he concedes that, for the most part, each of these technologies was conceived and manufactured abroad and therefore arrived in India as “the finished product of a very different, and very distant, society” (p. 7). In this account, then, modern technologies largely acquired their durable material features at an original site of invention and production in the West. The functions and meanings of these mechanical objects, meanwhile, changed as they moved from one place to another.

On Barak's luminous monograph On Time: Temporality and Technology in Modern Egypt draws inspiration from a similar impulse to historicize and critique the triumphalist discourses of technological determinism and homogenization that continue to bolster imperial projects into the present. On Time, however, pushes a good deal further towards exploding the distinction between the material production and the socio-cultural construction of techno-scientific objects that Arnold's account still retains. In Barak's history of the steamer, railway, telegraph, tramway, and telephone in Egypt between 1830 and 1940, the material features of each technology, as it was assembled in this semicolonial context, do not precede the meaning and significance assigned to it in any straightforward or consistent way. To be sure, Western representations of such technologies have often claimed for them a pure and stable metropolitan origin and promised, in turn, that they would “unify time zones and enhance instrumental rationality, synchronization, and egalitarian social cohesion.… The supposedly obligatory road to a modern secular democracy is thought to be paved with rail and tram tracks, and lined with telegraph and telephone poles” (p. 5). That technology's colonial career did not yield these outcomes, that “Egyptian time” could appear as a deviant and debased approximation of a European standard, has often contributed to modes of analysis that pit forms of cultural and technological determinism against each other. Drawing on recent insights from actor-network theory (ANT) and science and technology studies (STS), Barak instead proposes to “examine both determinisms as converging historical forces” (p. 7).

From this perspective, the distinctive “countertempos” that continued to haunt and disrupt the abstract ideal of homogenous, empty time were not simply residues of an authentic culture gradually giving way to the progressive spread of a uniform technical modernity. Rather, by emphasizing the synergic interactions and intersections between forms of thought and representation and the tangible features of material objects, Barak argues that the irreducible heterogeneity of time was itself actively reproduced through the specific conditions of each technology's putative universalization in Egypt under colonial rule. “Orientalism,” he explains, “shaped the environments it misrepresented” (p. 34). The modes of global comparison that marked colonial societies as so many bad copies of a European original did not emerge only after the arrival of trains, telegraphs, trams, and telephones as “finished products” from abroad. Rather, the engineers who implemented these technologies in Egypt also engaged in such acts of comparison, building their own notions of “oriental unpunctuality” into the timetables of trains and their principles of machine operation. As a result, “‘disorder’ … artificially produced and framed the second-rate ‘order’ attainable in a colony, and hence the modes of accepting and resisting it” (p. 54).

The history of international telegraphy that spans the first and fourth chapters of the book offers a particularly compelling illustration of Barak's nimble deployment of this relational methodology. Before it could become a truly global technology of communication, telegraphy would need to overcome the formidable challenge of transmitting signals over long distances under water. The solution to this problem emerged not in the metropolitan laboratories of Europe but in the tropical forests of Southeast Asia, where local populations had long ago learned to extract and manipulate a kind of natural latex called gutta percha. This waterproof and thermoplastic substance produced by non-European labor and expertise provided the insulation that made underwater telegraphy possible over ever-longer distances. First Europe and then the rest of the world was thus “glued together with Asian latex” (p. 41).

Unfortunately, the new rubber wrappings that protected undersea telegraph lines proved to be an appealing source of food for the Toredo navalis, a tunneling shipworm nicknamed the “sea termite.” This tiny nonhuman “stowaway,” which owed its own ubiquity to previous centuries of maritime commerce, played an important role in the development of yet another major engineering achievement: its method of lining the holes it bored with petrified excreta provided a key inspiration for the construction of “tunneling shields” and thereby helped give rise to the modern tunneling industry (pp. 46–47). At the same time, the sea termite's ravenous appetite for gutta percha led to the failure of the first intercontinental cables running through the Red Sea and forced a search for more durable ways of protecting the lines. The second generation of Red Sea cables were much thicker and included an iron casing that kept the hungry borers at bay. But the much higher cost of these materials left the British government reluctant to continue subsidizing the undertaking, so the newer telegraph lines were funded with private capital (pp. 48–49).

