Since Braudel’s pioneering longue-durée studies, scholars have often looked to creeping but irresistible economic and environmental processes to study the Mediterranean. A tendency to focus on the ‘deep tide’ of Mediterranean history has occluded the momentary ruptures that molded contemporary ecologies. Just as climatic and economic shifts shaped the Mediterranean landscape, so did discrete events such as war, rapid technological change, and famine, not to mention the accumulated impacts of countless plow and axe movements, shotgun blasts, and myriad other forms of human activity. This panel will consider the interactions between factors operating on these distinct layers of time in the Eastern Mediterranean.
Based on a variety of disciplinary perspectives, this collection of papers examines the relationship between society, state and ecology in the Eastern Mediterranean from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. Our studies offer rich possibilities for reconceptualizing the Mediterranean’s complex political ecology by considering proximate forms of human activity, and the specific political and regulatory arrangements mediating them, alongside deeper ecological trends. We argue that it is not possible, for example, to study the emergence of Ottoman forestry without understanding the broader history of Anatolian forests. Likewise, the terrible famine that affected Mount Lebanon during World War I cannot be understood without considering the ecological rhythm of Mediterranean mountains.
In particular, each study will consider the evolving capacity of state institutions to regulate human interaction with the environment. In this way, the panel will contribute to a larger conversation about the ecological legacies of Ottoman and post-imperial state institutions. Unprecedented population growth and economic activity complicated the state’s ability to regulate human impact on the environment and produced sudden and uncontrolled changes in the use, ownership, and management of nature. Our narratives resist one-dimensional interpretations depicting a state increasingly adept at manipulating the environment, or, conversely, a story of mismanagement and ‘decline’. Instead, they will acknowledge the complexity of subject formation at the state and local levels.
The emphasis on placing ecological processes amidst more familiar structures such as social class and the state will suggest novel interpretations to debates within geography, anthropology and history. We argue for a tangled structure of virtually inseparable actors and factors constituting the political ecologies of the Eastern Mediterranean. As we unpack that ‘green tangle’, our case studies will testify to the diversity (or potential coherence) of the Eastern Mediterranean as a political, social and ecological space.
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Dr. Graham Pitts
In May 1918, a priest looked on in horror while a bishop fed barley to his horses pulling a ‘luxurious’ carriage. Amidst acute grain scarcity and starvation in Mount Lebanon, the bishop in question and other influential clergy had done little to relieve their parishioners’ suffering, even hoarding and selling grain destined for charity. Corruption also sullied the reputations of local, provincial and Ottoman officials and institutions. However, the end of the war found the Maronite Patriarch forced to borrow his means of transportation, despite being the most influential religious figure in the Mountain. The Patriarchate had acted decisively to relieve famine during WWI, sacrificing much of its wealth. Amidst a landscape of discredited political and clerical institutions, the Patriarchate emerged from the war emboldened and thus became the architect for the creation of Greater Lebanon in 1920. This paper will assess the Patriarchate’s moral and material position during the war, its subsequent relief efforts, and their impact on the creation of Lebanon.
To the extent that historians have considered the impact of the WWI famine on Lebanon, their analysis has been limited to the years 1914-1918, without systematic consideration of its deeper sources or subsequent consequences. The analysis will situate the Patriarchate’s role in famine relief as a product of nineteenth-century environmental transformation. Before WWI, the silk economy enriched many in the Mountain while also destabilizing extant social and ecological relations. The Patriarchate had benefited from the silk economy materially while also becoming responsible for coordinating activity to resolve social instabilities resulting from its impacts. Karl Polanyi’s ‘double movement’ can aptly characterize this dialectic, which in many other places was resolved by centralizing governments. Lebanon’s social and environmental particularities meant that its confrontation with industrialization would not produce an ‘industrial-strength’ government (which might have mediated the severity of the famine through rationing).
The paper will draw on significant research from the Maronite Patriarchate, French diplomatic archives, and several other repositories in Lebanon. The Patriarchate’s financial ledgers and correspondence, in particular, will underpin analysis of its mobilization of land and capital during the war, activities which positioned it as the de facto government of the Mountain. That reality would subsequently shape patterns of governance in Lebanon and would, crucially, hamper the consolidation of state power.
