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OUTSOURCING: ENERGY AND EMPIRE IN THE AGE OF COAL, 1820–1911

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 July 2015

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Abstract

During the long 19th century, British coal proliferated throughout the Ottoman Empire in increasing quantity, rapidity, and regularity via junctions and political arrangements that became evermore stable and dominant. The British used coal export to project their power elsewhere, offshoring the Industrial Revolution by building an infrastructure that could support it overseas and connect it to existing facets of the imperial project. Examining this “outsourcing” and the importance of foreign coal markets to industrialization helps provincialize the steam engine and anchor it in a global context. It also allows us to explore the impact of fossil energy on the Middle East and the ways coal both set the stage for the arrival of oil and informed the possibilities for translating carbon power into politics. Coal, the article suggests, animated political participation in England while reinforcing authoritarian tendencies in the Middle East.

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Articles
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International Journal of Middle East Studies , Volume 47 , Issue 3 , August 2015 , pp. 425 - 445
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2015 

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References

NOTES

Author's note: I am indebted to the anonymous referees for IJMES and to its editor, Akram Khater, and managing editor, Jeffrey Culang, for their incisive comments. I thank my research assistants, Alaaddin Tok, Nimrod Ben Zeev, and Ran Levy. I am grateful to Timothy Mitchell, Liat Kozma, and Avner Wishnitzer for reading drafts of this article. Research was made possible by a Marie Skłodowska Curie fellowship and by funding from the Israel Science Foundation.

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49 Blyth, “Aden, British India and the Development of Steam Power,” 72.

50 Marston, Britain's Imperial Role in the Red Sea Area, 122, 273, 329–30, 364, 366.

51 Taylor, Statistics of Coal, 622.

52 Blyth, “Aden, British India and the Development of Steam Power,” 73, 82.

53 Gencer, Türk Denizcilik Tarihi Araştırmaları, 13–32.

54 BOA, İrade Hariciye (İ.HR.) 335/21582 (1298 [27 March 1881]).

55 “Our dredging machines,” said de Lesseps in an 1870 lecture, “of which the ducts were one and a half times as long as the column in the Palace Vendome, carried off from two to three thousand cubic meters a-day; and as we had sixty of them, we succeeded in extracting monthly as much as two million cubic meters.” Lesseps, Ferdinand de, History of the Suez Canal: A Personal Narrative (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011 [1876]), 77Google Scholar.

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75 Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World, 191–93.

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85 See the copy of Jevons' Foreign Trade in Coal in the Churchill Archives, CHAR 11/21 (Feb. 1904–24 Dec. 1909); and the correspondence by Jevons in the Churchill Archives, CHAR 2/597A-B (Dec. 1936).

86 Mitchell, Carbon Democracy, 36.

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91 BOA, DH.İD 112–1/15 (1330 [1912]), Ş 6.

92 Ibid.

93 BOA, Dahiliye Muhaberat-ı Umumiye İdaresi Evr. (DH. MUİ) 115/36 (1328 [28 July 1910]).

94 DH.EUM.KADL, 3/44 (1328 [5 January 1911]).

95 Ibid.

96 Quataert, Miners and the State in the Ottoman Empire, 43.

97 Yıldırım, Osmanlılar'da İşçiler, 282.

98 Barak, On Time, 180–83; Podobnik, Global Energy Shifts, 69–71.

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