Introduction

Extract

This roundtable brings together a diverse group of scholars to ask how a critical engagement with science studies, writ large, might allow us to rethink the modern history of the Middle East. They speak in the name of a number of disciplines, including: archaeology, agriculture, engineering, geography, medicine, natural philosophy, public health, psychology, sociology, and urban planning. And they cover a wide array of local, regional, and even international networks of expertise and experts. These included (to name a few) a British engineer who worked in colonial Egypt and India calculating the future demography of water supplies and sewage systems; American, Palestinian, and Zionist agricultural researchers and proponents of dry-land cultivation and colonization in Ottoman Palestine; Ottoman Arab and Turkish nationalists in Istanbul who debated the metaphysical and political implications of positivism; and, finally, the various experts and political actors who fought over the preservation (and destruction) of antique material artifacts and objects in Iraq and Egypt from the 19th century to the present. What we might claim they have in common, however, is a concern with the rise of the “modern state”—another broad category here encompassing a range of imperial, colonial, and national states in the region, and the multiple claims for legal and political sovereignty that they spawned. Of course, interlacing these questions of sovereignty, particularly in this context, as the essays show, is a further set of questions organized around the various forms of power that both these new states and these new sciences exercised. We could say, therefore, that collectively these essays reflect upon the coterminous rise of epistemic, material, and political orders in the region, and that, in the process, they contribute to our understanding of the ideas and practices claimed on behalf of both “science” and the “state.”