The companies responsible for laying and maintaining the new cables quickly sought ways to recuperate their costs and turn a profit, and they began opening news agencies that sold access to the information that traveled along their lines. Pursuing the twists and turns of these cables into his fourth chapter, Barak shows that the advent of telegraph companies and the papers they sustained with both local and foreign news brought about further reorganizations of space, time, and—perhaps most surprisingly—the Arabic language itself. Because its news coverage and distribution moved mostly along the telegraph and train lines, which ran parallel to each other, “[t]erritorially speaking, the Egypt of Al-Ahrām was that of the railway map” (p. 136). The newspapers themselves had first evolved from broadsheets posted to the walls of the Alexandria Cotton Bourse, which detailed cotton prices on major markets abroad. As the volume of information arriving across the telegraph lines expanded to cover not just commodity prices and stock quotes but also foreign news, Gregorian dates gradually displaced the Hijri calendar as the standard for locating events in time. And because the telegraph companies made their profits by selling usage time of their equipment and personnel, this new technology imposed a particular economy of language. “Translated by the telegraph into money, ‘the great equalizer,’” Barak explains, “the [Arabic] language was subjected to ‘the logic of capitalism,’ which may well be the equation of time and money” (p. 132). The valorization of concise, efficient prose gave rise to a new “telegraphic” style stripped of the ornate embellishments that Arabic authors had once prized. Among the foremost champions of this reconfigured language was the famed activist, literary pioneer, and publisher ʿAbd Allah al-Nadim, who spent the first two decades of his career working as a telegraph operator.

In a brief reflection on his approach to the urban history of speed in a chapter on the Cairo tramway and the new “urban politics of slowness” it fostered, Barak makes explicit the difference between his own study and the narrowly discursivist approaches that dominated an earlier wave of historiography. He insists that, “we cannot confine ourselves to looking at the development of a specific discourse shaped by the interaction of texts and writers. … Discursive and tangible experiences of speed shaped each other, defining speed's entry into politics and its emergence as an emblem for the colonial condition” (pp. 149–50). Taking a similar set of methodological axioms as its point of departure, Ronen Shamir's Current Flow lays particular emphasis on the “principle of a flattened topography” (p. 85). In this intriguing study of electrification in Palestine during the 1920s, Shamir follows the poles and wires of the electrical grid through this formative decade of the Mandate era. He argues that “electrical connections participate in processes of group formation, take an active part in the performativity of social asymmetries; shape areas and regions and other spatial formations; and actively assemble, sustain, and enable taken-for-granted categories and dichotomies such as the private and public spheres” (p. 3).

Rather than inert “intermediaries” that transmitted pre-existing political ideologies, economic structures, or sociocultural representations into predictable tangible forms, the material components of the grid, in Shamir's account, are “mediators” in their own right (p. 6). It is on this basis that he sets out to demonstrate that the contingent particularities of the grid's expansion through the spaces of Palestine played an active, if previously unacknowledged, role in producing and affirming the ethnonational divisions that would become increasingly central to the politics of the Mandate by the 1930s. Shamir's story begins with the British administration's decision to grant a concession for the provision of electrical power in Jaffa, Tel Aviv, and the surrounding Jaffa district to the Russian-Jewish entrepreneur Pinhas Rutenberg. The concession stipulated that Rutenberg's Jaffa Electric Company should build a hydroelectric plant on the Auja (Yarkon) River. Official accounts at the time, as well as subsequent histories, have attributed Rutenberg's eventual decision to build a diesel-fueled plant in a different location to the obstruction of Arab landowners in the Auja basin. Shamir, however, argues that while Arab resistance to Rutenberg's concession did take place, “it mainly served as a discursive trope for justifying a decision prompted primarily by commercial considerations and the technological imperatives of machines” (p. 27). Tracing the correspondence between the Jaffa Electric Company and the British authorities over the terms of the Auja Concession, Shamir suggests that “a ‘political context’ was assembled” to justify Rutenberg's decision to abandon the hydroelectric scheme in favor of the German-made diesel turbines he judged more profitable and reliable (p. 32). On the one hand, Rutenberg reframed his own technical and business decisions to violate his various contractual obligations in terms of Arab recalcitrance. On the other hand, he garnered British support for the Jaffa powerhouse by casting the provision of affordable electricity as central to a national development project that would assuage possible tensions between Arabs and Jews.

