As Toby Jones’s Desert Kingdom: How Oil and Water Forged Modern Saudi Arabia (2010) points out, Saudi power has always been predicated on the state’s ability to master the environment. The two pillars of Saudi geological imperialism have been oil and water. Yet, there is a tendency to forget that despite the initial discovery of oil in 1933, oil revenues did not begin to radically alter the Saudi state’s capacity for rapid development and authoritarian control until the 1960s. During those early decades, the main source of revenue for the Saudi government continued to come from tax revenues generated by the hajj. As both American and British archival sources make clear, the initial aims of geological surveying often had as much to do with the hajj and water security as with petroleum. Thus, investments in water infrastructure were not of secondary importance to oil exploration. The tendency to overlook these early decades also makes it more difficult for us to grasp continuities between the environmental and sanitary development and centralization projects carried out by the Ottoman Empire in the Hijaz and those of the early Saudi state. Up till now, scholarship on the late Ottoman Hijaz has focused on Pan-Islam, the Hijaz Railway, and the inter-imperial debates surrounding cholera and quarantine. In Ottoman documents, however, the su meselesi or “water issue” often occupied as much or more attention. The ‘Ayn Zubayda aqueduct system used to supply Mecca’s water had fallen into disrepair. In 1878, Sultan Abdülhamid II ordered the creation of a commission of Hijazi notables to solicit charitable contributions from across the Islamic world in order to fund the needed repairs. During the early 1880s, the Ottoman governor of the Hijaz, Osman Nuri Pa?a, oversaw a major overhaul of the Hijaz’s water supply. Major repairs and extensions to the Hijaz’s network of water channels, fountains, and cisterns were also needed to supply clean water to Arafat, Mina, and Muzdalifa. And Jidda’s water shortage was so acute that even prior World War I it had become greatly dependent on distillation and condenser machines used to convert seawater into potable water. This paper will attempt to demonstrate how late Ottoman hydro-centralization projects were resurrected and directly referenced by the early Saudi state, British engineering firms, and the American geologists and oil men who helped shape the petro-state we now know.

This paper examines the establishment of the British protectorate in Egypt in December 1914 and its international repercussions through the British unilateral declaration of Egyptian independence in 1922. The Protectorate formally incorporated Egypt into the British Empire and unilaterally severed the legal relationship between the Ottoman Empire and Egypt – ending almost 400 years of Ottoman rule in Egypt. “Independence” in 1922 paradoxically removed Egypt from the sphere of international politics and legal contest and publicity and brought Egypt under more direct British control. By 1922 British imperial practices were remarkably consistent across the Middle East after World War I, despite the variation of political forms through which Britain exercised influence. Throughout the Middle East, British imperial control was distinguished by a client-state relationship, where formal sovereignty existed outside of the British imperial system, but at the time British advisors administered critical state affairs. This paper argues that British imperial practices in the Middle East were not worked out after World War I. Instead they were the result of a sustained debate between the British and Ottoman Empires from the mid-nineteenth century through the end of World War I. Ottoman and British administrators debated and exchanged theories of imperial governance throughout the nineteenth century. The British occupation of Ottoman-Egypt (1882-1914) was decisive in this exchange. The occupation of Egypt was an experiment in administration, where legal justifications for the occupation demanded the retention of Ottoman political and legal institutions. At the same time, Britain’s occupation policies allowed the Ottoman Empire to preserve political control of Egypt, satisfying the chief foreign policy goal of the Hamidian regime (1876-1908/9) and that of the Committee of Union and Progress (1908-1918): preservation of the territorial integrity of the Ottoman Empire. This paper argues that end result of this experiment in hybrid sovereignty was a new model of imperial rule that the British exported into former Ottoman territories in the Middle East after the First World War, but one that rather critically retained Ottoman features.

This paper examines Ottoman efforts to develop water supplies in the Tigris-Euphrates basin in the early 20th century, roughly 1903-1914. The Ottoman government hired British irrigation engineer William Willcocks (the engineer who supervised the construction of the first Aswan dam) in 1903 to undertake a survey of the two rivers and create a plan for flood control and irrigation. After 1908, the Committee of Union and Progress invited Willcocks to expand on that initial survey and prepare drawings for a barrage on the Euphrates. This barrage, the Hindiyya, was completed just before the First World War. Though Willcocks’ plan called for several other dams, flood escapes and irrigation works, the Hindiyya barrage was the only part of Willcocks' survey that came to fruition during his lifetime. Still, the Ottoman vision for Mesopotamia, expressed through Willcocks’ designs, became a template for all future development of the two rivers. By investigating Ottoman sources regarding Willcocks’ surveys, this paper analyzes Ottoman ideas of Mesopotamian nature. I use the concept of the “environmental imaginary,” which thus far has been used most profitably to evaluate British and French imperial practices in the Middle East, to understand how the Ottoman government adopted environmental management as a means to integrate Mesopotamia more effectively, and more profitably, into the empire. Furthermore, I argue that this vision of a Mesopotamia integrated through water management survived the disaster of the First World War. I assert that the British invasion and occupation of Iraq should in fact be seen as an interruption in the economic development of the country, rather than its beginning. The Ottoman idea of consolidating political power through environmental management instead survived in an Iraqi government dominated by former Ottoman elites and eventually found expression after Iraqi gained financial independence after the Second World War.

Looking at Ottoman, British, French, and Italian studies on water management in the Sahara, this paper will trace how access to water shaped both the physical landscape and regional power structures in the Libyan territories during the late Ottoman administration and the early years of the Italian occupation. In the nineteenth century, well-digging techniques in the Sahara concentrated access to water in the hands of a constellation of power brokers. Ottoman state officials further encouraged the consolidation of control over water resources in the late nineteenth century as part of a broader effort to facilitate an increased integration of the region into the empire. State officials in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries did not necessarily recognize how important control over water access points was in their identification of regional power brokers; they were more likely to cite religious leadership or tribal affiliations in determining the influence of particular individuals. The correlation between access to water supplies and regional power structures came into stark relief only when the expansion of Italian state presence after the First World War threatened to overturn a fragile balance of power. Plans to construct railways into the desert interior under the Italian occupation promised to decrease the value of access to water, in the short term by increasing water access points along the construction zone, and in the long term by providing a cheaper alternative to camel trade and its overwhelming reliance on regular water supplies. Documentary evidence to construct a social history of the region in the nineteenth century is notoriously difficult to access, and my analysis of how well-drilling techniques mapped power structures onto the physical landscape will provide a rare glimpse into how those practices impacted one aspect of daily life in the Libyan territories. This paper will also explore how the power structures determined by access to water in Ottoman Libya persisted after independence. To what extent did Qaddafi’s extensive irrigation projects graft onto older patterns of regional power structures?