In this presentation, I argue that the development of the Keban Dam in eastern Turkey by political elites and foreign engineers facilitated the creation of the natural environment into a political subject. Built to harness the downward flow of the Euphrates River as a way to stimulate and transform the predominantly agricultural-based economy of the Kurdish east, construction of the Dam started in 1965 and was completed in 1974. The second largest dam in the region after Aswan in Egypt, the implications of the Keban Dam bring into light the relation between capital accumulation, Cold War imperialism, and the environment. Political expressions such as development and modernization were never in scarce use by the Turkish political elites since the inception of the Republic of Turkey in 1923. These terms were often deployed euphemistically to describe the process of capital accumulation and the submission of local Kurdish power in the eastern provinces. Decades following the 1930s pacification campaigns of two Kurdish-led revolts, the center-right government of Suleyman Demirel turned to a multinational Italian civil engineering firm, Impregilo, to alleviate the burden of its underdeveloped and potentially restless provinces. This effort was to be realized with the construction of the Keban Dam. In a scenario reminiscent of Timothy Mitchell’s account of post-war Egypt, the construction of the Dam unraveled a series of unintended consequences. Sources indicate that the evictions of some 20,000 Kurdish villagers were ordered by the Italian engineering managers, prompting Kurdish migration into the larger, more modern cities of Istanbul and Izmir. Scientists cite the rise in the region’s water table, introducing an influx of different species of insects, and prompting a change in the traditional methods of cultivation by Kurdish farmers. Akin to Robert Vitalis’ work on Italian and American oil workers in 1950s Saudi Arabia, the politics of race and ethnicity were ever present in the construction of the Dam. Keban laid the foundation of a brief solidarity labor movement between the predominantly Italian workers who were sent to manage and build the dam, and some of the local Kurdish workers. This confluence of labor unrest, environmental change, and internal displacement are illuminated in the pages of Italian and Turkish newspapers, logs of visiting American charitable organizations, and the archives of the State Planning Organization of Turkey.

A Fine-Grained History: Socio-politics of Rice Cultivation in 18th-century Ottoman Egypt Egypt’s role in world history has been recounted often and well as the story of wheat and, in the nineteenth century, of cotton. This paper explores a chapter in Egypt’s early modern history through the lens of rice: I argue that the particular exigencies of rice cultivation and trade in the Egyptian Delta placed a subgroup of provincial society––great rice merchants and brokers––at the nexus of production, commerce, and Ottoman politics in the late eighteenth century. Cultivable in only a few locations in the Ottoman Empire, rice was the primary cash crop grown in the well-irrigated lowlands of the northern Egyptian Delta until the rise of the cotton economy in the mid-nineteenth century. Requirements of irrigation and multi-stage processing made rice cultivation a capital-intensive endeavor. Meanwhile, the grain’s caloric density and long shelf life relative to wheat made rice an item of strategic demand and luxury consumption for Ottoman officials in Istanbul. This paper explores the socio-politics of rice cultivation in late-eighteenth century Rashid (Rosetta), an important Mediterranean port city at the western edge of the Delta where local capital met imperial demand. Recent scholarship in Ottoman studies has taken a renewed interest in the actors, ideologies, and institutions that helped maintain imperial integrity in the eighteenth century. Growing awareness of the commercialization of the early modern global economy has placed a spotlight on the impact of commerce and capitalization on Ottoman governance. This paper offers a ground-level view of capital at work in a domain of imperial affairs that also addresses Egypt’s position in an Ottoman framework during a period of crisis in the late-eighteenth century. The shari’a court records from the port city of Rashid provide a window into social organization, economic life, and politics in a major center of Egyptian rice cultivation and export in the second half of the eighteenth century. This study hones in on the economic and political activities of rice merchants and brokers as a powerful and influential cohort within Rashidi society. Drawing on commercial and advance payment (salam) contracts, probate inventories, and property transfers and complemented by Ottoman imperial orders and Ottoman and French travel literature, I explore how this propertied commercial class formed a critical link between Egypt’s tax-farming elite, local cultivators, and representatives of the Ottoman treasury invested in keeping the produce of the Egyptian soil within imperial reach.

