Recently, historians have begun to highlight the intimate relationship between the field of natural history and associated methodologies, on one hand, and imperial conquest, global trade-networks, and inter-imperial rivalries, on another. The major focus of this work has been 16th-19th century European botanical collecting and natural history in the Atlantic World, East Asia, and the Indian subcontinent during Europe's age of empire. European botanical collecting resulted in an explosive expansion of knowledge about non-European peoples and environments, and led to the creation of vast collections of flora and fauna at Kew and the Paris-based Jardin de Plantes. Indeed, European exploration of newly “discovered” territories in the Atlantic world and beyond gave birth to modern natural history including Carl Linnaeas’ revolutionary binomial taxonomical system as well as to modern cartography, geography, and climate science. My paper turns the lens away from European scientific exploration toward Ottoman and hence non-Western imperial science and exploration by focusing on an Ottoman scientific and reconnaissance expedition to Yemen and the Red Sea region in 1849. During this high age of empire, the Ottomans sought to extend their territorial reach to Yemen in the Arabian Peninsula in order to compete with Britain, France, and Russia, who had their own imperial ambitions in the Middle East. Just as Europeans used modern cartography, geographical surveying methods, anthropology, and natural history to define, categorize and order—to “know”—colonized territories and peoples and hence to dominate and rule them, so too, I suspect, did the Ottomans. Based on a close reading and analysis of the recently published Turkish-language travel account of Mustafa Hami—an Ottoman physician who accompanied the 1849 Yemen expedition—I seek to answer the following questions: What epistemic assumptions and categories of analysis did the expedition members use to describe the natural environment and population of Yemen? Did these descriptions reflect new methods of observation and Linnaean (and post-Linnaean) taxonomy associated with emergent modern scientific practices? To what extent did Hami’s narration reflect Ottoman-Muslim literary genres, on one hand, and new European ones, on the other? By considering the production of Ottoman imperial knowledge, my project helps to de-provincialize Eurocentric histories of natural history and solidly places the intellectual and cultural history of the modern Middle East and North Africa in a much broader global history of science.

When swarms of locusts descended on the city of Fayoum early February 2, 1915, neither Cairo’s newly created Entomological Section in the Ministry of Agriculture, nor the learned members of its professional entomological society were prepared to handle the outbreak. The scientists swiftly realized that the studies of locusts swarms held in their libraries were not applicable to densely cultivated areas like Egypt. In lieu of a proper workforce, they required the villagers of the Egyptian countryside to observe, collect, and eradicate the insects. This paper relocates natural history--the study of insects in particular--from the colonial armchair to the rural Egyptian village to examine the fellahin as producers of entomological knowledge during the Great Locust Invasion of 1915. It argues that village omdas and fellahin held tacit knowledge regarding the destruction of locusts, as well as the insidious egg masses they produced, that informed the studies of “professional” entomologists working for the Egyptian Ministry of Agriculture and the newly founded entomological society in Cairo. What the fellahin had not learned from their experience with locusts during previous invasions in 1891 and 1904, they learned swiftly from circulars and informational documents that were distributed throughout the provinces to aid in containing the outbreak. Entire villages—men, women, and children—worked to observe, and collect locusts for dissection, while omdas and mamurs regularly telegraphed reports of the insects’ habits and movements back to Cairo. Armed with palm branches, fire, and paraffin tins, villagers took to the fields effectively eradicate the locusts that tormented their homes and crops.

Materia medica texts and pharmacopeias were signal genres of medical knowledge in late seventeenth century Istanbul. Indeed, Istanbul was the main producer of such texts in the entire empire by a wide margin (out of 27 such texts written between 1660 and 1700 in the Ottoman Empire, 22 came out of Istanbul) Many materia medica texts presented a knowledge landscape rich with plants, spices, metals and minerals. Yet, none of them had accompanying visuals. These meaningful absences clue us into how the physicians and amateurs managed their ingredients in Istanbul. The verbal descriptions of plants and spices were often accompanied by translations in several languages as well as cues about taste and smell, which suggests not a world of exotics and exploration, but rather connoisseurship in a stable, familiar and resourceful medical marketplace that operated in several languages.

