This paper addresses the basic questions relating to environment and ecology in early modern Ottoman Cilicia (modern-day Çukurova). Recently, historians have begun to consider the role of environmental factors and ecological change in Ottoman history, particularly the cooler and drier climate of the Little Ice Age period, which resulted in reduced agricultural yields throughout the Empire. This work offers an entirely new perspective on the early modern Ottoman experience while raising many questions, namely: what were the Little Ice Age experiences of the various provinces of the Ottoman Empire and how did climate and geography influence the historical development of these different regions? Drawing on contemporary scholarly debates within the historiography of the Mediterranean, environmental history, and climate change as well as travel accounts from the period, this paper targets a localized, regional picture of the Ottoman environmental history by focusing on the understudied region of Cilicia. Although today Çukurova is the most agriculturally productive region in Turkey, the plains of Southern Anatolia and Northern Syria were largely uncultivated during the early modern period due to colder temperatures, insufficient rainfall, frequent flood and poor irrigation methods. Within this context, the practice of transhumance spread. While the spread of semi-nomadic tribes of pastoralists has been often viewed as the “decivilization” of the Ottoman countryside, this paper explains the ways in which transhumance was in fact a successful adaptation to ecological change that brought drought and disease to settled populations. This discussion will include a consideration of the ways in which transhumant pastoralists were integral to the economy of Cilicia, moving beyond the image of the marauding “mountaineers” deplored by nineteenth-century Ottoman and Western modernists alike. Many have noted that modernization played out very differently in different parts of the Ottoman Empire. In the case of Çukurova, the lack of settled population as a result of agricultural difficulties meant that large estates with a relatively small number of landholders could be created through privatizing land tenure under Tanzimat reforms. The case of Ottoman Cilicia demonstrates that the regional study of the environmental history of the Ottoman Empire during the early modern era has major implications not only for our understanding of that period but also for the modernization that took place throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

The French commercial concerns that had lobbied for mandate control of Syria considered the ecology of large portions of the region eminently suitable for the cultivation of cotton, making it a high priority on French mandate officials' agenda as they contemplated how best to pursue the territory's mise en valeur. However, by the mid-thirties, optimistic prognostications for the project's success had been superseded by pessimism about the crop's future in Syria. This paper will explore the trajectory of this proposed project, contextualizing its development with respect to the dynamics of international circulations of capital, the ever-present possibility of foreign competition, local ecological constraints, and the fate of (largely unrealized) technological proposals. By exploring the realities of practice alongside the discursive representations used to promote the project and justify its shortcomings, the paper will elucidate the dissonances that characterized agricultural policy under mandate rule and the space they produced in this context. Given the type of cotton desired by French mills, achieving any substantial, assured yields would involve undertaking significant irrigation projects. It would also necessitate exerting considerable pressure on the cultivation choices of local farmers. French officials attempted to entice local farmers into the risky business of growing cotton with very little in the way of infrastructural support, preferring to invest in structures that would facilitate and expedite processing for French mills over projects such as irrigation networks for aspiring cotton farmers. While some farmers would experiment with the cotton varieties preferred by French commercial interests, many resisted attempts to control their cultivation efforts, hedging their bets based on shifts in markets prices, changes in climatic conditions or experience with pest infestations. Using reports to the League of Nations, official mandate publications, archival materials, and the National Bloc newspaper al-Qabas, this paper seeks to explore the tensions and struggles that arose between officials and farmers over the project of cotton cultivation. In particular, it will examine how mandate officials' discourse represented local farmers and their relationship to the environment as these farmers responded to the exigencies of on-the-ground practical, economic, ecological and climatic realities. By tracing the vicissitudes in cotton cultivation alongside these contestations over agricultural priorities, the paper aims to demonstrate how despite the dissonance between rhetoric and practice, the project of cultivating cotton would nonetheless produce a particular agricultural space with far-reaching impacts.

In 1933, the American University in Beirut inaugurated what it called the Village Recovery Program, through which this elite educational institution dispatched teams of students and professionals to the countryside to “modernize” rural society. Over the course of the decade, the program expanded with several teams of volunteers spending months at a time in the field and considerable government and press attention to their activities. By 1938, Syrian officials had incorporated similar programs. Authorities saw the benefits of the program as two-way. From the “cultured youth,” as the newspapers called the program’s volunteers, the peasants would learn modern techniques of agriculture and hygiene, abetted by both chemicals to kill the Sunn Pest, scourge of regional agriculture, and medicine to cure infectious diseases. From the peasants, the cultured youth would connect with the national essence that their privileged urban positions alienated them from. Yet while the aim of the rural development program was strengthening the connection between these two groups and the nation, the Syrian government’s appropriation of the program also coincided with an effort to keep peasants in their particular physical place; while officials lamented the backwardness of peasants, they also bemoaned their steady migration to cities. Thus, while the Village Recovery Program was about reforming peasants, it was also about firmly attaching them to their respective villages. One report on rural education encapsulated this point in sartorial terms, declaring that though peasants would attend school, they would not leave wearing tarbushes, the cylindrical hats-cum-markers of urban modernity preferred by city effendis. The goal of this paper is to examine two layers of the Village Recovery Program and related rural development projects: the first, embodied by the Sunn Pest, has to do with state efforts to eradicate this and other vermin and diseases through chemical, medical, and architectural alterations to the rural environment; the second layer, symbolized by the tarbush, has to do with the societal tensions embedded in the ambivalent relationship between urban professional youth and the rural subjects of their uplift projects. Studies of nationalism and modernity in mandate Syria – including those by Gelvin, Thompson, and Watenpaugh, among others – have almost exclusively framed these projects as rooted in urban spaces. By examining the Village Recovery Program, I hope to suggest that rural inhabitants and urban residents’ imagination of them were also crucially constitutive factors in the articulation of social roles and the delineation of state responsibility.