Between 1831 and 1914, cholera spread from India to Mecca and the Hijaz on at least forty separate occasions. Between 1817 and 1947, it is estimated that at least 38 million Indians died of cholera. During this period, colonial India experienced an ecological and demographic implosion. While climatic factors, such as altered El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) patterns and the repeated failure of the monsoons certainly contributed to colonial India’s catastrophic mortality rates, the synergistic relationship between drought, famine, malaria, plague, and cholera were in fact man-made crises, born of the British Empire’s unjust agrarian, environmental, economic, and political systems. Working in tandem, vicious cycles of famine, dislocation, and disease set into motion a cascade of public health crises that would assume global proportions for the better part of the long nineteenth century. Though cholera had long been endemic in Bengal and the Ganges Delta, over the course of the nineteenth century it rapidly transgressed its previous boundaries. Unlike the outbreaks of pre-colonial times, however, new patterns of British trade and military movement, eventually intensified by steam and rail, created entirely new circuits of transmission, allowing to India’s disease pool to spill over into the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf, leaving the Ottoman state to defend itself (and the rest of Europe) against colonialism’s ecological fallout. This paper traces the development of Ottoman quarantine and public health controls in the Hijaz, Red Sea, and Persian Gulf between 1865 and World War I. Typically, the Ottoman Empire’s role in questions of quarantine and international sanitary regulation has been overshadowed by concerns of Europe. The nexus between the Hijaz, pilgrimage and quarantine has been well covered in the history of public health, but has focused primarily on Europe, Egypt, and British India. By contrast, this paper asks what the Ottoman response to the crisis of Indian Ocean cholera looked like. It explores why the Ottoman state took such an enthusiastic role in the erection of international quarantines. It outlines what the Ottoman state hoped to achieve through its participation in international quarantine regulations directed against the hajj. Was this merely a defensive policy or did cholera and the erection of the Red Sea quarantine system play a constructive role in the late Ottoman resurgence in the Arabian Peninsula? And conversely, what were the limitations of Ottoman sanitary discipline on its Red Sea frontiers?

To date, most historical research on the nineteenth-century Middle East has failed to recognize the parallels between ecological crises within the region extending from Asia Minor and Syria to Kurdistan and Iraq, and global climatic fluctuations. Indeed, most studies have treated recurrent environmental disasters in this region as singular events that resulted from local weather episodes. In contrast, this paper suggests that these recurrent drought and severe cold events were manifestations of a wider climatic pattern affecting the region as a whole. However, a better understanding of these events requires a more comparative and global approach to climate. By investigating the connection between local weather anomalies and global climatic shifts as they relate to El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) and North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) in the nineteenth-century Middle East, I argue that recurrent episodes of drought and other extreme conditions are not singular weather events. Rather, they were synchronized with global climatic patterns. Drawing from Ottoman and British archives, as well as existing climatic and dendrochronological studies, this paper examines the parallels and contrasts between “local” Middle Eastern weather anomalies and global climatic oscillations.

This paper seeks to combine evidence of meteorological anomalies found in Ottoman archival and narrative sources with the latest climate reconstructions to assess the impact of the Late Maunder Minimum (1675-1715) on the Ottoman Empire. In the late seventeenth century, the Ottoman Empire had to deal with two devastating conflicts: war with the Holy League north of the Danube (1683-1699) and a rural uprising in the lower Tigris and Euphrates (1690s). The paper will demonstrate how climate-induced disasters such as droughts, famines, and floods hampered Ottoman efforts to wage war and restore order in both fronts. Moreover, it will underscore the complex web of factors (epidemiological, political, and financial) that made the climatic crisis of the period exceptionally destructive. The paper will conclude with an analysis of how prolonged drought in southeastern Anatolia in 1687-1688 destabilized the Euphrates flow and contributed to a channel shift in its lower reaches.

This paper will reassess the "long fall” of the Safavid Empire (1501-1722) from the perspective of environmental history. The heritage of the Safavid Empire is generally understood as a cultural one: from the rise of modern Shi’ism, to thriving artistic, philosophical, and scientific movements under the powerful Safavid state. Not surprisingly, then, understandings of the sudden Safavid decline in the late 17th and early 18th century tend focus on the attentiveness of the court and high religious functionaries, in step with socio-cultural trends of the time. Arguments on the Safavid decline have ranged from a series of ineffective rulers succeeding Shah 'Abbas I, to changing patterns of global trade, to an ideological crisis of legitimacy. Save for economic historians, scholars have paid surprisingly little attention to material conditions in the empire. We are missing, namely, more specific attention to the Little Ice Age and the related “General Crisis” affecting societies throughout the world at the time. This paper will bring together narrative sources from late 17th and early 18th century Safavid chronicles and travelogues with new evidence available in the environmental sciences (namely tree ring samples and climate reconstructions) to present a clearer picture of the regularity and severity of the droughts, crop failures, famines, and epidemics that plagued the Iranian plateau, Caspian littoral, and surrounding regions from the 1660s onward. In contrast to the prevailing declensionist approach in late Safavid historiography, this paper will contend that the imperial networks of the Safavid Empire were resilient enough to weather more than a half-century of climatic crisis before they dramatically break. While a decline certainly occurs, we must locate this properly as a decline in agricultural productivity which undermined the material base of the Safavids’ imperial ecology, and is connected to a global climate crisis that reshaped the modern world.