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GLOBAL MUSLIMS IN THE AGE OF STEAM AND PRINT edited by James L . Gelvin and Nile Green Berkeley: University of Ca lifornia Press, 2014 (xiv + 285, index, illustrations, maps) $75.00 (clot h), $34.95 (paper)
In his 1981 classic, The Tools of Empire: Technology and European Imperialism in the Nineteenth Century, Daniel Headrick wrote: "Among the many important events of the nineteenth century, two were of momentous consequence for the entire world. One was the progress and power of industrial technology and the other was the domination and exploitation of Africa and much of Asia by Europeans" (3). But, as the editors of Global Muslims in the Age of Steam and Print, James Gelvin and Nile Green, caution, "focusing on these technologies also highlights the fundamental problem of ascribing agency solely to one part of the globe" (3). Thus, instead of telling a "simple story of imperial hegemony and technological determinism," this edited volume attempts to weave a more complicated narrative, documenting how Muslim communities worldwide quickly took up the "tools of empire" and put them to use in ways that their inventors and disseminators had never envisioned (2-3). Highlighting the global Muslim community's exposure to new technologies, the authors in the volume do more than simply reframe a familiar story from a non-Western perspective. Instead, they open up new space to rethink the meaning and timing of globalization itself.
Gelvin and Green take aim at the question of how to periodize globalization. Acknowledging that we live in a globalized world, but dissatisfied with the notion that the current era of globalization dates from the end of the Cold War or the invention of the microchip, they argue that this most recent incarnation of globalization "was made possible and in many ways defined by earlier globalizing events" (1). For much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, steam and print quickened the pace of human contact and represented the sinews and tentacles of "the twin systems most identified with the modern period: the world system of nation-states and the modern world economic system" (4). By concentrating on this bundle of technologies, Gelvin and Green distinguish between "the more nebulous periods of 'modernity/early modernity' on the one hand and unqualified 'globalization' on the other" (1). In...