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AVNER WISHNITZER, Reading Clocks, Alla Turca: Time and Society in the Late Ottoman Empire (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015). Pp. 312. $ 55.00 cloth.
"It's dangerous to touch the calendar and the clock," a senator admonished the Ottoman parliament during a debate in 1910. By the time the reader encounters this dictum on page 176 of Avner Wishnitzer's book, however, it is rather late to wipe one's fingerprints. 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. If the sensation it induces is not exactly the thrill of danger, it is at least the excitement of seeing the continuities and transformations of the Ottoman long nineteenth century from an original and revealing perspective.
Reading Clocks may be read as comprising three parts. The first, chapter 1, explores the eighteenth-century temporal culture that late Ottomans inherited, in which time was measured and imagined within nested cycles: the solar day, lunar and solar years, and astrological relationships of the planets and Zodiac. Thanks especially to extensive translation and analysis of poetry, this chapter offers a remarkably vivid reconstruction of early modern Ottoman temporality. Wishnitzer shows how time, in this context, served and expressed the society's patrimonial relations. Waiting was an expression of devotion, and the ability to command haste or delay was a prerogative of power-be it the power of a pasha over his dependents, or the power of a beloved over an admirer. Mechanical clocks, far from revolutionizing this dynamic, were smoothly incorporated within it.
Chapters 2 through 4 bring the reader into the transformation of this temporal...