The Egyptian state built the High Dam at Aswan (1960-1971) to sustain its rapidly growing population and its status as politically independent postcolonial nation. But could the state sustain the High Dam? What political, social, economic, environmental, and structural ecologies did such support require? Anxiety about the dam’s safety marked a slew of popular publications and rumors that emerged during and after the dam’s construction. Such texts envisioned a destructed Nile valley flooded by waters released by a broken or bombed dam. Initially raised by funders in 1956, these disaster fears surfaced in Egypt in response to catastrophic dam failures in Europe during High Dam construction and wartime dam bombing, including in the conflict with Israel. Futuristic fears of catastrophic downstream flood mirrored real destruction on the other side of the dam—the upstream flooding of Nubia by the new reservoir and the land’s destruction by salvage archaeological teams. These anxieties revolved around stone. Egyptian officials worked to allay fears by publicizing the technological and scientific specificities of the dam: they contrasted the mountain-like rock earthworks of the High Dam to the “thin” and “curbed” concrete walls of many European dams and highlighted the structural benefits of rock fill, which would simply fall back into the Nile’s channel as a “natural dam” if imploded. Likewise, scientists and popular writers imagined the material properties of the Nubian sandstone underlying the dam—its propensity to become saturated during high floods and thus weigh heavily on the region’s seismic faults, or to develop a congeries of subterranean waterways from the dammed water’s corrosive power. This paper draws on several recent anthropological and literary critical studies of the materiality and ecology of stone (Cohen; Tilley; Gordillo) to contextualize popular concerns and theories of dam failure in Egypt. Building on existing studies of the High Dam politics of expertise (Waterbury, Mitchell, Shokr), I use published and unpublished government documents, pulp fiction, film, and the press to argue for the political salience of popular opinions that the dam exceeded technological control or mastery and harbored apocalyptic potential. This study contributes to the anthropological literature on the relationship of time to natural resources (Limbert; Ferry and Limbert) by examining how materiality structures the temporality of crisis. The social history of anxieties of “ruination” (Stoler) in Egypt reveals narratives about the Middle East and environmentalism that have remained marginalized in studies of the Cold War (Hecht; McNeill/Unger; Lee).

With its vast oil reserves, Saudi Arabia has invested billions in expensive and energy-guzzling desalination technologies. In 1970, Saudi Arabia opened its first modern desalination plant in Jidda, designed by the U.S. Department of the Interior’s Office of Saline Water and built by a subsidiary of the Coca Cola Company. As the kingdom plotted its embrace of large-scale desalination, it rapidly became clear that the project would assume gigantic proportions. In 1974, a royal decree created an independent government body, the Saline Water Conversion Corporation, armed with broad powers to exploit desalination technology. Ever since the monarchy’s move to total reliance on desalination technology, this prototypical petro-state has transformed itself into a veritable “saltwater kingdom,” ushering in an era from which there could be no turning back. Oil and water have become completely interdependent. Not only have oil revenues subsidized water for the kingdom’s subjects; oil itself has become a necessary ingredient in water’s production. But water is no ordinary public handout produced by petro-state rentierism. Unlike the alchemy of turning oil into government revenue and private wealth, the production and consumption of desalinated water has created even more fundamental forms of material dependency. Through the magic of turning oil into water the Saudi state has arguably cast its most awe-inspiring and terrifying spell over its subjects. The kingdom’s embrace of multi-stage flash and reverse osmosis desalination technologies has been a key component in the Saudi state’s continued modernization and demographic explosion. This resource-intensive solution is predicated on the conceit that oil production and revenues will be able to perpetually keep up with the unbridled development that they have enabled. In order to map the development of desalination technology in Saudi Arabia, from the 1930s onward, but especially after World War II, I argue that Saudi reliance on American hydraulic expertise was a critical compliment to the development of the kingdom’s massive petroleum reserves. Indeed, American assistance in the development of the kingdom’s water was a fundamental element of American-Saudi relations. Thus, as the United States began to invest in experimental desalination techniques for domestic uses between the 1950s and 1970s, the transfer of these new technologies emerged as a lynchpin of American Cold War technocratic diplomacy in Saudi Arabia, Israel, and the wider Middle East. And in turn, large-scale desalination projects became central to Saudi monarchy’s visions of development and the environmental management of its subjects.

The idea that Ottoman officials intervened in any meaningful way to address the impact of natural disasters, from fire to famine, seems to contradict many of the received wisdoms about late imperial governance. Indeed, many European observers painted a picture of a negligent imperial state that did little or nothing to help populations suffering from a variety of problems, including famine, disease, extreme weather, and locusts. Accordingly, many contemporary scholars have argued that despite deteriorating conditions in the countryside and cities, the imperial state either ignored these problems or dealt with them in a desultory fashion. My findings, based on a combination of Ottoman and British archival sources, challenge such assumptions. In this paper I focus, in particular, on the outbreaks of locusts between 1860s and 1890s. Desert locusts ravaged agricultural crops and pastures, robbing people and animals of food crops and fodder. The problem was especially severe in the Ottoman East. Thousands of peasants fled from affected rural areas or left agricultural zones to seek refuge in cities. Hundreds of documents including urgent telegraphs sent by local officials attest to episodes of locust attacks across the region, from Diyarbekir to Mardin to Cezire. But these documents also tell the story of repeated efforts by the Ottoman administration to mitigate the damage caused by the insects. The government’s measures included putting a price on locust eggs [‘20 para per kıyye’ (1.128kg)] to encourage civilians to go into the fields; in other instances, the state employed soldiers to collect eggs from fields before they hatched. These policies suggest that despite infrastructural difficulties and limited resources the Ottoman government was concerned enough with the crises caused by agricultural pests to intervene directly in an attempt to protect agriculture and peasant livelihoods.

Over the past two centuries, the Çukurova region of Southern Anatolia has grown to be one of the densest areas of agriculture and manufacturing in the Eastern Mediterranean. Much of that is the result of global capitalism, constant migration, and the various transformations that led to the ascendance of commercial cotton cultivation from the early 19th century onward. As the work of Meltem Toksöz has shown, the combination of a complex system of credit and bountiful, fertile soil made Çukurova the leading cotton producing region of the Ottoman Empire by the time of the First World War. By the 1950s, the early 19th-century ecology dominated by pastoralism was barely recognizable in the countryside of the Çukurova region. But one constant throughout the period was cotton—not just the species—but the precise cultivar that people chose to plant nearly every spring. This paper reconstructs a fascinating story within the narrative of Çukurova cotton’s meteoric rise. It tells the tale of the local cultivar, referred to simply as yerli, and its endurance as the mainstay of commercial agriculture into the 1940s despite over a century of efforts to replace it with various cultivars of foreign provenance. While major players in the world cotton industry in Britain, France, Egypt, and the United States deemed yerli undesirable, local cultivators, who were anything but cut off from global markets, happily persisted in planting the native strain. How did Çukurova cotton hold out so well in a period during which agrarian ecologies were being utterly overthrown by capitalism and industrialization? The answer to this question lies not only in the biology of the cultivar itself and its relationship with Çukurova’s soil but also in the history of political ecology, sustainability, labor, and technology in the late Ottoman Mediterranean. This paper examines different facets of the political and social history of Çukurova from the Ottoman period to present through the lens of the region’s intransigent seed. All in all, it tells the story of a particular ecological continuity in the midst of profound agrarian change—a biological legacy of the Ottoman period in the early Republic of Turkey and a kernel of local resistance in the face of an increasingly globalized economy.