Description:

ON BARAK: Middle Eastern and African History, Tel Aviv University

“Reading Boyle in Istanbul: British Coal and the Animation of Ottoman Technopolitics”

Description: The separation of politics and experimental science, or Leviathan and air-pump, is traditionally recounted as an English story with less attention to whether and how it was informed by, and in turn impacted other places. This talk brings the Ottoman Empire into the frame: It suggests that the success of this project in the British Isles depended on trans-imperial connections already in the seventeenth century and well into the long nineteenth. Moreover, it demonstrates how this divorce in Europe limited the possibility of a hermetic separation of science, politics, and religion in the Ottoman and post-Ottoman worlds. Examining Ottoman appropriations of European knowledge about coal, its extraction and utilization (geology, mineralogy, engineering, and thermodynamics), the talk asks how increased transnational connectivity in the age of steam-power energized global incommensurability.

Bio: On Barak is a social and cultural historian of science and technology in non-western settings. He is a Senior Lecturer at the Department of Middle Eastern & African History in Tel Aviv University. His most recent book is On Time: Technology and Temporality in Modern Egypt (University of California Press, 2013). His current book project, Coalonialism: Energy and Empire before the Age of Oil, on which this talk is based, is funded by a European Union Marie Curie Award and an Israel Science Foundation Grant.

 reception to follow