Bøker av On Barak

"In rewriting the entangled histories of coal, Powering Empire recasts the history of the Middle East as well as our understanding of empire and the map of our present predicament. Barak has written a brilliant book."--Timothy Mitchell, author of Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil "An imaginative, timely intervention in debates on the popular but contested idea of the Anthropocene, Barak's account of coal and the British Empire in the Middle East effectively historicizes many of our contemporary anxieties and concerns. His wide-ranging and impeccable scholarship and his judicious discussion of 'energy transition' in the Middle East will make this book compulsory reading for all historians and students of energy regimes."--Dipesh Chakrabarty, author of The Crises of Civilization: Exploring Global and Planetary Histories "We all know that the energy source that made the modern Middle East is oil--wrong! As On Barak shows in this fascinating book, British coal during the nineteenth century--and an archipelago of coaling stations designed to safeguard Britain's seaborne links to India and beyond--triggered enormous changes in everything from high politics to diet, labor, environment, and ideas about the body in Egypt, the Red Sea, and the Arabian Peninsula. But 'coalonialism, ' as the author calls it, was not only powered by coal. Water, human and animal muscles, plus abstract notions of energy, work, and risk both made the projection of coal-based power possible and also were transformed by it--often in ways that anticipated and persisted into the so-called 'age of oil' that would follow. This book will stimulate lots of new thinking about how our current relationships to energy sources took shape and what it might mean to transform them."--Kenneth Pomeranz, author of The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy "Powering Empire is an extraordinarily original account that unsettles conventional energy histories of the Middle East, which focus to a great degree on oil. What Barak shows is that it was the nineteenth century intersection of British coal exports and colonialism that helped create the infrastructural and social basis for the twentieth century's oil regime. Brilliantly insightful and marvelously written, this book reminds us of how deeply the legacy of coal continues to inform contemporary energy politics."--Dominic Boyer, author of The Life Informatic: Newsmaking in the Digital Era

In this pioneering history of transportation and communication in the modern Middle East, On Barak argues that contrary to accepted wisdom technological modernity in Egypt did not drive a sense of time focused on standardization only. Surprisingly, the introduction of the steamer, railway, telegraph, tramway, and telephone in colonial Egypt actually triggered the development of unique timekeeping practices that resignified and subverted the typical modernist infatuation with expediency and promptness. These countertempos, predicated on uneasiness over "e;dehumanizing"e; European standards of efficiency, sprang from and contributed to non-linear modes of arranging time. Barak shows how these countertempos formed and developed with each new technological innovation during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, contributing to a particularly Egyptian sense of time that extends into the present day, exerting influence over contemporary political language in the Arab world. The universal notion of a modern mechanical standard time and the deviations supposedly characterizing non-Western settings "e;from time immemorial,"e; On Time provocatively argues, were in fact mutually constitutive and mutually reinforcing.