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Mr. Robert Greeley
Studies of large-scale conservation projects among local populations have long focused on traditional and customary land use with an emphasis on herding and subsistence practices. Often this work is concerned with the implication of conservation projects in the marginalization of local or indigenous peoples through attempts to change and forbid practices. While much of this work is focused on Africa and the Americas, my research moves that dialogue into Lebanon and examines the unexplored area of recreational sport hunting practices. The Shouf Biosphere Reserve in Lebanon has attempted to enact national hunting laws to preserve natural habitat and bird populations, undertaking campaigns that attempt to regulate and curb hunting in the local area. My paper is based on months of interviews and participant observation with biosphere personnel, police, politicians, Shouf residents and hunters over a crucial period of initial law enforcement. This paper focuses on the capacity of the biosphere to make national law effective and establish a semblance of environmental governance in connection to sport hunting. While much of governance is concerned with government, my paper looks at a localized, semi-formal application and negotiation of national law. In doing so it considers the social nuances of sport hunting in the Shouf region and interrogates the role of the reserve in relation to the state in the application of law to govern recreational practices. In particular it addresses how the reserve has used multiple means in various attempts to address hunting and the extent to which these attempts are aware of and apply the criticism that has been leveled against conservation platforms. Despite an observed self-awareness and precise local knowledge, the Shouf's efforts have been only marginally successful. This paper contends that more than cultural sensitivity, knowledge of local populations and local political will is called for to establish a viable environmental governance. While these are necessary components of effective governance, without the enforcement capacity of the state such governance cannot be achieved. This apparent need for the state brings into question the calls for decentralization that have resounded through development thought and practice and more recently through environmental management formulations.
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Chris Gratien
While potatoes may not be viewed as exotic in the post-Ottoman world today, they have only been cultivated in regions such as Anatolia and Syria for less than two centuries. The Ottoman Empire was a relative latecomer to the ecological exchange that brought potatoes to every continent of the world, revolutionizing diets wherever it went. In the nineteenth century, Ottoman cultivators interested in experimenting with European methods of agriculture introduced the plant to the Ottoman Empire, where there was relatively little taste for tubers.
However, it was drought induced famine and not a change in tastes that brought about the first serious efforts at promoting potato cultivation in Anatolia during the late nineteenth century. The Ottoman administration saw the potato as a possible solution to hunger and encouraged planters to experiment with the crop. Yet, in an agrarian economy increasingly dominated by commercial agriculture, its spread was limited.
This paper seeks to analyze the ways in which economic crisis has shaped diets in the modern Middle East. By studying the Ottoman encounter with the potato, it emphasizes the role of state reactions to famine in promoting new foodstuffs. In this discussion, I will devote considerable space to the Ottoman experiment with the potato during the First World War. With the army and populace starving, the government transformed sparsely populated regions such Adapazarı into potato plantations that could feed soldiers and hungry populations in the capital. Millions of potatoes were produced largely by a command economy utilizing labor battalions and seized lands. Thus, the story of the potato also provides a window onto how state activities play a role in shaping everyday diets.
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Dr. Hande Ozkan
This paper will explore how different actors involved in Turkish forestry navigate the spheres of law, politics and science. Ideas and practices of nature have been an integral part of the nation-building project in modern Turkey and they have engendered different ways of imagining citizenship and the modern national subject throughout the twentieth century. This paper will focus on the dialogic relationship between three sets of actors, forest engineers, forest guards and forest villagers to investigate the intimate forms of state-making via forest management. Turkey’s forests have been owned and managed by the state since 1945. Forest villagers, who are defined by law as residents of villages in or adjacent to forests, are contracted by the state forestry administration and carry out a big portion of Turkey’s forest production. Forest management and production takes place in forest sub-districts, managed by state appointed forest engineers, who are representatives of a hegemonic scientific discourse in their relationships with forest villagers. Yet, the pervasiveness of this hegemony is often challenged on the ground when these engineers are expected to function as an intermediary between ideals and realities. Moreover, as civil servants, forest engineers also bear the burden of administrative desk duties which create a challenge to their presence in the field. This is where forest guards enter the scene as a liminal category between forest engineers and forest villagers. Since guards spend a lot of time in the forest and due to their rural backgrounds, they develop more intimate relationships with forest villagers. As decision makers at the micro level, forest guards represent the spontaneous, contingent processes of state-making, which depend as much on the context as they do on laws and regulations. As such, they often form a bridge between forest engineers and the villagers and embody elements of statehood and a peasant mentality at the same time. This flexibility, which goes to the heart of the state-society dynamics within the context of forest management, inevitably raises the question of what the state is: Is it a rigid, written set of rules, regulations and laws? Or is the state the actual outcome, the lived experience of these rules, regulations and laws? How do different actors within the state bureaucracy negotiate policies? And how are new forms of personhood formed in the process? This paper will explore these questions based on historical and ethnographic evidence on forest management in northwestern Turkey.
