Middle Eastern Routes to the Global

Wilson Chacko Jacob: Middle Eastern Routes to the Global: As a historian schooled in the postcolonial “tradition,” rather than roll the proverbial eye or explicitly critique some of the recent efforts to resuscitate imperial history through routes like transnational science or a global history of ideas, I try another approach in this paper. Very broadly, it asks how a Middle Eastern Global history might be written. In the wake of Edward Said’s Orientalism and over three decades of postcolonial scholarship, have we indeed written a single piece of post-orientalist positive history? In trying to answer this clearly polemical question, the paper draws on my recent book project Sovereignty in Times of Empire: The Life of Sayyid Fadl b. Alawi, which engages the openings and limits of thinking through empire. Whether that thought “originates” in the metropole or in the colonies, empire—its forms of knowledge and its techniques of government—cannot be ignored. However, as a mode of ordering life and as a self-evident horizon it raises a number of problems for global history that cannot be addressed through its own terms. Through the history of the nineteenth-century mystic “prince” Sayyid Fadl, I analyze those problematic terms and propose other possible routes to the global.