Introduction: Global Muslims in the Age of Steam and Print

Abstract

GLOBAL MUSLIMS IN THE AGE OF STEAM AND PRINT edited by James L . Gelvin and Nile Green Berkeley: University of Ca lifornia Press, 2014 (xiv + 285, index, illustrations, maps) $75.00 (clot h), $34.95 (paper)In his 1981 classic, The Tools of Empire: Technology and European Imperialism in the Nineteenth Century, Daniel Headrick wrote: "Among the many important events of the nineteenth century, two were of momentous consequence for the entire world. One was the progress and power of industrial technology and the other was the domination and exploitation of Africa and much of Asia by Europeans" (3). But, as the editors of Global Muslims in the Age of Steam and Print, James Gelvin and Nile Green, caution, "focusing on these technologies also highlights the fundamental problem of ascribing agency solely to one part of the globe" (3). Thus, instead of telling a "simple story of imperial hegemony and technological determinism," this edited volume attempts to weave a more complicated narrative, documenting how Muslim communities worldwide quickly took up the "tools of empire" and put them to use in ways that their inventors and disseminators had never envisioned (2-3). Highlighting the global Muslim community's exposure to new technologies, the authors in the volume do more than simply reframe a familiar story from a non-Western perspective. Instead, they open up new space to rethink the meaning and timing of globalization itself.Gelvin and Green take aim at the question of how to periodize globalization. Acknowledging that we live in a globalized world, but dissatisfied with the notion that the current era of globalization dates from the end of the Cold War or the invention of the microchip, they argue that this most recent incarnation of globalization "was made possible and in many ways defined by earlier globalizing events" (1). For much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, steam and print quickened the pace of human contact and represented the sinews and tentacles of "the twin systems most identified with the modern period: the world system of nation-states and the modern world economic system" (4). By concentrating on this bundle of technologies, Gelvin and Green distinguish between "the more nebulous periods of 'modernity/early modernity' on the one hand and unqualified 'globalization' on the other" (1). In contrast to political or military framings of the long nineteenth century, they propose a period from roughly 1850 to 1930 defined by "the global diff usion of enabling technologies" (2).The collapsing of time and space facilitated the movement of migrants, pilgrims, commodities, and diseases with unprecedented speed and breadth. In the process, steamship and rail travel rearranged the physical and conceptual geography of the Islamic world. The massive increase in the numbers of Muslims making the hajj to Mecca, particularly from South and Southeast Asia, helped to kindle the emergence and spread of new religious and religiopolitical movements, running the gamut from Sufism to pan-Islamism. In other cases, however, older circuits of travel gave way to a new geography of steamship routes and newly industrialized port cities like Aden, Beirut, Bombay, Port Said, and Mombasa. Overlapping networks of rail and steamship routes ensured that the books, newspapers, and journals printed in Cairo, Istanbul, Bombay, and Singapore reached audiences across the Islamic world. The proliferation of this polyglot marketplace "created a new transnational public sphere where news of world events and the fortunes of other communities of Muslims could be disseminated" (13). Gelvin and Green argue that the material and ideological connotations of the Islamic world as we now understand it were produced by "a specific and relatively recent conjuncture, when steam and print allowed for the synthesis of new social imaginaries, which were in turn validated by new social practices" (4).The book explores these disparate strands through twelve case studies, divided into three parts. …