Nomadism and the activity of nomadic tribes constituted major challenges for the reformist undertaking of the Ottoman Empire during the 19th century. This period marked the height of Ottoman efforts to systematically deal with the nomadic issue as Ottoman authorities attempted continuously to settle tribesmen, coopt them and their tribe leaders, and in some cases to harness their abilities for the benefit of the state. In spite of these targeted efforts, the challenge posed by nomadism to the centralization project of the Ottomans grew significantly in the last third of the century. This paper will examine the situation in the district of Kirkuk, on the eastern frontier of the Ottoman Empire, where nomadic Kurdish tribes, mainly the Hamawand, posed a major source of unrest and a threat to the reformist endeavor. Following the signing of the second treaty of Erzurum, in 1847, that which marked the borders between Qajar Iran and the Ottoman Empire, the nomads in this region had to adjust to a reality of limitations posed imposed on their ability to roam, to graze their herds, and to engage in smuggling and brigandry. Their reaction to this reality came in the decades that followed, in the form of a constant threat posed by nomadic tribes in the Kirkuk area to Ottoman trade routes, trains, and telegraph lines, as well as to city-dwellers and their property. This paper will further show the ways in which the Ottoman state confronted the nomadic challenge in Kirkuk and the implications they hadof this confrontation on the city and its society. Moreover, this paper will show that although the mission to break nomadic resistance to reforms was monopolized by the central government and was not treated directly by local authorities in Kirkuk, the city was still essential in to this Ottoman effort. Kirkuk was used by Ottoman authorities as both a carrot and a stick vis-a-vis the nomadic tribes: It served as as a hub for the operations of recurrent military campaigns, sent to forcibly sedentarize and coopt the tribesmen and put a halt to their attacks on caravan routes and on transportation and communication infrastructure. On the other hand, the city was also used by the Ottomans as lodestone for tribal leaders willing to cease violence and to cooperate. These leaders were settled in Kirkuk, were merged in into the local elite, and were granted regular benefits, funding and Ottoman honorary titles.

This paper seeks to investigate the origins of al-Zawra’, Baghdad’s first newspaper. Moreover it suggests that solely viewing al-Zawra’ as an element of cultural and intellectual progress within the Ottoman Tanzimat period (1839-1876) and a sign of extended imperial presence, or as the auspicious beginning of the Iraqi Nah?a, ignores its transregional perspective, which was solidly illustrated by the content of the articles and news reports published for Baghdadi consumption in the early 1870s. Its conception as a bilingual (Arabic-Turkish) semi-official newspaper came about during the governorship of Midhat Pasha (1869-1872), and it was printed at the province’s first governmental printing house, under the management and editorship of Ahmed Midhat Efendi. This paper only takes issues from 1869-1871 into account because they include the original charter, and Ahmed Midhat Efendi had not yet returned to Istanbul, and thus, with certainty, was the editor. Despite being a state organ, al-Zawra’ went beyond the role of the vilayet gazetesi (provincial gazette), which was understood to be a mere medium of communication from the Ottoman imperial center in Istanbul. Much of al-Zawra’s content creates a different picture than that of the vilayet gazetesi. It does not only focus on local events, nor does it offer much space to events in Istanbul or other Ottoman provinces, which would tie Baghdad closer to the center, and to the empire as a whole. Instead, the newspaper pays close attention to tribal skirmishes in Iran, the state of the political situation in Afghanistan, border-crossing Bedouins, famines and commercial affairs in the British Raj, among many other transregional topics. All of these topics generate a different cognitive map than would be expected from a semi-official state organ with the aim of Ottomanization. Additionally, with the spread of telegraph wires, the sources for the news themselves were not necessarily from within the Ottoman Empire. Although the province of Baghdad was located on the edge of the Ottoman frontier, and one aim of the Tanzimat was to bring the province back into the Ottoman fold and imbue it with enlightenment and progress, this paper shows that al-Zawra’s content, the news sources, and the cognitive geographical perception of its non-Baghdadi editor Ahmed Midhat Efendi reveal that 1870s Baghdad was perceived as being located in an entirely different, loosely-defined geographical region that did not align with the constructed imperial borders.