In Palestine, too, a universalist discourse of colonial development abetted by the transformative promise of technology at once sanctioned and belied the ongoing production of “a material infrastructure of difference” (p. 77). The strongest sections of Shamir's book recount in detail how the technical and commercial arrangements that governed the grid's expansion gave rise to an uneven territory divided, most notably, between “wired Jews and unwired Arabs” (p. 76). Tel Aviv and other predominantly Jewish municipalities contracted with Rutenberg's Jaffa Electric Company to build out the grid at the town's own expense. In Arab towns such as Jaffa as well as in rural villages, where no such contracts for planned expansion existed, the Electric Company was forced to deal directly with individual consumers and to cover the costs of extending poles and lines on its own. Domestic connections to the grid in turn often followed the spread of electric streetlights, and the introduction of current meters not only enshrined a distinction between public and private spheres but contributed to the collation of statistical data that added meaning to categories of class difference. And particularly after the collapse of plans to grow the Electric Company's business by pushing for the electrification of the state-run Jaffa-Jerusalem Railway, the grid began “attaching itself to an inflow of private capital, to a flow of commercially oriented immigrants who invested in industry and in new agricultural technologies” (p. 121). With this massive influx of Jewish immigrants and capital in the mid-1920s, the grid's expansion became ever more dependent on the demand for “industrial power.” While the British authorities actively worked to suppress evidence of such divisions, subsuming them within accounts of unified national development, economists and statisticians who enjoyed the institutional backing of Zionist organizations deployed the growing mass of data about electrical usage to perform and represent a discrete “Jewish economy.” Over time, the “rapidly increasing gap between Jewish and Arab consumption of ‘industrial power’ enabled a material basis for comparisons between the two populations” (p. 135).

A sociologist by training, Shamir is careful to elaborate his methodology in direct and systematic terms. Consequently, his monograph exemplifies both some of the more fruitful possibilities and some of the more troubling pitfalls of what might be described as a new materialism that, albeit in varying degrees, characterizes all five of the works under consideration here. Much like Barak's critical interrogation of homogenous empty time, Shamir's study holds the politically charged colonial ideal of a unitary developmental space up against the empirical details of an increasingly fragmented and hierarchical mandatary territory. Current, like other resources and forms of power, did not flow equally to all groups and regions. His “flattened topography” of interactions, moreover, allows him to show how the particular configuration of components in Palestine's electrical infrastructure gave new meaning and plausibility to discourses and representations of communal difference. A similar concern to relate the dramatic spatial transformations wrought by the spread of steam and print to new religious and political imaginaries runs through many of the chapters in Gelvin and Green's edited volume.

There is a tension throughout Shamir's narrative, however, between such compelling observations about the mutually constitutive relations between materiality and forms of thought, on the one hand, and a much stronger set of methodological claims, derived from ANT, about the active mediation of inanimate objects, on the other. Shamir's devotion to this “method of inquiry that…does not assign ‘context’ a determining role in accounting for the general direction or order of events,” leads to some of the more problematic features of his narrative (p. 7). First, if wooden poles, copper wires, and current meters often attain the status of historical actors in Shamir's study, Arab Palestinians rarely do. Arab responses to the Auja Concession and the subsequent spread of the grid only appear relevant as they were narrativized and instrumentalized by Rutenberg and others. The “‘Arab economy’ in Palestine . . . perhaps may be better understood as a ‘negative assembly,’” Shamir suggests, and it “mainly existed as a kind of an ephemeral shadow” (p. 137). Shamir thus represents as a methodological innovation what might otherwise be construed as an unfortunate but predictable limitation of his reliance on predominantly English and Hebrew sources. Second, the same analytical emphasis on the contingent effects of material objects and processes underpins Shamir's repeated disavowal of human intentionality and, more specifically, Zionist and colonial politics as explanatory factors in the story he tells. It is in this way that he is able to argue that the “outcome of the process of electrification, unlike its original drivers, had ethno-national implications. The physical deployment of the wires and the attachment of the grid to the circulation of capital, rather than any Zionist master plan, participated in the assembly of a politics of separatism” (p. 148).

