The Material Life of the Ottoman Middle Class Toufoul Abou-Hodeib* University of Oxford Abstract Recent scholarship on the Ottoman Empire and Egypt pays close attention to the relationship between changing material culture and modernity in the late 19th and early 20th century. This has led to a better understanding of how, for a nascent middle class, objects and commodities served to define both its relationship to modernity as well as its social position. Nevertheless, con- ceptualizing changing aspects of material life does not go beyond the use of objects to represent and signal socioeconomic positions at the desires and whims of their users. Accordingly, objects have only served to reaffirm scholarly claims about the fragmentation and Westernization of the Ottoman middle class. Using conceptual perspectives on material culture and specific examples from the Levant, particularly Beirut, this article investigates how material culture can further push the understanding of the rise of the middle class by shedding light on anxieties shared across the religious divide and by demystifying the concept of ‘Westernization’. When Nikki Keddie, in an article published in 1984, explored the range of possible con- tributions of material culture to the study of Middle East history, such lines of investiga- tion were still relatively new. 1 Apart from museologists, archaeologists, and art and architectural historians, for whom the study of material cultural production is common- place, the potential a world’s trove holds for other forms of academic study was just being expanded. Since, the study of material culture has come into the mainstream and contin- ues to grow in relevance today, seemingly with possibilities as inexhaustible as the diver- sity of things in the world. Conceptually, a qualitative shift took place with the publication of Arjun Appadurai’s The Social Life of Things in 1986, followed by works such as Bruno Latour’s We Have Never Been Modern in 1991 and the emergence of ‘thing theory’, introduced in a Critical Inquiry special issue on the topic in 2001. 2 From their dif- ferent disciplinary standpoints, these works advance an understanding of ‘things’ that goes beyond their being simple indicators of style and taste and mere objects utilized to convey social messages. They examine points at which things escape the human desire to repre- sent and signal, shaping us as subjects instead. A stark example of this are mass-produced Jesus pictures in Ghana. Building on ‘thing theory’, Birgit Meyer argues that given the history of religious icons in Ghana, pictures of Jesus often slip from their intended pur- pose of signaling a Christian identity, to become perceived as a dangerous, demonic pres- ence capable of acting upon their beholders. 3 The actual materiality of things and their resistance to submitting to projected representations then holds potential for historical investigations of modernity that go beyond intellectual ideals and nationalist projects. Generally speaking, the use of objects to signify social and economic status is not unique to the modern age. But the productive capacity of the industrial revolution funda- mentally altered the relationship of objects to everyday life. 4 The economy of the region known today as the Middle East also underwent profound, if indirect overhauling, after the industrialization of Europe. As imported, mass-produced commodities flooded its History Compass 10/8 (2012): 584–595, 10.1111/j.1478-0542.2012.00866.x ª 2012 Blackwell Publishing Ltd