The Diffusion of "Small" Western Technologies in the Middle East: Invention, Use and Need in the 19th and 20th Centuries by M. Kupferschmidt (review)

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• The Diffusion of “Small” Western Technologies in the Middle East: Invention, Use and Need in the 19th and 20th Centuries by M. Kupferschmidt
• Leor Halevi (bio)

The Diffusion of “Small” Western Technologies in the Middle East: Invention, Use and Need in the 19th and 20th Centuries
By Uri M. Kupferschmidt. Berlin: De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2023. Pp. xii + 278.

This book deals with the transfer of technological objects from Europe and the United States to Istanbul, Cairo, and other Middle Eastern cities. In size, these objects range from socks and light bulbs to pianos and cars. Kupferschmidt refers to them as “small” in quotation marks—to distinguish them from massive projects such as railways and hydroelectric dams, the construction of which depended, as Daniel Headrick argues in The Tentacles of Progress (1988), on imperial states’ core political and economic interests. But how should we think historically about the transregional and transcultural diffusion of everyday technologies, as well as novelties in cases where, despite Western dominance, imperialism was hardly at stake? Alongside social anthropologists and multinational marketing researchers, historians of technology and world trade have answered this question in various ways, illustrating the dynamics of the rejection, adoption, and spread of innovations in colonial and postcolonial states. Many of these scholars have emphasized cultural differences and adaptations. Kupferschmidt does the same, highlighting cultural factors when theorizing about the success or failure of diffusion in the Middle East.

He contributes to this field through fascinating case studies of objects that have received little attention in a Middle Eastern context. He examines a transimperial department store chain, Orosdi-Back, which Jewish businessmen of Austro-Hungarian descent launched in Istanbul and Cairo in the 1850s. As well as fezzes, umbrellas, and watches, it exported ready-to-wear clothing from European factories to branches in “the Orient.” Additionally, Kupferschmidt refers to the usefulness and impact of four tools: eyeglasses, sewing machines, typewriters, and pianos. Why, he asks, did Arab and Turkish consumers adopt eyeglasses and sewing machines readily but typewriters gradually and pianos minimally? Mass-produced “reading” glasses and sewing machines met both social and professional needs, allowing adults suffering from presbyopia or gender discrimination to engage in “delicate work.” Facilitating their commercial success, too, were advertisements, novel marketing strategies, foreign brokers, minority retailers, and elite adopters.

Culture was a barrier to rapid diffusion in the other two cases. Kupfer-schmidt shows what incremental innovations were needed to adapt mechanical typewriters to Arabic and Ottoman-Turkish scripts around 1900. Besides [End Page 996] beginning and final letters, cursive ligatures were expected; the obvious solution to the need for extra characters was an instrument with two shift keys and three-character typebars. Pianos were less adaptable. One challenge to diffusion was that the standard Western model was “unsuitable” to Arab music, the maqam melodic system, with its microtonal scales and variations. Several “Oriental” models were developed by 1932, but “even the young Umm Kulthum failed to harmonize her singing with the innovative instrument” (p. 87). Furthermore, unlike fiddles, which maqam bands could afford and take from coffeeshop to coffeeshop, pianos were expensive and difficult to transport.

A mix of previously published and unpublished chapters, the book has the charming quality of a project that grew by happenstance as the author encountered morsels of evidence. But it is not clear why and how he chose his four cases. What is each an example of? How would our impressions of diffusion change if Kupferschmidt had focused instead on, say, violins, bicycles, cotton gins, and firearms? Several times he laments the lack of reliable evidence and statistical data to understand better how far imports spread in society. Much more evidence can presumably be found in probate inventories and dowry lists. The choice to concentrate on the private sector and personal goods is fine, but it seems artificial to address the diffusion of light bulbs and cars in connection with batteries and unpaved roads when there were contemporary infrastructure developments. As Rudolf Mrázek’s Engineers of Happy Land (2002) suggests, the boundary between personal and public technologies was not that hard and fast.

The other boundary that seems porous is between cultures. Egypt’s cities had a significant...