On Time

Abstract

Westerners and non-Westerners alike tend to agree that the colonial and postcolonial worlds are characterized by "elastic" conceptions of time, whose origins are primordial. Such dispositions toward time, this book provocatively argues, were, in fact, a nineteenth-century creation, one that was every bit as technological and modern as their European and American temporal counterparts. Surprisingly, it was the introduction of the steamer, railway, telegraph, tramway, and telephone into colonial Egypt between 1830 and 1940 that triggered the development of unique practices of timekeeping that deceptively evade the modernist infatuation with expediency and promptness. These newly introduced means of conveyance did not drive social synchronization and standardized timekeeping, as conventionally understood by social scientists. Rather, they often promoted "countertempos" predicated on unease with the time of the clock, and a vocal disdain with "dehumanizing" European standards of efficiency, linearity, and punctuality. In this pioneering history of transportation and communication technology in the modern Middle East, On Barak retraces to these countertempos the universal notion of an empty and homogeneous standard time of modernity. To these countertempos we also owe much of the current political language in the Arab world, a lexicon dominated by nonlinear, temporal terms.

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