Science and Technology Studies (STS), modern Middle East History, and the infrastructural turn

This article critically surveys the field of Science and Technology Studies (STS) and modern Middle East History. Scholarship in STS has helped transform the writing of history by developing new ways of thinking about what the political and the technical are and how they work. Historians of the modern Middle East have expanded on these microstudies to think about the larger, more extended effects beyond the laboratory, and to reconfigure the role of nature and technology in the reassembly of questions of agency, knowledge production, governance, political community and nation, and possibilities for democracy in the region. The discussion tracks the turn to the material or technical in modern Middle East History by placing the nonhuman at the center of the analysis of power. Making extensive use of industry and company archives, recent scholarship has drawn on STS to introduce new puzzles to the field of Middle East History concerning the political economy of the countryside, large-scale infrastructures, energy and democracy, and the political agency of the multinational corporation.