This rather startling conclusion usefully points towards some significant differences between the various approaches to a “new materialism” found in all five studies and the “historical materialism,” grounded in a Marxian critique of political economy, that animated an older body of scholarship. In these new works, the latter's concern for the historically specific structuring practices of social mediation peculiar to capitalism is, for the most part, conspicuous by its absence. In the older tradition, the spread of new technologies and the production of material objects are inseparable from the forms of human activity and social practice that became prevalent as a result of a given territory's particular conditions of incorporation into the world economy. While the stronger variants of a new materialism do not necessarily jettison the category of capital altogether, they do actively refute the explanatory force of capitalist social relations while assigning historical agency to nonhuman objects.

This issue is perhaps most obvious in Shamir's case. Situating his work within the historiography on the Mandate era, he locates the emergence of “ethno-national identities” as an outcome of the “‘concrete’ process” of electrification in the 1920s. Neither the particular details of that electrification process nor the growing influence of separatism, he insists, can be adequately explained in terms of a pre-existing Zionist project backed by colonial rule: “the material consolidation of the grid (with its nascent differences and distinctions) preceded and ‘assembled’ part of what was to come” (p. 21). On both empirical and theoretical grounds, this account stands at odds with Gershon Shafir's argument in Land, Labor, and the Origins of the Israeli–Palestinian Conflict that Labor Zionism and its vision of an enclave economy took shape several decades earlier.Footnote ³ In Shafir's monograph, which goes unmentioned and uncited in Current Flow, it is not the mediation of material objects but the mediating social practice of buying and selling labor power that occasioned growing popular support for a politics of ethno-national separation: Jewish immigrants arriving from Europe could not viably compete on a free and open market against Arab laborers in Palestine who accepted a lower standard of living and offered a higher level of skill for the same work. The “context” of capitalist wage labor relations in a settler colonial society thus played a significant “determining role” in generating demands for subsidization and protection of Jewish labor. Shafir's study is by no means incompatible with a more modest framing of Shamir's arguments. Moreover, Shamir's emphasis on group formation as an ongoing “process ‘in action’” (p. 20) and his attention to the way Rutenberg's business interests sometimes trumped his Zionist politics constitute important correctives to more polarized histories of the Mandate. But in skirting a more substantive engagement with this older line of analysis, Shamir's attachment to the mediation of things seems somewhat arbitrary.

To be sure, the older iterations of historical materialism were not without their flaws, among which their proclivities towards economic determinism and a stagist conception of capitalist development were surely the most notorious. One of the signal virtues of many recent histories of technology and infrastructure has been to denaturalize and historicize the market mechanisms, modes of calculation, and ways of construing human wealth unique to capitalism that many earlier works, whether Marxist or otherwise, took for granted. Particularly under conditions of colonial rule, the introduction of modern technologies, both big and small, often played an outsized role in subjecting new regions and social groups to the coercive imperatives and competitive pressures of the world market. It was for this very reason that many critics of colonialism expressed a profound ambivalence towards the technical innovations that foreign rule had helped to introduce. In her chapter of Global Muslims on the hajj travelogue of the Indian publicist and litterateur ʿAbd al-Majid Daryabadi, Homayra Ziad notes that he appreciated the potential benefits of technological progress and acknowledged its role in facilitating his own religious journey. But in his travelogue, Daryabadi also identified the advent of industrial technology with “‘brisk circulation of money, absorption in buying and selling.’” As Ziad goes on to explain, Daryabadi associated the attendant spread of “universal warfare, greed, injustice, and self-serving ideologies” with the return of the monstrous Qurʾanic figure of Yajuj (pp. 236–37). In a similar vein, Barak tracks the spread of “the universalizing episteme wherein time could be squandered and economized” along Egypt's new lines of transport and communication. Because the tramways that subjected their drivers to strict standards of time discipline and caromed through city streets at breakneck speed were foreign owned, “tram accidents offered an avenue for the development and intersection of pointed anticolonial and anticapitalistic critiques” (p. 162). He likewise suggests of the popular revolt that took place following World War I that “for Egyptian peasants attacking rail lines and telegraph and telephone poles in 1919, the uprising was characterized by wholesale rejection of the monetized notion of time and the resurrection of long-suppressed millenarian utopias and cyclical temporalities” (p. 176).

