Reading Clocks, Alla Turca
Time and Society in the Late Ottoman Empire
Up until the end of the eighteenth century, the way Ottomans used their clocks conformed to the inner logic of their own temporal culture. However, this began to change rather dramatically during the nineteenth century, as the Ottoman Empire was increasingly assimilated into the European-dominated global economy and the project of modern state building began to gather momentum. In "Reading Clocks, Alla Turca", Avner Wishnitzer unravels the complexity of Ottoman temporal culture and for the first time tells the story of its transformation. He explains that in their attempt to attain better surveillance capabilities and higher levels of regularity and efficiency, various organs of the reforming Ottoman state developed elaborate temporal constructs in which clocks played an increasingly important role. As the reform movement spread beyond the government apparatus, emerging groups of officers, bureaucrats, and urban professionals incorporated novel time-related ideas, values, and behaviors into their self-consciously "modern" outlook and lifestyle. Acculturated in the highly regimented environment of schools and barracks, they came to identify efficiency and temporal regularity with progress and the former temporal patterns with the old political order.
Drawing on a wealth of archival and literary sources, Wishnitzer's original and highly important work presents the shifting culture of time as an arena in which Ottoman social groups competed for legitimacy and a medium through which the very concept of modernity was defined".Reading Clocks, Alla Turca" breaks new ground in the study of the Middle East and presents us with a new understanding of the relationship between time and modernity.
Contents:
Acknowledgments
Note on Terms, Names, and Transliteration
Introduction
Chapter 1. Reading Clocks, Alaturka
Chapter 2. Clerk Work
Chapter 3. Military Time
Chapter 4. On Time for School
Chapter 5. Ferry Tales
Chapter 6. No Time to Lose
Conclusion: Reading Clocks, Alafranga
Notes
Bibliography
Index
About the Author
Avner Wishnitzer is senior lecturer in the Department of Middle Eastern and African History at Tel Aviv University. He resides with his family in Jerusalem.
Reviews
"Among the most brilliant moments of historical writing are often those that reveal the amazing and unique stories of dramatic change in things we usually take as givens. Wishnitzer's 'Reading Clocks, Alla Turca' is one such moment. His meticulously detailed account of perceptions, technologies, and the regulation of time in the vast Ottoman Empire of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, is a wide-ranging, exciting adventure in learning why time matters!" – Walter G. Andrews, University of Washington
"The social construction of time is an astonishingly difficult topic to pursue, and Wishnitzer brilliantly mines almanacs, timetables, and schedules for what they can reveal about how the peoples of the Ottoman Empire experienced and discussed time – but more impressively, he brings his analytical skills to bear on literary sources one might not expect, notably poetry, to broaden and deepen his account. Through a nuanced reading of these varied sources, 'Reading Clocks, Alla Turca' demonstrates that there was no sudden shift from the seasonally oriented forms of reckoning time that prevailed among the Ottomans before the modern period, to the abstract, homogeneous form of time which dominates modern life today. This is an ambitious and important examination" – Paul Sedra, Simon Fraser University
"If you want to understand nineteenth-century Ottoman history through the story of time, then this is your book. Wishnitzer tells a complex tale, not of one single temporal culture, but of time organization as an arena of competition waged by state and societal forces, meshing 'center' and 'peripheries' and featuring variegated practices. This book will fascinate Middle East historians and any scholar interested in the riddle of modern time" – Cyrus Schayegh, Princeton University
"Wishnitzer's 'Reading Clocks, Alla Turca' breaks new ground in the study of the late Ottoman Empire by examining the shift from old-style to new-style – mean-time – temporal reckoning. By focusing on the important but overlooked question of this crucial transition in its many vicissitudes, ranging from the way that schedules increasingly regulated daily activities to an internalized clock consciousness, Wishnitzer skillfully demonstrates the value of what he aptly terms 'temporal culture' for elucidating some of the many changes affecting late Ottoman society. At the same time, the book is alive to both the continuities and the changes – the losses as well as the gains – involved in adjusting to the new temporal order and is careful to include these in the elegant analysis offered in these pages" – Benjamin Fortna, SOAS, University of London
