With the emergence of a Turkish Republic and the mandate territories of Iraq and Syria after the First World War, national and imperial administrations in these new states began planning a series of projects on the Euphrates and Tigris rivers. These plans included new dams, bridges, irrigation and flood control works. The schemes submitted for the two rivers illustrate the aims of development ideologies during the inter-war period as well as understandings of what constituted a modern state. Many of these envisioned water projects were eventually constructed after the Second World War, dramatically altering the flow of the two rivers and remaking the environment of the basin. My research argues that water projects on the two rivers also shaped the environment of state and society by facilitating the rise of a modern bureaucracy, centralizing control over natural resources, justifying new techniques to manage populations, and opening avenues for international intervention. Moreover, the consequences of these changes were not always what governments in Baghdad, Ankara and Damascus intended, producing for local inhabitants a fractured and in many cases discriminative experience of technological advancement and economic “development.” Drawing from an array of primary sources, including government sources, memoirs, and local and national periodicals, this paper explores the planning and implementation of projects in each of the three states. I focus in particular on French plans for a large dam on the Syrian stretch of the Euphrates, the Samarra and al-Ramadi works north of Baghdad, and the Keban dam and hydroelectric station in Turkey. By examining these projects in combination, I expose the political ideas and processes involved in shaping the entire river basin, revealing a story of state formation that is regional rather than bounded by national frontiers.

The conception of space is fundamental to our understanding of the world. Dividing land into exclusive territories, such as sovereign states, is only one of many ways to think about space, and its historical expansion in the world during modern times needs to be examined in sufficient depth. This paper aims to bring in the newest insights from the field of environmental history to Middle East Studies by examining how the modern conception of territoriality evolved in the Persian Gulf in relation to water, and later oil. The case in point is an oasis called Buraimi located in the Southeastern corner of the Arabian Peninsula. In 1952, a border dispute over the oasis broke out between Saudi Arabia, Abu Dhabi and Oman. With a growing expectation of oil reserves, the former was supported by America, whereas the latter two was under the informal empire of Britain. The case was brought to an international arbitration tribunal in Geneva; but the debates there revealed a picture that was fundamentally at odds with the modern norm of sovereign territoriality. In contrast to the claims of the disputants, the ongoing research suggests that the Buraimi oasis had not been divided into mutually exclusive territories, but the water of the oasis had been traditionally shared by various local tribes. However, the emerging hope of the oil in the mid-1950s pressed Britain to withdraw from the arbitration tribunal and to capture oasis by force. The forceful closure of the Buraimi dispute also witnessed the making of a modern map by the British Foreign Office. The map, which became the basis of the later postcolonial states of the region, was so complex with a number of enclaves and areas of joint jurisdiction that even the Foreign Office officials called it a ‘jig saw puzzle’.

Among the several factors which influenced the development of medieval societies, water is considered the most vital. The lack of this fundamental element, due to prolonged and unexpected periods of drought, at times devastated entire populations and caused terrible calamities. For a civilization like the Arabic one, which was originated in the deserts of the Arabia peninsula and developed in the also dried lands of North Africa, water enclosed a powerful meaning and boasted a strong significance; it was a more necessary element than for other cultures and a luxury that only the caliphs, emirs, and the elite could enjoy. This reality can be easily observe in all the gardens created within the walls of the several palaces erected in the Arabic world, where water was always present in pools, fountains and sources that were continuously flowing. Al-Andalus and the Maghreb, areas situated in the Western-most side of both the Muslim world and the Mediterranean area, suffered significant epochs of dearth of water. Some Arabic writers registered in their chronicles interesting information regarding not only the droughts themselves –such as the year, the month, and the location when and where they took place–, but also their terrible consequences –among them, the loss of entire harvests, famine, poverty, the impossibility of carrying out the ritual ablutions before the Islamic prayer, and, above all, the appearance of epidemics, the most serious result. Among the several historians who transmitted interesting news of these natural phenomena, suffered in both Mediterranean shores (al-'udwatayn), the following chroniclers should be mentioned: Ibn ‘Idhari and his "al-Bayan al-mughrib"; Ibn Abi Zar' with his also well-known work "Rawd al-qirtas"; the anonymous "al-Dhakhira al-saniyya"; or Ibn Abi Hajala and his inventory of epidemics titled Daf? al-naqma fi salat ‘alà Bani l-Rahma, amongst others. The imperative necessity to combat calamities such as Black Dead also led several intellectuals to compose treatises providing urgent solutions to its negative effects, like Ibn Khatima, Ibn al-Khatib, or Ibn Khaldun. Throughout this paper, the main periods of droughts occured during the 13th, 14th, and 15th centuries in both al-Andalus and the Maghreb will be analyzed, according to the information provided by the Arabic sources. Attention will be also paid to the most devastating plagues which arose as a result.

How and why do certain changes in nature come to be defined as environmental problems? Social scientists argue that environmental problems are socially constructed in the sense that societal groups and conditions help define, or frame, certain changes in the natural environment as problematic and worthy of attention and action. Researchers point to the role of the media, environmental organizations, and policy-makers, in shaping public perceptions about ‘the environment’ and about the salience of some environmental issues over others. Drawing on this constructionist approach, the paper examines the problem of the Dead Sea, the unique salt lake in the Middle East, where the water level has been declining for decades yet it is only in recent years that it has been loudly touted as an urgent environmental problem. With 30 years of news articles, and documents from government agencies and environmental NGOs, the project tracks the changing conceptions of the Dead Sea water level, paying close attention to when the receding water line was defined as an environmental problem, who pushed the idea, how they did it, and to what effect. The paper argues, ironically, that powerful state and economic interests in a particular solution helped to construct the decline of the Dead Sea as a serious environmental problem.