People, Fauna, and Environment in the Ottoman Empire
Panel 240, 2011 Annual Meeting
On Sunday, December 4 at 1:30 pm
Panel Description
In spite of the profound impact of the environment and the animal world on humans in the Ottoman Empire –as elsewhere– only few scholars have dealt with the relations between humans and animals and the natural habitat they share. Much of the existing body of knowledge stems from scholars who are not necessarily historians, but geographers, literary scholars or people concerned with animal rights or environmental affairs who applied various approaches and academic methods. Over the past decade initial endeavors have been undertaken by historians to put the connection of people with the fauna and the environment at the center of their academic focus and exchange in the form of conferences and edited volumes. To a great degree this was enabled by an attempt to broaden the source base available to scholars through the inclusion of Ottoman archival sources. Drawing on various archival and narrative sources that have not been explored thus far this panel examines the attitude of people towards animals and the environment in a variety of settings and circumstances during the Ottoman period.
Drawing on archival sources such as tax registers and official price lists for the sale of foodstuff on the markets as well as on Western and Ottoman travelogues paper A analyses the consumption and food regime with regard to fish as an important resource for food and income for the residents of Istanbul in the 16th to 18th centuries. Paper B examines the development of a new horse breed in Bosnia and Herzegovina as part of the Ottoman military and economic policies in the region. Through a variety of Ottoman archival documentation it will show that historical studies related to the creation and development of Ottoman varieties of plants and breeds of livestock are not congruent with the prevalent periodization and spatial organization in Ottoman studies. Paper C investigates irrigation methods in 19th century Iraq in the case of the Hindiyya channel. Stressing the social relevance of hydraulic engineering it highlights the problems connected with Ottoman attempts in bringing about a once-and-for-all solution to the problem. Paper D explores an early Ottoman kanunname, which contains a prohibition against the abuse of beasts of burden on the grounds of their inability to express their pain. It calls for a reevaluation of the notion that the wellbeing of animals was of no concern in legal regulations of the treatment of animals prior to the 19th century.
The legal protection of animals in the pre-modern Islamic world is a largely understudied topic among students of the Middle East. Idealized depictions of the interaction of humans with animals in the prescriptive religious texts of Orthodox Islam as well as in the writings of Islamic mystics do not allow for an adequate assessment of how animals were treated by people in different realms and periods of Islamic history.
This paper will offer a glimpse at the legal protection afforded to beasts of burden on the local level in two Ottoman cities on the basis of regional law codes (kanunnames). Two easily overlooked passages in Ottoman law codes from Anatolia at the beginning of the 16th century contain legal stipulations with regard to beasts of burden, which, as will be argued in this paper, present the earliest known codification of animal rights in the Ottoman context. More importantly, while regulating the protection of the rights of animals only for a very specific context, a close look at the legal stipulations reveals a surprisingly modern and “progressive“ sounding justification of the need of animals to receive protection from the abuse by humans. Is it possible that views held by animal rights activists of the 20th century and by a handful of Western philosophers since the 17th century in favor of a pathocentric approach to animal rights were already anticipated in an Ottoman legal code of the 16th century?
By contrasting the stipulations of the kanunnames to the views on animal rights expressed in Islamic doctrine, Sufi treatises, hisba texts and travelogues from the Ottoman period, this paper will call into question for Ottoman Anatolia of the early 16th century the predominant view on animal protection held for the pre-modern Islamic world (and beyond) from a merely anthropocentric perspective.
Fish and fishermen in the Istanbul region (mid-16th to mid-18th centuries)
What can we find out about fish, fishing grounds and fishermen in the vicinity of Istanbul over the longue durée? How did the fishermen go about their work, and who were their customers? What kinds of fish appeared on Istanbul markets? Did the Ottoman bureaucratic apparatus exercise any kind of control over the fishermen? In the context of a larger study concerning the use that the inhabitants of Istanbul made of the natural resources available in their environment, I will try to provide at least partial answers to these questions.
