Gelvin James L. - Global Muslims in the Age of Steam and Print

Introduction

Global Muslims in the Age of Steam and Print

James L. Gelvin and Nile Green

DEFINING GLOBAL PARAMETERS

At the end of the twentieth century, the term globalization entered both the social science lexicon and the popular imagination. While it has become a commonplace to say that we live in an era of globalization, there is little agreement on the exact parameters and processes that define this era. During much of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the two most fundamentaland indeed, most globalof these enablers were the technologies of steam and print. Whether through quickening the production and distribution of commodities, facilitating mass migrations and private pilgrimages, or disseminating learned tracts and proletarian newspapers worldwide, these technologies were prime movers that set in motion further cycles of human interaction. By focusing on steam and print, we are better able to discern a specific phase of global history that is set apart from the more nebulous periods of modernity/early modernity on the one hand and unqualified globalization on the other.

In relation to what came before, what was distinctive about this period was the sheer scale of interaction that technology enabled, in terms of both the numbers of people moving across land and sea and the range of ethnic, religious, and language groups now able to print, publicize and exchange their ideas. Because the defining technologies emerged from European and American societies (albeit with precursors elsewhere), the notion of an Age of Steam and Print by necessity connects the history of Euro-American societies to that of other (in this case, Muslim) societies. If the Age of Steam and Print was therefore an intrinsically global age, for Muslims it was also an age of discovery and differentiation, creativity and crisis. Muslims discovered both other Muslim and non-Muslim societies, defined themselves in relation to these contacts, and synthesized new ideologies and rethought older doctrines. The Age of Steam and Print was the foundational sine qua non of the contemporary Islamic world.

When, though, did this age begin, and when did it end? In Islamic regions and elsewhere, the Age of Steam and Print can be dated from around 1850 to 1930. This period intersects with what is commonly referred to as the long nineteenth century, though the latter both begins and ends earlier. Since our study highlights the technological rather than the political or military, we focus on the mid-nineteenth century, when the global diffusion of enabling technologies began, through 1930, when automobile and air travel, along with telephonic and televisual/radio communications, ushered in a new (because more intensified) phase of globalization. Indeed, the phase of interaction that followed the Age of Steam and Printa period of decolonization, economic nationalism, ideological contestation, and Third World assertion that closed in the 1970swas not merely subsequent to that age but was both its apotheosis and its logical culmination.

The year 1850 also marked the beginning of the Second Industrial Revolution. In terms of steam, we are therefore dealing with the era of railroads and of oceanic rather than river steamship travel. And although print technology had been around since the days of Johannes Gutenberg, it is important to recognize the reinvention of printing that occurred during the industrial nineteenth century. As we shall see in more detail below, it was through the distribution of mass-produced iron Stanhope presses and the spread of lithographic (or, as the process was originally known, chemical) printingfirst introduced to the Islamic world in 1820 but not in widespread use until about 1850that the Islamic world came to feel the full effects of the Gutenberg (or even Stanhope) revolution. The Muslim story is therefore part of a larger, global history told from a non-Western perspective, albeit one that must recognize the transformative impact of Western technologies and the power they lent their controllers.