Environment and Empire in the Ottoman Jazira

Samuel Dolbee

hosted by Chris Gratien and Reem Bailony

| What can we learn about the late Ottoman Empire from the histories of its would-be margins? In this episode, we explore that question in multiple senses through a conversation with longtime Ottoman History Podcast contributor Sam Dolbee about his book "Locusts of Power: Borders, Empire, and Environment in the Modern Middle East." The book studies the dynamic history of the Jazira region, which straddles the modern borders of Turkey, Syria, and Iraq. From the Tanzimat-era reordering of the Ottoman provinces to the fall of the Ottoman Empire and the creation of new nation-states, we discuss how the environment of the Jazira region and its people were both actors and objects in the remaking of the Middle East. Building out from the changing lives of locusts, grasshoppers that intermittently imposed themselves on the Jazira's history by devouring agricultural crops, Dolbee casts light onto communities of nomads and migrants often excluded from the empire's modern history. In the process, he shows how the people of Jazirah both made and resisted new administrative and national borders of the period.

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What can we learn about the late Ottoman Empire from the histories of its would-be margins? In this episode, we explore that question in multiple senses through a conversation with longtime Ottoman History Podcast contributor Sam Dolbee about his book "Locusts of Power: Borders, Empire, and Environment in the Modern Middle East." The book studies the dynamic history of the Jazira region, which straddles the modern borders of Turkey, Syria, and Iraq. From the Tanzimat-era reordering of the Ottoman provinces to the fall of the Ottoman Empire and the creation of new nation-states, we discuss how the environment of the Jazira region and its people were both actors and objects in the remaking of the Middle East. Building out from the changing lives of locusts, grasshoppers that intermittently imposed themselves on the Jazira's history by devouring agricultural crops, Dolbee casts light onto communities of nomads and migrants often excluded from the empire's modern history. In the process, he shows how the people of Jazirah both made and resisted new administrative and national borders of the period.

Contributor Bios

	Samuel Dolbee is Assistant Professor of History at Vanderbilt University, where he teaches classes on environment, disease, and the modern Middle East. He is the author of Locusts of Power: Borders, Empire, and Environment in the Modern Middle East.
	Chris Gratien is Associate Professor of History at University of Virginia, where he teaches classes on global environmental history and the Middle East. His first book, The Unsettled Plain: An Environmental History of the Late Ottoman Frontier, explores the social and environmental transformation of the Adana region of Southern Turkey during the 19th and 20th century.
	Reem Bailony is an Associate Professor of Middle East history at Agnes Scott College and formerly an American Druze Foundation postdoctoral fellow at Georgetown University's Center for Contemporary Arab Studies. Her book “Syria’s Transnational Rebellion: Diaspora Politics and the Revolt of 1925-1927" explores how the Syrian-Lebanese diaspora shaped the anti-French rebellion.

Credits

Episode No. 548
Release Date: 31 May 2023
Recording Location: Nashville, TN
Sound production by Chris Gratien
Music: Zé Trigueiros
Images and bibliography courtesy of Samuel Dolbee

Further Listening

	Arbella Bet-Shlimon	428 9/28/19	Ethnicity and Politics in an Iraqi Oil City
	Deniz Türker & Ahmet Ersoy	379 9/19/18	The Hamidian Quest for Tribal Origins
	Faisal Husain	504 6/27/21	The Environmental Origins of Ottoman Iraq
	Metin Atmaca	395 12/29/18	Autonomy and Resistance in Ottoman Kurdistan
	Bathsheba Demuth	439 12/6/19	An Environmental History of the Bering Strait
	Chris Gratien	523 3/11/22	An Environmental History of the Late Ottoman Frontier

Images

The Moroccan locust (Dociostaurus marocannus). Maurin, Invasion des Sauterelles.



The Jazira, Ottoman provincial borders, and post-Ottoman borders. Provincial borders based on Cuinet, La Turquie d’Asie.



The starling. D’Herculais, Les Sauterelles.



Proposed Desert province, 1890. BOA, Y.A.RES 55/38.



