Across the Black Sands and the Red: Travel Writing, Nature, and the Reclamation of the Eurasian Steppe, c. 1850 Through a reading of nineteenth-century Persian travel narratives, this paper locates the history of Iran and Central Eurasia within the context of the recent literature on global frontier processes, and the encounter between empire and nature. It argues that Persianate travel books (safarnama) about Central Eurasia were part of the imperial project to order and reclaim the natural world and were forged through the material encounter with the steppes. Far from a passive act of collecting information and more than merely an extension of the observer's preconceptions, description was essential to the expansion and preservation of empire. While there exists a vast literature on Western geographical and ethnographic representations of the Middle East, building on the critiques of Edward Said in Orientalism and Culture and Imperialism, only recently have scholars begun to mine contacts that took place outside of a Western colonial framework and within an Asian setting. Based on an analysis of Riza Quli Khan Hidayat's Sifaratnama-yi Khvarazm, the record of an expedition sent from the Qajar Dynasty to the Oxus River in 1851, the following pages explore the nineteenth-century Muslim "discovery" of the Eurasian steppe world. The Khvarazm expedition set out to define imperial boundaries and reclaim to the desert, but along the way it found a permeable "middle ground" in between empires marked by trans-frontier and cross-cultural exchanges, such as trade and pilgrimage.

Late nineteenth-century Iran was characterized by agro-environmental crises and social protests. Furthermore, European powers, local notables, as well as the provincial and central governments all vied for control of the natural resources. This paper inquires into the origins of a string of urban protests that occurred in 1871-1892. It argues, among other things, that the twin processes of capitalism and imperialism undermined the moral economy of agricultural production and resource use in a semi-feudal social system. The paper traces the growth of dissatisfaction from the early 1870s when the Qajar state enacted a series of reforms aimed at centralizing government bureaucracy. As the central government raised taxes on the provinces, the governors and the landed elites engineered massive hoarding and price gouging in essential goods such as grain. Meanwhile the outbreak of locusts and epidemics, as well as a string of chronic famines wreaked havoc throughout the country. The government was, however, unable to quickly or systematically alleviate public suffering. Instead, it began from the late 1880s to grant European firms a number of concessions over agricultural production, forests, mines, and fisheries. The protests over government policy came to a head in the Anti-Tobacco Regie Movement of 1891-1892 when a nationwide embargo on the use of tobacco succeeded to reverse a British tobacco concession. In this paper, therefore, I look at the political ecology of commercial agriculture and its relations to conflict between foreign powers, the government, local notables, and the protesters. For this reason, this paper draws from theories of political ecology developed by environmental historians such as Alf Hornborg, J. R. McNeill, and Joan Martinez-Alier. In writing this paper, I have drawn from eighteen months of archival research in England and Iran. The majority of the sources I am utilizing have not been used by other scholars.