Early Ottoman records concern taxes paid by fishermen at work in the Sea of Marmara; particularly interesting is the abridged tax register (icmal) of Anadolu (937/1530). Certain fishing grounds were productive enough for fishermen to set up weirs; these installations existed in the mid-1600s as well, when Evliya observed them. Moreover the French naturalist Pierre Belon du Mans (visit in 1548) has provided detailed information on the methods used by fishermen working the Sea of Marmara. For the markets of the Ottoman capital and the fish sold there, our principal source is the price list (narh defteri) of 1640 which contains not only a listing of raw fish but also a few fish-based dishes. Moreover this list is contemporary with the observations of Evliya Çelebi, who recorded some of the information ? and tall tales ? that he probably picked up from local fishermen. Concerning taxation practices current in the mid-1700s, towards the end of our period, some pertinent information survives in the sultanic commands sent out in response to complaints from administrators and tax-payers (ahkâm defterleri). Tax farmers sometimes asked for information that an enlarged bureaucracy was by now much better equipped to provide.
Due to the preponderance of official sources, present-day historians tend to overestimate the role of the Ottoman bureaucratic apparatus, even though fish was not nearly as important in the eyes of administrators as for instance meat or bread. However by cross-checking the information provided by officialdom with that recorded by Ottoman and foreign travelers, we can at least try to visualize how the sultans’ subjects used the unique food resource that the fish of the Marmara and Black Seas provided for them each and every year.
The bifurcation of the Euphrates caused by the so-called Hindiyya-channel that was constructed in the late 18th / early 20th centuries with the aim to bring water to Najaf became one of the prolonged problems tormenting the Ottoman administration in Iraq throughout the late Ottoman period. It reduced the cultivable area around Hilla that had formed an important tax revenue for the Ottoman governors in Baghdad and unsettled the tribal balance in the area. Various Ottoman governors attempted to solve the problem either by seeking to re-establish the hydrological balance between what had become the two branches of the Euphrates, by militarily checking the tribal movements that resulted from the shifting of the river's main course or by trying to exploit them politically.
What had been a local (however important) problem in the first half of the 19th century became increasingly the project of a general reconstruction of Iraq's hydrological geography. While until the 1860s the Ottoman administration had almost exclusively employed local technical knowledge in their hydraulic engineering the Ottomans increasingly came to rely on European-inspired engineering that ushered in the grandiose projects of the famous British engineer William Willcocks in the beginning of the 20th century. The paper argues that the resort to imported “scientific methods” of engineering enlarged not only the social distance between the Ottomans and the indigenous population but also failed to bring the desired ultimate solution to the economic, social and environmental problems of the region. In this respect the history of the Hindiyya-channel may be read as a case study for some of the major problems and predicaments of Ottoman modernization policy. The paper is based on contemporary Ottoman and European printed publications and on British, French and German as well as Ottoman archival material.
The idea of history as being independent from nature determined the development of thinking in the modern Ottoman historiography. Researchers have mimicked the Braudelian perspective of nature as repetitive and cyclic and, assuming the static relationship between natural environment and human society, ignored the biological diversity as an important facet of the history of the Ottoman regions. Moreover, human agencies were not observed as factors that may have contributed to the creation of a number of varieties of plants and breeds of livestock.
Through a case study of the Bosnian mountain horse my paper will examine the development of a new horse breed in Bosnia and Herzegovina as part of the Ottoman military and economic policies in the region. By using a variety of Ottoman archival documentation (provincial records from the Bosnian Inspectorate, correspondence from the Prime Minister's office) my paper will show the changing political and economic contexts that prompted the creation and development of this horse breed, praised even in the twentieth century for its adjustability to the region's geography. My paper will also describe the scientific aspects of the creation of this breed. By surveying the Ottoman scientific literature related to horse breeding, with an emphasis on the regional archival collections in Bosnia and Hercegovina, I will demonstrate the changing Ottoman procedures in the creation of horse breeds. I will conclude the paper by dealing with the resources that both the Ottoman and regional governments had at their disposal for the creation of this breed during the Ottoman period. In the end I will point out that historical studies related to the creation and development of varieties of plants and breeds of livestock cannot be aligned with the prevalent periodization and spatial organization of Ottoman studies.