Islamicate exploration of the natural world developed from and alongside earlier Mediterranean, African, Indian Ocean, and Central Asian traditions. The intellectual vibrancy of early Islamicate scientific work has been credited to this expansive world, as attested to by practitioners in these earlier periods as well as more recent scholarship. By the Ottoman period, imperial expansion and translation of works into multiple Islamicate languages was again central to addressing the problem of “knowing nature” but it was also done with self-conscious awareness of this longer Islamicate scientific heritage and equally self-conscious attention to competition and collaboration with European states. Despite their connected histories, ongoing scientific exchange, many shared practices, and the common role of exploration in both European and Ottoman projects to “know nature” in the 17th – 20th centuries, terms and distinctions in the classification of knowledge differed in these two cases. Where Natural History and Natural Philosophy were important intellectual and social distinctions in European contexts, Ottomans primarily distinguished between al-‘ulum al-naqliyya wa-’l-‘ulum al-‘aqliyya. By the 13th century, this formulation of al-‘ulum al-naqliyya wa-’l-‘ulum al-‘aqliyya was the most commonly-used expression to distinguish two broad categories of knowledge in Islamic terms. Although the precise boundaries of these divisions fluctuated and various fields received more or less attention in different historical contexts, these two general categories distinguished knowledge authorized by revelation (al-‘ulum al-naqliyya) from knowledge authorized by rational investigation (al-‘ulum al-‘aqliyya). In these systems, al-‘ulum al-naqliyya, conventionally translated as the “transmitted” or “traditional” sciences, depended on appropriate interpretation and transmission of reveled material. Al-‘ulum al-‘aqliyya, generally translated as the “rational” or “reasoned” sciences, depended on human perception, speculation, and reasoning. Biographical dictionaries and manuscript archives evidence marked attention over the 18th and early 19th centuries to what both ‘Abd al-Rahman al-Jabarti (1753-1825 CE) and Muhammad Khalil al-Muradi (d. 1791 CE) called al-‘ulum al-ghariba -- a significant subgroup of al-‘ulum al-‘aqliyya. Patrons, teachers, students, instrument makers and scribes actively cultivated their expertise in a range of mathematical, medical, astronomical and divinatory subjects. Traces of these individuals, circulating texts, commentaries, and their interrelationships may be analyzed to help us better understand the social and intellectual significance of these fields in the century prior to large-scale European conquest in the Middle East and North Africa.

Natural history as a branch of the history of science remains one of the most neglected subjects in Ottoman studies. The ways modern Ottoman historians have categorized certain kinds of Ottoman sources limit our visions of how Ottoman literati developed and debated their understanding of the natural world. One example of it is Hezarfenn Hüseyin’s (d. 1692) medicinal encyclopedia entitled Tuhfetü’l-Erîbi’n- Nâfia li’r-Rûhânî ve’t-Tabîb (“The skillful, beneficial gift for the spiritual elect and the physician”). Tuhfetü’l-Erîbi’n is more than a medicinal encyclopedia, since it consisted of elaborated descriptions of plants drawing on from various canonical sources from Aristoteles and Hippocrates to Hezarfenn’s own time. In this alphabetically arranged work, Hezarfenn also listed the original version of the loanwords of plants, animals, and other medicinal products as well as their equivalents in Persian, Arabic, Greek and Latin. Despite the fact his ancient Greek sources are replete with references to Cretan plants, Hezarfenn rarely mentions medical usage of Cretan plants even though he served as a register officer during the Ottoman conquest of Crete in 1669. Instead, most of the medicinal plants Hezarfenn addresses are from Egypt. Through examining this textual preference of Egypt over Crete in the medicinal context, this paper sheds light on unexplored domains of the Ottoman intellectual world and complicates the history of cross-cultural exchanges in the Eastern Mediterranean. How did Hezarfenn interact with different intellectual traditions in his encyclopedia while also creating a text that was distinctively his own? What was the place of Egyptian nature in Ottoman philosophical and medical traditions? How was it connected to the medical markets across the empire? I argue that for early modern Ottoman scholars like Hezarfenn, political shifts and change of borders did not necessarily have a direct effect on the intellectual traditions of what we call “natural history.” This is because these Ottoman scholars continued to prioritize natural resources in geographies such as Egypt, in accordance with Islamic tradition.