The British Empire in India, the Gulf pearl and the making of the Middle East

Crouzet, Guillemette

doi:10.1080/00263206.2019.1588121

Cited by 3 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 8 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…After all, as Guillemette Crouzet has recently highlighted, it was the control of the pearl industry in the Gulf that also informed the conceptualisation of a 'Middle East'. 6 Another question concerns Barak's argument about opposing 'energy' as a category itself. Although he seeks to provincialize the term, many of the chains of agency he follows from coal ultimately relate back to coal as a fuel source.…”

Section: Likewise In Chapter Fivementioning

confidence: 99%

Powering empire: how coal made the Middle East and sparked global carbonization

Biglari

2020

Middle Eastern Studies

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

How did the world become addicted to fossil fuels? Of course, when reference is made to the Middle East in answering this question, it is usually done so in relation to oil. In his latest book, Powering Empire, On Barak instead turns attention to coal, not only for its role in transforming the region before oil, but also in connecting consumption habits across the world through imperial networks. In order to understand how we might achieve decarbonisation faced with global climate crisis, Barak posits, we must understand how carbonisation became global in the first place. Barak's book investigates this issue by combining environmental, social, cultural, intellectual and labour history approaches, offering a new and rich account of how coal became ever more intertwined with mundane life in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It is an extremely valuable and ground-breaking work to add to the burgeoning field of 'Energy Humanities' and should be of interest to scholars concerned with the history of the modern Middle East, British empire and global capitalism.As in his previous book, On Time, Barak borrows methods from science and technology studies (STS) to examine the technopolitics of an array of objects, technological artefacts and infrastructures. 1 These were all related in some way to coal: steamships, desalination plants, refrigerators, irrigation pumps, lighthouses, risk management and coal itself. Yet Barak also seeks to marry this 'New Materialism' with Marxian materialism through examining how these were embedded within global capitalism and imperial power structures, alerting the reader to labour conditions and forms of agency in steamship engine rooms, coal mines and at coal heaving ports, as well as pointing to the early geopolitics of 'energy security'. He does so by This is the version of the article accepted for publication in Middle Eastern Studies, 57 (1). pp. 168-172 (2021), published by Taylor and Francis.

show abstract

Section: Likewise In Chapter Fivementioning

confidence: 99%

Powering empire: how coal made the Middle East and sparked global carbonization

Biglari

2020

Middle Eastern Studies

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

List of publications on the economic and social history of Great Britain and Ireland published in 2019

Hale¹,

Raymond²,

Wright³

2020

The Economic History Review

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The Airwaves in Arabia: BBC Arabic, British Imperialism, and the Arabian Peninsula’s Global Listenership, c. 1933-1940

Lavin

2023

arabianhumanities

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This article explores how the reception of early Arabic radio broadcasts throughout the Arabian Peninsula was connected to global media markets and geopolitics leading up to the Second World War. Specifically, it uses British efforts to establish the BBC Arabic service to investigate the various radio stations and other technologies that defined the region’s global media landscape during the 1930s. It argues that, while the BBC broadcasts pushed colonial territories in Arabian Peninsula away from British India into the fold of Britain's Middle East administration, colonial officials had to acknowledge Arabia’s social, economic, and cultural ties to the Indian Ocean region in order to have the BBC successfully compete with German and Italian broadcasts among Arab and Muslim audiences worldwide. As such, the article also suggests that the Arabian Peninsula’s role in the history of early Arabic broadcasting is significantly more important than previously assumed in scholarship.

show abstract

The British Empire in India, the Gulf pearl and the making of the Middle East

Cited by 3 publications

References 8 publications

Powering empire: how coal made the Middle East and sparked global carbonization

Powering empire: how coal made the Middle East and sparked global carbonization

List of publications on the economic and social history of Great Britain and Ireland published in 2019

The Airwaves in Arabia: BBC Arabic, British Imperialism, and the Arabian Peninsula’s Global Listenership, c. 1933-1940

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About