The nineteenth and twentieth centuries were accompanied by a series of environmentally-induced but socially constructed famines across the globe. While these instances of food scarcity and starvation have long been studied in the context of other world regions, scholars of the Middle East have by and large overlooked to examine this phenomenon. Placing famine on the scholarly map within the field of Middle East studies, these papers tackle crucial and heretofore unexplored dimensions of this phenomenon in the social, economic, and political history of the region. Focusing on specific localities, incorporating new archival materials, and employing fresh perspectives and approaches, these presentations address issues that situate famine and famine-related issues within the broader historiographical, regional, or world contexts.
Focusing on the World War I period, the paper on Mount Lebanon describes the effects of environmental crises, Ottoman wartime requisitions, and the Allied naval blockade on the long-lasting social and demographic changes that occurred in this region. This presentation argues that famine contributed to a major shift in consumption patterns, the social and ethical desensitization, the fragmentation of the Lebanese citizenry, and finally the deterioration of neighborly and communal relations.
Moving on to nineteenth-century Iran, the next paper inquires into the multifarious causes and contexts of chronic famine and starvation, and their subsequent social and political implications throughout the country. Reading a diverse array of archival sources, this presentation contends that widespread scarcity and subsistence riots contributed directly to the development of popular politics and political participation in Iranian society paving the way for major, countrywide revolutionary movements at the turn of the century.
Focusing on the famines of 1873-75 and 1877-80 in central and eastern Anatolia, the following paper deals with the causes, as well as the social and political implications of food scarcity and government-sponsored relief efforts. Reading the British and Ottoman sources against the grain, this paper explicates the social and political impact of famine in Anatolian towns and rural areas in a decade of economic and political crisis.
The final paper on Ankara in 1845 deals with the ways in which the state and starving groups in society responded to food scarcity. This presentation argues that the idea of a welfare state during the Ottoman reforms requires reconsideration since government authorities were themselves very much involved in the development of famine through hoarding and stockpiling of grain and bread.
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Ms. Melanie Tanielian
In the context of World War I, a massive famine struck Mount Lebanon that cost the lives of approximately a third of its population. Despite the fact that social scientists generally agree that famine is man-made, and not a cruel joke of nature, in the case of the Lebanese famine the environment may not be neglected as a contributing factor to starvation and hunger. Harsh winters, little rain, heat waves, and not the least waves of voracious locusts from the Sudanese desert added to the enormous wartime requisitions by the Ottoman Fourth Army and an Allied naval blockade resulted in a demographic and environmental catastrophe of unprecedented scale. The famine would not only circumscribe the wartime experience of civilians in Mount Lebanon, but also would have long-term effects by shaping social and cultural configurations of post-war Lebanese society.
Famine, according to economist Mohiuddin Alamgir, may be defined by its symptoms including the uprooting and separations of families, changes in consumption patterns and breakdown of traditional social bonds. All these aspects circumscribed the Lebanese famine and contributed to the fragmentation of the citizenry. Based on the parish records and institutional diaries of religious orders in the mountains, this paper explores the effects of hunger on communal relations. These unique and newly discovered records reveal in great detail the collapse of neighborliness, subsiding charity and desensitization in light of overwhelming mortality, shifts in consumption patterns and strategies of survival that range from eating of alternative ‘famine foods’ to—in extreme cases—cannibalism.
Consequently, I argue that the lack of food that increasingly marked everyday life initiated modes of competitions that damaged the citizen’s trust in their local (municipal) leadership and increased the schism between classes. Furthermore, the social interactions were increasingly located outside the frame of morality and represented the collapse of communal links down into the most fundamental unit of society, the family. The famine produced a fragmentation so deep that its memory would be destructive to the unity of the young, tenuous and most of all artificially delineated Lebanese state in the post-WWI period. As a result we see a state-sponsored forgetting, leaving the memory of the famine to linger uncomfortably below the surface.