Nowhere to Run To, Nowhere to Hide?: State, Society, and Epidemic Disease in the Ottoman Balkans In the early part of the nineteenth century outbreaks of bubonic plague and cholera devastated peasant populations in the Ottoman Balkans. For many Ottoman subjects in the Balkans flight (for safety and to escape social ostracism) was the natural response to the appearance and contraction of epidemic disease. This displacement disrupted the collection of taxes, hampered the recruitment of soldiers, and contributed to lawlessness and a breakdown in public order in the Ottoman Empire’s Balkan provinces. My paper will explore the nexus between epidemic disease, human mobility, and the centralizing initiatives of the Ottoman state in the Ottoman Balkans in the early part of the nineteenth century. Drawing upon Ottoman and Bulgarian archival sources and Bulgarian and European travel accounts, it will analyze how plague-induced displacements resulted in the formation of new population settlements and significant alterations to the human geography of nineteenth-century Ottoman Rumelia. In the early 1830s, following an extended period of warfare and decentralization in Ottoman Rumelia, the Ottoman state viewed the implementation of anti-disease measures and the expansion of quarantine construction as a means to reassert central state control over rural populations. As part of Ottoman quarantine and anti-disease legislation, quarantine officials were required to compile information on all individuals and families entering and exiting Ottoman quarantine stations. These types of information-gathering initiatives indicate an increased interest by the Ottoman state in managing population movements and “knowing” which subjects were on the move within and without the Ottoman Balkans in the 1830s and 1840s. Underscoring the role of quarantines as all-purpose border and internal checkpoints, Ottoman quarantine officials in the Balkan provinces were authorized to issue travel and health-related documents to individuals entering and exiting Ottoman quarantines. The texts of these documents indicated the completion of all required quarantine obligations and granted the holder permission to travel within the Ottoman Empire. The provision by quarantine officials of travel and health-related travel documents to individuals moving within and without the Ottoman Empire highlights the general linkage of disease suppression, migration management, and social control in the Ottoman Balkans in the first half of the nineteenth century.

The Tobacco Protest which swept across Iran and the broader Shi'ite world in 1891-92 was one of the earliest revolutionary movements in the history of the modern Middle East. In many ways comparable to the 1882 'Urabi Revolt in Egypt and the 1857 Mutiny in British India, the Tobacco Protest marks the beginnings of a national movement that eventually defined modern Iran. Based on several years of extensive research in French, American, British, Ottoman, and Iranian archives, this paper explains why the majority of Iranians supported and partook in this protest. The previous literature has explained why the merchants, the clerics, and the intellectuals participated in the Tobacco Movement. But this literature has not been able to explain why the urban poor, the working-class population, and women joined the protest. Disentangling and explicating the various factors that contributed to the making of the Tobacco Protest, this presentation argues that the single most important cause of popular mobilization was a set of ecological and environmental crises in Iran during and immediately before the protest (1890-92). This environmental stress, which was then combined with and compounded by a series of socioeconomic crises, put an enormous amount of strain on the majority of the population throughout much of this period. The environmental factors included widespread epidemics, cattle plagues, locust attacks, famine, earthquakes, and extreme shifts in temperature with devastating consequences for the rank and file of the population. The socioeconomic crises consisted of massive unemployment, declining wages, severe inflation, and declining standards of living. In such an environment, the poor and lower middle layers of society had recourse to an “economy of makeshifts” where they engaged in a variety of schemes and stratagems in order to bear the increasing pressure that was put on them. These activities which could also be described as “weapons of the weak” included theft, poaching, prostitution, tribal raids, and other forms of public crimes and violence. The massive popular participation in the Tobacco Movement should be understood in this environmental and socioeconomic context. It was the material grievances of the majority of the population that eventually brought them to join the ranks of merchants, clerics, and intellectuals and to participate in the Tobacco Protest.

This paper argues that epidemics and other calamities occurring across the Ottoman Empire contributed more than political and military factors to the fall of the Ottomans in World War I. Historians have generally given little attention to natural or environmental phenomena as factors affecting the political development of the Ottoman Empire. Recently, a number of studies have approached the history of the eastern Mediterranean from an environmental perspective. So far, the role of disease, famines, and other calamities in the rise of the Empire in the fourteenth century seems clear: the plague, an urban disease, devastated the Byzantines, but it did little harm to the early Ottomans, nomads who were constantly on the move. Yet the part such disasters played in the downfall of the Empire is yet to be explained. In this paper, I shall attempt to do just that, using a broad range of evidence, from Ottoman archival documents through Arab and Turkish chronicles to European accounts. The Ottomans, who for long refused to adopt quarantine to contain plague outbreaks, began to make extensive use of it in the 1830s. Yet by the 1850s European nations trading in the Mediterranean had already abandoned this method. With the developing understanding of sanitation, hygiene, and the discovery of bacteria, quarantine seemed useless. It was replaced by stricter health policies. From the 1850s to the 1890s, European nations exerted pressure on the Ottomans to give up quarantine – a policy that harmed trade in the Mediterranean – but the latter, for various internal considerations, refused to do so. The Ottoman approach to containing disease finally shifted from a contagionist understanding of epidemics to an infectionist one in the early 1890s, from which point quarantines were used less frequently. But it was too little, too late. A series of severe cholera outbreaks in the military and within civilian populations that state health authorities could not contain, accompanied by famine and earthquakes, had weakened the Empire significantly during the Russo-Ottoman War of 1877-78 and the Balkan Wars of 1912-13. By the time the Ottomans entered the Great War in 1914, the state’s ability to mobilize troops and rely on its cities and citizens for supplies and support had become very limited. Outdated health practices bred military failures, which ultimately led the Ottomans to their defeat in the War.