Such arguments offer a convincing historical explanation for the wide popular appeal of critiques that conflated colonial with capitalist domination and identified specific technologies as the immediate embodiments of both. At the same time, however, they prompt a further set of questions about the degree to which such critiques succeeded in grasping and comprehending the problems they associated with the physical forms of material objects. Here again, a greater sensitivity to the changing and unstable relationships between material practice and material things, between capitalism and the technopolitical arrangements that have often enabled its spread, becomes relevant. The problem with a materialism of material things alone, in brief, is that capital, as value in motion, is both dependent upon and irreducible to its various tangible manifestations. Railways and telegraph lines may have been instrumental to the intensification of capitalist relations of production and exchange in Egypt as in many other colonial territories. But as such social practices became ever more vital to the reproduction of everyday life, they soon spread well beyond the heavy vasculature of those particular infrastructures. As Barak himself notes in passing, for example, Egypt underwent a massive financial boom in the early years of the 20th century. The elaboration of new transport and communication networks played an important role in first attracting investors to the Nile Valley, and the massive influx of foreign capital did contribute to the rapid development of urban and suburban real estate on which Barak focuses in his fifth chapter. But at its climax in the early 1900s, the boom was characterized not only by the rapid transformation of built environments but also by frenzied speculation on a range of increasingly abstract and heavily leveraged financial instruments. When the bubble burst in 1907, an early generation of economic nationalists railed most of all against the ephemeral and immaterial character of the fictitious value that had exploded under the auspices of colonial rule. They therefore called for the institutionalization of a sovereign national economy that would foster Egypt's technological advancement as a basis for the production of what they referred to as “real wealth.”

That colonial subjects in Egypt could just as easily identify their predicament in the formless abstractions of imperial finance as in the physical features of technological objects is a testament to the contradictory character of capital's churning movements. In the opening pages of Everyday Technology, Arnold draws attention to a similar ambivalence when he contrasts Gandhi's famous condemnations of “industrial civilization” and its technical armature with Begum Rokeya Shakhawat Hossain's utopian short story “Sultana's Dream,” in which modern technology serves “as a means of achieving female emancipation and the conjuring up of a future, alternative world in which scientific knowledge and mechanical inventions prevail” (p. 17). Arnold describes these opposing visions of India's future simply to introduce the empirical plurality of “India's technological imaginary.” But the contemporaneous appearance of such very different evaluations might also serve to underscore the lived ambiguities of technological modernity as both Gandhi and Rokeya Hossain experienced it in 1905.

If greater attention to the uneven movements of capital in and through the spaces and material objects it produces only adds to the challenge of writing critical histories of globalization and technology, it may also help to account for the kinds of contemporary globalization discourse that all of these authors rightly set out to debunk. It is precisely this ongoing and uneven transformation of space and time, what Joseph Schumpeter famously referred to as capital's “creative destruction,” that Matthew Hopper showcases in his concise and lucid exposition of the international date trade in Global Muslims. In the early 1860s, wooden barks sailing out of Salem, Massachusetts began carrying dates from Oman to a growing population of eager American consumers. Over time, Hopper shows, competition to capture profits on either end of this long-distance exchange and along the routes in between drove significant reconfigurations of the date trade's component parts. The volume of Iraqi dates sold from Basra soon surpassed that of Omani dates from Muscat. Sailing ships from Salem continued to make the journey around the tip of Africa for several decades after 1869, but the opening of the Suez Canal shortened the journey for steamers based out of New York by a third and thereby sparked a new rivalry between the two Atlantic ports. While steamships and telegraph lines accelerated trade and communications between the United States and the Arabian Gulf, Hopper notes that the dynamics of the trade in turn imposed their own rhythms on the uses of those technologies. The premium awarded to the first shipment of dates arriving in New York each year provided the impetus behind “an annual date race” in which captains pushed their vessels to shave days off the long journey (p. 168). Finally, Hopper concludes, “Just as quickly as globalization created vibrant export industries in the Gulf, it ushered in their demise. … The Gulf's key date market in North America dwindled as soon as the United States developed a date industry of its own in California” (p. 172).

By recognizing that globalization is a process whereby new geographies are continuously pulled together and torn apart, such accounts begin to do more than reveal the banal myopia of presentist globalization discourse. They also help to explain the constant appearance of novelty and change that lend such presentist pronouncements their ready appeal. From this perspective, the hollow claims of a Thomas Friedman are as old as the processes they fail so spectacularly to capture and explain. In opening up new avenues for understanding both the longer histories of those material transformations and the forms of thought that have sustained and challenged them, these works invite us to reconsider the contours of Middle Eastern studies itself.