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Prof. Ranin Kazemi
This paper is part of a larger project on widespread famine and recurrent food protest in nineteenth-century Iran. I explain the primary causes and the historical context of food scarcity and protest, the Iranian state’s response to famine and food-related riots, and the significance of these for an understanding of modern Iran and the contemporary Middle East. My contention here is that these subsistence riots contributed to the development of popular politics in Iranian society paving the way for major, country-wide revolutionary movements in the late nineteenth and throughout the twentieth centuries. I argue that the causes and context of nineteenth-century famine and food riots were unprecedented or “modern" phenomena, and these in turn set the stage for the development of political participation in the country. This paper is divided into three sections. In part one, I briefly examine the roots of public frustration in nineteenth-century Iran. In the second part, I focus on the causes and frequency of famine during this period. And in the final section, I speak of the main features of subsistence protest. I will conclude by pointing to the importance of food riots in the development of popular politics in Iran and by implications across the Middle East. This work is based on eighteen months of archival research in Iran, Turkey, Britain, and the US. The social conflict and violence that I study and that were generated as a result of food crises are important because they served as templates for future popular movements and revolutions in this country. Scholars of France (e.g., George Rudé and Cynthia Bouton) and China (e.g., Joseph Esherick and Paul Cohen) have shown how famine and food-related grievances contributed to the making of the French Revolution of 1789-99 and the Boxer Uprising of 1898-1901. Despite these broader interest in the background of important revolutionary episodes, historians of the modern Middle East have, by and large, overlooked to scrutinize the economic, social, and political origins and genealogy of the widespread social upheaval in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. My work moves away from this earlier historiography by explaining the agrarian and social background that contributed to the development of popular dissent during this period. My study shows that the reasons for the development of political participation were far more complicated than what earlier historians have noted.
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Ms. Ozge Ertem
In the years 1873-75, between 100,000- 250,000 people died in the villages and towns of a wide region in central Anatolia because of starvation and disease. Just five years after the end of this disaster, another one hit north-eastern and eastern Anatolian provinces of Erzurum, Van and Diyarbak?r immediately in the aftermath of the Russian-Ottoman War (1877-78) and extended to Mosul in the Arab lands of the Ottoman Empire. In this second famine no fewer than 10,000 people died of starvation in eastern Anatolia, and another 25,000 in Mosul. Focusing on two bread riots that occurred in Diyarbak?r in 1880 spring and summer, this paper aims to investigate the social and political impact of the famine in eastern Anatolian countryside and towns in a decade of economic and political crisis. While the first bread riot in Malatya was related to the consequences of the government order regarding devaluation during days of scarcity, the second one in the city of Diyarbekir was triggered by the forestalling acts of Muslim and non-Muslim members of the administrative council. In both cases crowds protested seriously and the consequent events did not only challenge the power and legitimacy of local authorities but also alarmed the government about the political threats triggered by the famine. Using micro and macro scales of analysis, this paper investigates how the events unfolded and and what their socio-political implications were.
Moreover, through the example of the bread riot in Diyarbak?r, it argues that socio-economic deprivation was not always transformed to communal tensions; it did not solely deepen religious or ethnic conflicts in eastern Anatolia. Socio-economic and political conditions paved the way for also common struggles between Muslims and non-Muslims in towns and villages. In urban areas, scarcity and high prices aggravated the previous economic hardships. Economic discontent, having combined with anger against political authorities, sometimes resulted in serious unrest and riot based on common perceptions of justice and thus socio-economic tensions crosscut ethnic and religious boundaries.
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Mr. Semih Celik
This paper analyzes famine-time social relations and state-society relations by focusing on the famine that took place in Ankara in 1845. The state (meaning the center and its agents in the provinces) responses to the famine, and the relationship between these responses and the ways that the society (mainly the poorer sects) responded to the crisis are the main focuses. The paper argues that the idea of a benevolent Ottoman state that takes care of its fellow subjects is not valid for the case of Ankara of 1845; instead, it claims that the power relations and clashes of interests between central authority and the agents of state in the provinces, and between different provincial agents themselves, ended up in nothing but discrimination (stockpiling grain and bread, not distributing the state support, hiding the food stocks remaining in the granaries, etc). Within that picture, the inhabitants of urban Ankara had to rely on their own tactics of survival like migration, begging and resorting to crime. Moreover, examples demonstrate that those who found their own “ways of survival” did not even tend to conform with the norms of the administration/state in order to get state support after the first waves of famine. In that sense it can be argued that there had been a clash between state-support and survival.
Through reading between the lines of official newspapers (Takvim-i Vakayi and Ceride-i Havadis), registers and reports from the Ottoman archives in Istanbul, that are produced by the Ottoman center and local administrators, and through various petitions signed by inhabitants of Ankara, state-society relations and the responses to famine on the side of both state and society are analyzed. In that sense, the paper argues that the famine of 1845 can be read as an example of how environmental calamities forced some to “invent” different tactics of survival (from changing eating habits to “putting aside” social norms) while they allowed some to maximize their profits, at the expense of worsening the consequences of the disaster.
