Mavi Boncuk |Reading Clocks, Alla Turca
TIME AND SOCIETY IN THE LATE OTTOMAN EMPIRE
Reading Clocks, Alla Turca
Avner Wishnitzer is senior lecturer in the Department of Middle Eastern and African History at Tel Aviv University. His current project is titled A Dark History of the Late Ottoman Empire, sponsored by the Israel Science Foundation. The study investigates the far-reaching transformation in late Ottoman nocturnal realities from the early 18th century to WWI, exploring a variety of themes, from the economic utility of darkness to material and political aspects of lighting. His previous work focused on temporality and his book Reading Clocks Alla Turca: Time and Society in the Late Ottoman Empire was published by the University of Chicago Press in 2015. Dr Wishnitzer received his PhD from Tel Aviv University and was later a Fulbright post-doctoral fellow at the University of Washington in Seattle, a Lady Davis post-doctoral Fellow at the Hebrew University and a Krietman Post-Doctoral Fellow at Ben-Gurion University. He is the co-editor of the Social History Workshop, a public history blog in Haaretz Newspaper (in Hebrew).He resides with his family in Jerusalem.
312 pages | 14 halftones, 1 table
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
Benjamin Fortna, SOAS, University of London
“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.”
Journal of the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association
“Reading Clocks Alla Turca puts Ottoman studies in particular, and Middle Eastern history in general on the map of the ‘temporal turn’ that lately has been receiving a renewed interest. . . . Wishnitzer employs sophisticated approaches to modernity, state-society binary, and the issues of agency. . . . With the accounts of sunset-time sadness, the ferry-waiting wife at the window, the anxiety of running late, Wishnitzer brings in the creative forces of poetry and fiction, and strongly weaves a universe sufficiently chaotic that is irreducible neither to state-compelled reforms nor a world saturated with homogenous time.”
New Perspectives on Turkey
“From sociology via anthropology to social and cultural history, time as an aspect of social relationships has recently become an object of empirical scholarly inquiry. Reading Clocks, Alla Turca is the first extensive study that brings the insights from these fields to bear on Ottoman history. It is a study of the changing temporal regimes, daily rhythms, and the meaning of time among the Ottoman state elite from the eighteenth century to the establishment of the Republic of Turkey. . . . While Reading Clocks is a study in social history, it is highly relevant for scholars working in other fields as well.”
International Journal of Turkish Studies
“Drawing on a wealth of sources, from erotic poetry to military timetables, ferry schedules, police reports, and political cartoons, Wishnitzer's book engages the reader in a deeply tangible experience of late Ottoman temporality. . .an original and highly readable study.”