On Time: Technology and Temporality in Modern Egypt

by On Barak

In this pioneering history of transportation and communication in the modern Middle East, On Barak argues that contrary to accepted wisdom technological modernity in Egypt did not drive a sense of time focused on standardization only. Surprisingly, the introduction of the steamer, railway, telegraph, tramway, and telephone in colonial Egypt actually triggered the development of unique timekeeping practices that resignified and subverted the typical modernist infatuation with expediency and promptness. These countertempos, predicated on uneasiness over "dehumanizing" European standards of efficiency, sprang from and contributed to non-linear modes of arranging time.

Barak shows how these countertempos formed and developed with each new technological innovation during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, contributing to a particularly Egyptian sense of time that extends into the present day, exerting influence over contemporary political language in the Arab world. The universal notion of a modern mechanical standard time and the deviations supposedly characterizing non-Western settings "from time immemorial," On Time provocatively argues, were in fact mutually constitutive and mutually reinforcing.

Genres: Nonfiction, History, Egypt

359 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2013

About the author

On Barak is a social historian of science and technology in non-Western settings, and a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Middle Eastern and African History at Tel Aviv University. He is the author of On Time: Technology and Temporality in Modern Egypt.

Reviews

[Sara Salem]

Interesting book that looks at how technologies such as watches, the Gregorian calendar, trains and trams affected conceptions of time in Egypt. The author looks at how these technologies were bound up with European capitalism and Eurocentric notions of time and productivity, and how in relation to these Egyptians were constructed as lazy, late, and so on. The author could have pushed much further in many places, however, given the extensive critiques that have been made by other postcolonial and decolonial scholars who look at how subjectivities were imported through the spread of capitalism. The author sometimes gets trapped in the trap of saying "everything is nuanced" in places where it is sheer European power, dominance and hegemony that are at play. Nevertheless an important book!

[Ajk · Rating 4 out of 5]

The prose is quite dense and often simply not good, but the arguments are fascinating. Barak talks about dueling notions of time and what it is to be on or against time. It's a great explanation of colonial understandings of time, connecting temporalities and modernity. See? I can't write well when I talk about it either.