This panel brings together two forms of bottom-up history in its discussion of the nineteenth-century Middle East. The papers collected here make use of the methodology of environmental and social history to shed light on the profound transformation of the region in this period. They also look at neglected topics, utilize overlooked original sources, and grapple with questions that have broad regional and global implications.
The first presentation interrogates the connections between water scarcity and population settlement in the Gulf littoral. Reading through Arabic and European sources, this paper chronicles the ways in which local settlers obtained water to sustain life in the area. The contention here is that access to drinking and usable water was key to settlement patterns and the development of societies in this part of the Middle East.
Drawing on Ottoman, Arabic, and Persian sources, the next presentation explicates how the introduction of steamships in southern Iraq in the midcentury transformed the experience and social worlds of trade and travel in the region. Engaging with the literature on the history of technology, empire, and minorities, the paper argues that steamships helped bring about uneven economic and social development, and solidified class divisions in southern Iraq.
Moving beyond the history of water and people, the third presentation focuses on a series of droughts and extreme weather events in Ottoman Kurdistan in 1840-96. The paper reads through state and local sources to explain how crop failure, war, and over-taxation worked together to pauperize large segments of the population in this region and how the Ottoman state responded to these and other environmental and social crises.
The following presentation analyzes a series of disasters in Qajar Iran in 1860-61 to tease out the multifaceted contexts of similar crises and disasters throughout the century. Reading through a wide range of contemporary documents, the paper scrutinizes the political economy of war, famine, and ecological stress, and argues that large numbers of people had become vulnerable to disasters more than ever before in the recent history of Iran.
Making use of state and local sources, the final presentation looks at the social and environmental factors that contributed to the making of the Sheikh Ubeidullah Rebellion in the Ottoman-Iranian borderland region in 1880-81. This paper contends that the economic and ecological context of sectarian tension and nationalism is important in understanding this episode in the history of violence and displacement in the region.
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Dr. Noah Haiduc-Dale
Much of the Persian/Arabian Gulf littoral is as dry as any region in the world. Averages range from 51mm per year in Hormuz, to 80mm in Bahrain, to close to 200mm annually in Kuwait. New York City, by contrast, receives approximately 100mm of rain each month. The dry interior of the region means that there are very few rivers of any size flowing into the Gulf, with the notable exception of the Tigris-Euphrates system at the northwest end of the sea.
Such dramatically dry conditions were a major block to expansive settlement in the Gulf littoral throughout history, and even in the twenty-first century creative efforts to provide water for growing populations is a key to Gulf states’ success. As Toby Jones (Desert Kingdom, 2010) has shown for one major coastal player, Saudi Arabia was really only able to control water resources once it had attained wealth through access to a liquid with greater global value: oil.
My paper examines the role that water, and the lack thereof, played in settlement patterns along the Gulf coasts during the 19th century. The major port cities were often determined by access to fresh water, but locals were also creative in their efforts to capture, store, and use limited water resources. Fresh water from oases close to the coast, springs, small streams, and even fresh springs bubbling up from the ocean floor were essential for life itself. The plentiful salt water was even used for a variety of uses that most cultures would have avoided.
I argue that, like other mediocre resources in the Gulf (such as fish), limited water was a mixed blessing for local inhabitants. Wherever plentiful water existed, so too did larger cities with regionally dominant political families. The lack of fresh water along much of the coast provided some people, anyway, the opportunity to establish life outside of the political elites’ control of water, and therefore people.
Arabic sources that discuss water usage by people outside of the major towns are as rare as the water itself. Instead, I use European travelogues, East India Company documents, British government dispatches, and missionary papers to catch a glimpse of this element of life in the region.
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Dr. Camille Cole
Min aja‘ib al-buldan – one of the wonders of the world. Nineteenth-century commentators agreed that Basra and the surrounding region was defined by water in a unique way. The riverine and wetlands geography of what is now southern Iraq gave the region an equally unique relationship to water transport. Looking at changes in water transport during the nineteenth century, this paper argues that the introduction of steamships in the mid-nineteenth century had significant effects on the experience and social worlds of travel in the region, and on geographies of transport and trade.
The paper draws on a variety of sources – ranging from Ottoman border chronicles (seyahatname-i hüdud) to Iranian pilgrim narratives (safarnameh/ziyaratnameh) to Arabic provincial chronicles to the diaries of an Iraqi steamship employee – to analyze the relationship between steamships and space.
The paper argues that southern Iraq – the region south of Baghdad along the Tigris, Euphrates, and Shatt al-Arab, and into Iran up the Karun – represented a coherent space and was recognized as such by contemporaries. The paper then examines the changing social worlds of passengers, crew, and locals in the era of steamships, touching on the gradual severance of social and economic life on board ship from that on shore, the integral role of steamships and related merchant enterprises in the dispersion of the Baghdadi Christian community, and the ways steamships solidified class divisions in regional travel. The paper concludes with a discussion of the role of steamships in new geographies of trade and transport, both in terms of their imposition of a new boundary between “internal” and “ocean-going” shipping, and in their facilitation of uneven economic and urban growth along the Tigris.
