Electrical Palestine: Capital and Technology from Empire to Nation
Fredrik Meiton
Abstract
Like electricity, political power travels through physical materials whose properties govern its flow. Electrical Palestine charts the construction of Palestine’s electric grid in the interwar period and its implication in the area’s rapid and uneven development. It does so in an effort to rethink both the origins of the Arab-Israeli Conflict and the interplay of politics, capital, and technology more broadly. The study follows the coevolution of the power system and Zionist state building efforts in Palestine on the conceptual and material level. Conceptually, the design and construction of t ... More
Like electricity, political power travels through physical materials whose properties govern its flow. Electrical Palestine charts the construction of Palestine’s electric grid in the interwar period and its implication in the area’s rapid and uneven development. It does so in an effort to rethink both the origins of the Arab-Israeli Conflict and the interplay of politics, capital, and technology more broadly. The study follows the coevolution of the power system and Zionist state building efforts in Palestine on the conceptual and material level. Conceptually, the design and construction of the system shaped Palestine as a precisely bounded entity with a distinct political, social, and economic character. Materially, the borders of the mandate were mapped onto the power system and structured an ethno-national division of capital, land, and labor. In 1948, these coevolving forces ultimately carried over into Jewish statehood and Palestinian statelessness.
Keywords:
Palestine,
Arab-Israeli Conflict,
state building,
coevolution,
electricity,
capitalism,
technology,
British empire,
development,
statelessness,
Pinhas Rutenberg
Bibliographic Information
Print publication date: 2018 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780520295889 |
Published to California Scholarship Online: May 2019 |
DOI:10.1525/california/9780520295889.001.0001 |