Vartavar Avakian. ALON-UNOG, C1602/498/1747. Courtesy of United Nations Archives at Geneva.



Trucks with arsenic compounds against locusts. Rooke, Note on Locusts in ‘Iraq.



The Jazira's wildflowers, 1930s. ALON-UNOG, R34942/4/11757/30870. Courtesy of United Nations Archives at Geneva

Select Bibliography

Seda Altuğ, "Sectarianism in the Syrian Jazira: Community, Land, and Violence in the Memories of World War I and the French Mandate (1915-1939)" (PhD diss., University of Utrecht), 2011.

Zayde Antrim, Mapping the Middle East (London: Reaktion Books, 2018).

Nora Barakat, "Making 'Tribes' in the Late Ottoman Empire," International Journal of Middle East Studies53.3 (2021): 482-487.

Muhammad Jamal al-Barut, Al-Takawwun al-Tarikhi al-Hadith lil-Jazira al-Suriyya (Beriut: Al-Markaz al-'Arabi lil-Abhath wa Dirasat al-Siyasat, 2013).

İdris Bostan, "Zor Sancağı'nın Imar ve Islahı ile Alakalı Üç Layiha," Osmanlı Araştırmaları 6 (1986): 163-220.

Kate Brown, A Biography of No Place: From Ethnic Borderland to Soviet Heartland (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004).

Marwa Daoudy, The Origins of the Syrian Conflict: Climate Change and Human Security (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2020). 

Diana Davis, Resurrecting the Granary of Rome: Environmental History and French Colonial Expansion in North Africa (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2007). 

Fuat Dündar, Modern Türkiye'nin Şifresi: İttihat ve Terakki'nin Etnisite Mühendisliği (1913-1918) (Istanbul: İletişim Yayınları, 2008).

Chris Gratien, The Unsettled Plain: An Environmental History of the Late Ottoman Frontier (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2022). 

Walter Johnson, River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and EMpire in the Cotton Kingdom (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014). 

Oktay Karaman, "Diyarbakır Valisi Hatunoğlu Kurt İsmail Paşa'nın Diyarbakır'daki Aşiretleri Islah ve İskan Çalışması (1868-1875)," History Studies: International Journal of History 4 (2012): 227-249.

Reşat Kasaba, A Moveable Empire: Ottoman Nomads, Migrants, and Refugees (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2009).

Janet Klein, The Margins of Empire: Kurdish Militias in the Ottoman Tribal Zone (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011). 

Timothy Mitchell, Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-politics, Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003). 

Khatchig Mouradian, The Resistance Network: The Armenian Genocide and Humanitarianism in Ottoman Syria, 1915-1918 (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2021). 

Linda Nash, Inescapable Ecologies: A History of Environment, Disease, and Knowledge. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006. 

Nevcihan Özbilge, Çekirgeler, Kürtler ve Devlet: Erken Cumhuriyet Dönemine Yeniden Bakmak, (Istanbul: Tarih Vakfı Yurt Yayınları, 2020). 

Zozan Pehlivan, "El Nino and the Nomads: Global Climate, Local Environment, and the Crisis of Pastoralism in Late Ottoman Kurdistan," Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient63.3 (2020): 316-356. 

Edmund Russell, War and Nature: Fighting Humans and Insects with Chemicals from World War I to Silent Spring (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001). 

Cyrus Schayegh, The Middle East and the Making of the Modern World (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2017).

Sarah Shields, Mosul Before Iraq (Albany: State University of New York press, 2011). 

Ronald Grigor Suny, Fatma Müge Göçek, and Norman M. Naimark, eds. A Question of Genocide: Armenians and Turks at the End of the Ottoman Empire (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). 

Vahé Tachjian, La France en Cilicie et en Haute-Mésopotamie: Aux confines de la Turquie, de la Syrie et de l'Irak (Paris: Karthala, 2004)

Uğur Ümit Üngör, The Making of Modern Turkey: Nation and State in Eastern Anatolia, 1913-1950 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012). 

Benjamin White, "Refugees and the Definition of Syria," Past & Present 235 (May 2017): 141-178.