The Euphrates River flowed through the Ottoman Empire’s eastern frontier, where Ottoman authorities struggled against various enemies, foreign and domestic. Relying mainly on Ottoman and Arabic sources, this paper will examine the Euphrates in the 18th century as an Ottoman frontier river. It seeks to demonstrate that fluvial dynamics and the Ottoman struggle against mobile pastoral groups in the Empire’s eastern frontier were closely intertwined, and they influenced and shaped each other. Particular emphasis will be given to the Ottoman conflict with the Khaza’il tribal confederation on the banks of the Middle Euphrates. The position of the Euphrates as a frontier river constrained Ottoman efforts to tame it and bring it under close state control. Without a comprehensive irrigation infrastructure and systematic flood control measures, the Euphrates often generated massive floods and created marshlands on its floodplains. In the Ottoman struggle against mobile pastoral groups, Euphrates floods and marshes were not neutral. Rather, they were the natural allies of mobile pastoralists and the natural enemies of grain farmers and the Ottoman provincial administration in Baghdad. Ottoman policy to deal with the challenge posed by mobile pastoral groups in the Empire’s eastern frontier had a transformative impact on the Euphrates River. Throughout the 18th century, Ottoman officials pursued an environmental warfare to defeat their pastoral foes. They built massive dams and drained the marshes of their enemies in order to make the landscape of the Middle Euphrates more legible and facilitate state interventions and control in the region. Such measures had a profound impact on the Euphrates and induced it to follow a more westerly course since the late 18th century. By highlighting the relationship between the Euphrates River and Ottoman frontier politics in the 18th century, this paper aims to demonstrate that humanity and nature engage in an intimate dialogue. This dialogue has significant consequences for humans and the ecosystems they interact with on a daily basis and should not be placed in the background of human affairs.

During the winter of 1971-72, between 40,000 and 50,000 so-called “Iranians” were expelled from Iraq into Iran. The Iraqi government vociferously objected to any suggestion that the expulsions were motivated by anti-Shi?i sectarianism or anti-Persian racism, insisting that these “illegal immigrants” lacked proper documentation and that deportation was more “humane” than imprisonment. Breaking with past scholarship that interprets the expulsions as retribution for Iran’s take-over of the islands of Abu Musa, Greater Tunb, and Lesser Tunb, and given the relative silence about the deportations within Iraq at that time, I theorize their relationship with Iraq’s call for an aggressive policy of methodically targeting Iranians living in the Arab Gulf states for harassment, marginalization, and deportation. Coverage of the “Iranian infiltration” of the Arab Gulf countries in Al-Jumhuriyya and The Baghdad Observer newspapers and in United Nations documents related to the deportations reveals how the Iraqi government “ethnicized” a geo-strategic conflict in the Gulf to portray all Iranian nationals, and by extension Iraqi Shi?a, as a fifth column, potential participants in an expansionist plot that included Iran’s “occupation” of Arabistan/Khuzistan and its recent abrogation of the 1937 treaty establishing the border along the Shatt al-?Arab waterway. This discourse about the threat of Iranian expansionism represents a manifestation of the Iraqi Ba?th Party’s “Mesopotamianism” that intentionally framed political conflicts in the region as ethnic and sectarian conflicts played out in a pseudo-mythical frontier between Arab and Persian, Sunni and Shi?a, a forward-looking revolutionary republic against a reactionary, backwards monarchy with imperial ambitions. This project, therefore, contributes to our understanding of how the Ba?th Party categorized peoples and merged geography with history and contemporary politics as part of a broader project of regime maintenance through the formulation of a nationalist narrative of Iraq as a frontier. It shows how a particular idea of modern Iran came to represent the shu?ubi “other” to Iraq’s Arabism, and in doing so became an integral part of the Iraqi Ba?th Party’s domestic politics. Last, but not least, it provides a unique look at politics early in the 1970s, an under-studied decade of Iraqi Ba?th Party history.