On Barak's "Heat, a History"

On Barak is a social and cultural historian of science and technology and Professor of Middle Eastern and African History at Tel Aviv University. His books include Powering Empire: How Coal Made the Middle East and Sparked Global Carbonization.

Barak applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Heat, a History: Lessons from the Middle East for a Warming Planet, and reported the following:

Climate scientists dread vicious cycles – biophysical feedback loops that could accelerate climate change and push the Earth's system past critical tipping points. (These include melting ice exposing darker, heat-absorbing surfaces; thawing permafrost releasing greenhouse gases; and deforestation reducing carbon sequestration.) But if climate change is human-caused, what about the social and political dynamics propelling it? My book explores such cycles forming during the twentieth century and page 99 captures one of them quite effectively. It describes newly built all-season asphalt and concrete roads that connected the coastal plain and the interior in Mandatory Palestine. Unlike the old dirt roads that were impassable during winter and raised choking dust in the summer, these new infrastructures supported the expansion of economic sectors like citriculture – allowing oranges to be transported from field to harbor during the winter – and that of beachgoing during the summer. Yet built from heat-absorbing materials, the new roads contributed to the formation of heat sinks and prevented rain absorption. Moreover, they flamed the escalation in heated intercommunal clashed between minimally clothed Jews and Arabs congregating together at the beach.

As the rest of the book shows, such vicious thermo-political cycles play an unrecognized role in the history of the Middle East, a region often labeled a “hotspot” but where heat is seldom considered seriously. For example, I trace the impact of August 1929 heat on the famous riots that some historians argue triggered the conflict over Palestine. One overlooked trigger was tension surrounding fair-skinned Jewish women wearing shorts in ethnically mixed cities like Jaffa – a cooling strategy for some became a provocation for others.

Beyond Palestine, other vicious cycles include the introduction of air conditioning in Egypt and Saudi Arabia from the 1940s. This emblematic vicious cycle relied on fossil-fuel electricity for cooling while enabling oil extraction in hot regions as American oilmen in Arabia depended on their ACs. In turn, combusted oil released greenhouse gases, intensifying global warming and local heating.

The advent of mechanical cooling accelerated the shift in attitudes towards perspiration, the body's natural cooling mechanism. Heat, A History chronicles the transformation of sweat from a desirable, even erotic substance in early modern times to an abject fluid to be suppressed or masked. This shift paralleled and intertwined with the increasing reliance on fossil-fueled cooling technologies. The book posits that breaking our dependence on fossil-fueled technology requires a multi-level reconsideration of our attitudes towards heat and cooling. This reassessment must span from the individual body to the built environment and ultimately to the global scale. By recognizing how our perceptions of sweat and heat have changed over time, as well as the social and political dispositions involved, we can begin to challenge our current reliance on energy-intensive cooling methods.

Visit On Barak's website.

--Marshal Zeringue