While the literature on nationalism, imperialism and spatial imagination in the Middle East is rich, there are comparatively few studies concerning how other trajectories, such as that of capitalism, have remade the dominant geographical constructs of our field. During the late Ottoman period, the lowlands of the Cilicia region, fertile and well-watered by large rivers and tributaries, were hailed as a “Second Egypt” that possessed the agricultural and commercial potential that Egypt had realized over prior decades. This late 19th century making of the southeast Anatolian crescent-shaped area as a region, named alternatively Adana Ovas?/Çukurova/Cilicia by different actors at different times, entailed diverse processes of settlement and migration that cannot be adequately explained by either the imaginaries of the central and local state or imperial refashioning of such national imaginaries. Crucial to this process were the different groups of tribes and merchants, landholders and industrialists whose accumulations of agricultural production, commerce and industry revolved around a single crop: cotton, the much wanted and valuable crop in the second half of the 19th century. Yet the commercialization of the crop’s agriculture in the 19th century did not simply depend on the world’s growing need for cotton. Neither did the resultant regional economy based on large holdings of cotton cultivation and textile industry arise simply as a response to the Ottoman imperial legal framework through which private property was constituted. Instead, the story of cotton production in a landscape like Çukurova was very much a multilevel regional history of capitalist transformation. Inasmuch as the later 19th century was/is conducive to paradigmatic frameworks of imperial and national construction of the state, indeed, the study of intra-imperial and national spatial differentiation does not readily render Çukurova as a region. Instead the Çukurovan region can be “constituted as an effect of analysis”(D. Massey) of capitalism as manifested through the various activities of state and commercial actors. For, in this region “potentialities of capitalism” (I. Habib) underlined the massive transformation of human geography, without assigning disaggregated imaginaries to the state and social actors. This paper studies how such imagination turned potentialities around when multiple actors interrelated to produce an economy that sustained growth that shaped the notion of Çukurova as Second Egypt, imagined so both by the Cotton Supply Association of Great Britain as of 1857, and the Ottoman central state that exhibited Çukurovan cotton at international fairs as a competitor to Egyptian cotton.

Until the Greek-Turkish exchange of populations of 1923, Cilicia was home to numerous rural and urban Greek communities. As this paper shows, modern Greek Cilicia was not a remnant of the Byzantine past of the region but rather a product of nineteenth-century migrations of Ottoman Greeks who moved to Cilicia from other parts of the empire in search of economic opportunities. Initially, in the eyes of these settlers Cilicia was a region defined primarily by its economic promise. Gradually, however, they came to “rediscover” Cilicia’s Roman past and reinvest its geography and topography with symbolic meaning. This paper explores the history of the “re-Hellenization” of Cilicia drawing on records of interviews with Greek refugees from Adana, Mersin, Silifke and other town and villages in Cilicia, collected in mid-twentieth century and now preserved at the Centre for Asia Minor Studies in Athens. Many of these refugees never learned Greek until their arrival in Greece and remained strangers in their new homeland, clinging to the memory of Cilicia as an idealized patrida. Demonstrating that Greek presence in Cilicia was more than simply Byzantine residue, this paper complicates our understanding of the origins of Greek regions of the Ottoman Empire. Furthermore, it exposes contradictions and compromises involved in place-making by showing how logic of economic migration, ecclesiastical geography, ideas of Roman past and encounter with Armenian human and built geography, as well as ultimate loss and dislocation, affected the ways Ottoman Greeks imagined and experienced Cilicia as a distinct region.

A French Mandate of Cilicia never officially existed. Though France occupied the Cilicia region after the First World War, by the time the Middle East mandates were established in 1923, the French army had already withdrawn from Cilicia, taking with them tens of thousands of repatriated Ottoman Armenians. In the decades that followed Cilicia’s incorporation into the Republic of Turkey, the vestiges of the mandates and Cilicia’s alternate past were slowly erased as the triumph of the Kemalist resistance and expulsion of the French was incorporated into a narrative of Turkish independence. The French Mandate of Cilicia and the Armenian national home that it would foster did exist, however, as a political project. And its existence is manifested in the present as a separate section of the French Diplomatic Archives in Nantes where, like Syria and Lebanon, Cilicia has its own series of diplomatic and administrative documentation labeled as a “mandate.” This paper studies aspects of Cilicia’s material past through that archive and other artifacts, considering the question of how past geographical imaginaries become real and manifest through the documentary practices of the state. The mandate that never was is continually conjured into being by the scholarly researcher and the archives that facilitate their work. While Cilicia’s archive is also fascinating for its documentation of an extremely understudied time and place in the history of the Middle East, I focus on the dystopian affect of the colonial archive. French rule in Cilicia entailed an ambitious project of imagining that reframed the region and generated representations alien to its recent Ottoman past. The archive not only makes the Mandate of Cilicia seem real but also evokes an eerie impression akin to that of dystopian literature. The Mandate of Cilicia is familiar yet slightly askew of our dominant narrative of Middle East history, placing a recognizable cast of characters in unfamiliar roles. As such, I argue that Cilicia’s archive can be studied as a relatively unique body of dystopian fiction that attests to the value of analyzing unrealized projects, and in channeling an alternative vision of the modern Middle East, demonstrates not only the relationship between archive-making and power but also how more fully realized imaginaries of similar political projects have become reinforced through the repeated act of history-writing.

In 1949, the IBRD (International Bank for Reconstruction and Development) accepted three of the loan projects submitted by the Turkish government. These projects, namely ‘the Toprak [soil], the Seyhan River and the Port’ constituted the three major areas of intervention for ‘the US mission to Turkey’ in the following decades of the Cold War period. Each of these projects seemed distinctive in terms of the nature and scale of expertise that it necessarily entailed. In this paper, however, I will look at them as orchestrated efforts to construct a regional enterprise, namely ‘the Çukurova region’, in accordance with the social scientific theories of an international project of modernization and development. In particular, I focus on the notion of ‘regional development’ and how it arose out of the policies initially enforced by the Marshall Plan (1948-1952). Land was already commercialized in Çukurova as early as 1850s. And yet it was in the middle of the twentieth century when it became the very material and symbolic site of a 'scalar leap in extractive capacity' (Stiner et al. 2011) by means of infrastructural investments like the ‘Seyhan River Basin Development Project’ (1949-1956). Considering this scalar leap as an entry point to interfere with the history of spatial sciences and technologies in Turkey, this paper will explore how ‘the rural’ was envisioned as the prime site of experimentation for cultivating the technics of capitalist planning. I ask: what were the tools and terms by which ‘toprak’ was measured, calculated, and represented in the national planning rhetoric? How was the rural reconceptualized materially, politically and symbolically along with the rescaling of ‘toprak’? Following these questions through the spatial rhetoric of regional planning as reflected in the expertise reports and correspondences of the Turkish planning institutions and international agencies of development, I examine the ways in which ‘toprak’ transformed into a laboratory for an emerging science of the rural. Locating the Çukurova region of Turkey in the broad epistemological framework of the historical geography of the Cold War (Farish 2010), this paper will be an attempt to contribute to the intersecting histories of regional planning, agro-industrial development, and spatial technology. References: Farish, Matthew. The Contours of America's Cold War. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010. Stiner, Mary et al. “Scale,” in Shryock, Andrew, and Daniel Smail Deep History: The Architecture of Past and Present. University of California Press, Berkeley, 2012. 242-273.