Speaking to a literature dealing with technology and the global production of space, as well as addressing long-standing historiographical questions around the nature of British imperialism in the Ottoman empire and the role of religious minorities in it, the paper interrogates the nature and inevitability of a variety of spaces in late Ottoman Iraq – from the existence of a distinct social sphere aboard ship to the distinction between river and sea. Though these changes largely did not stem from Ottoman policy, they had implications for Ottoman governance. In suggesting the river basin as a starting point for investigation, the paper points to the contingent and complex roles of technological change in this land of water.
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Zozan Pehlivan
On June 24, 1893 Armenian and Muslim religious leaders of the Palu district presented a petition to the governor of Diyarbekir. The petitioners implored the Sultan to relieve the suffering caused by the last three-years’ continuous drought. Palu was not the only place experienced frequent drought. Peasants and pastoralists in Ottoman Kurdistan encountered a set of economic and political difficulties in the nineteenth century. Continuous wars with Russia, the settlement of Muslim refugees from Caucasus in the region, bribery and corruption practiced regularly by administrative authorities, lack of public security, and continuous changes in taxation system increased the burden on Armenian, Arab, Ezidi, Greek, Kurdish, Syriac, Nastorian, and Turkish peasants in the region. Conditions became intolerable for millions of peasants and their livestock when unusually extreme drought persisted for several years. Repeated droughts not only destroyed harvests in the field but also dried up pastures and left peasants and their animals without food. Even eating seed required for the next sowing season was not enough to keep peasants in their native lands. After the loss of their livestock (the principal source of wealth and property for an agrarian household in the Ottoman Empire) peasants had nothing to live on, and were required to flee the afflicted areas. Using Ottoman and British sources, this paper examines the fragile and changing socio-economic atmosphere of the region in the light of the following questions: first, how did frequent weather events impact peasants of Ottoman Kurdistan in the nineteenth century, specifically between 1840-1896?; second, how did the Ottoman state respond to those crises and provide aid or relief to its starving subjects? By focusing on the measures taken by the state to relieve distress among peasants in the region, I aim to challenge existing interpretations of relief policies and official responses to environmental disasters in Ottoman Kurdistan.
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Ranin Kazemi
This paper focuses on one of the most serious cases of famine in Iran in the nineteenth century. Reading through a wide range of contemporary documents, the principal aim here is to use this episode as a case study to talk about the larger problem of subsistence crises and natural disasters in Iran and the Middle East in this period. The paper studies the causes of a famine in 1860-61 and contends that a series of interlocking factors that had affected the political economy of the Qajar state had an important role in setting up a broad context in which food crises of this kind could occur frequently. Loss of transcontinental trade and territories, the decline of local industries, worsening trade deficits, the devaluation and scarcity of currency, as well as chronic imperial and state-building warfare in an increasingly globalized economy had led to the worsening fiscal crisis of the Iranian state and the rise of what was essentially new and predatory capital in the Qajar grain market. In such an atmosphere, people had become vulnerable more than ever before to natural and manmade disasters. When government officials decided to dispatch an expedition to the northeastern frontier in May to early October 1860, they thought they could bring about a dramatic reversal of some of these longer-term processes while countering the Russian expansion in Central Asia. The Persian defeat in the war, however, unleashed an array of aftereffects that ranged from tribal raids in the northern provinces and the resultant disruption of trade in half the country to more severe budgetary crisis of the government and the nonpayment of the wages of officials and civil servants. Average Qajar subjects, on the other hand, saw rapid deterioration of their means when a series of ecological disasters struck the country that winter. Outbreak of cholera and cattle disease were reinforced by the high mortality among people and working animals and extreme weather conditions which meant a year of drought was now followed by a year of incessant snow, storms, and flood. Under these circumstances, people saw the slowing down and cessation of the national transport system and a period of high inflation in the prices of food. The subsistence crisis of 1860-61 was, therefore, caused by no one factor alone. A series of events and processes with local, regional, and global dimensions were combined to create the “black winter” that year.
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Dr. Sabri Ates
This presentation focuses on the role of the environmental factors in bringing about the Sheikh Ubeiduallah Rebellion. This rebellion started in the last months of 1880, when tens of thousands of Iranian and Ottoman Kurds marched on northwestern Iran. Under the command of Sheikh Ubeidullah of Nehri, an Ottoman citizen and influential leader of a Sunni religious brotherhood, they temporarily took control of several cities. Their success, followed by the aggressive response of the Iranian army, activated what had been relatively dormant Shia-Sunni sectarian boundaries and resulted in great violence and displacement: tens of thousands of families left their ancestral lands, villages and towns were depopulated, civilians lost their lives, and the affected districts were laid to waste. The memories of the revolt shaped the relations between the Iranian Kurds and the Iranian state for a long time to come. In the literature on the Kurds this revolt has been characterized as the cradle of Kurdish nationalism. No doubt nationalist aspirations, and some other factors contributed to the making of this rebellion. This paper argues and shows that environmental factors, including famines of 1860-1 and 1873, significantly contributed to the making of this revolt.
