Seeds of Power Explorations in Ottoman Environmental History

About this book

The Ottoman Empire was one of the greatest early modern world empires, stretching from the outskirts of Vienna in the west to the Caucasus Mountains in the east and from the tip of Arabian Peninsula in the south to the Ukrainian steppes in the north, covering an area of 3.81 million square kilometres. The Ottomans were remarkable not just for their political and military success but also for their desire and ability to understand, adapt, modify and manage different environments. This edited volume is the first collective effort to take an original look at the Ottomans through the lens of environmental history. In its wide-ranging essays, environmental perspectives illuminate diverse historical processes and events in the long history of the Ottoman Empire. The essays thus offer new answers to old questions – but also ask new questions – about the ways the Ottomans related to, depended on, thought about and interacted with the natural environment. It will appeal to anyone interested in the environmental history of one of the world's largest and most durable empires, the longest-lasting in the history of the Muslim world.

Contents

Preface / ALAN MIKHAIL
Introduction The Ottoman Environments Revisited / ONUR İNAL and YAVUZ KÖSE

Part I. Climate and Landscapes
Chapter 1. Searching for the 'Little Ice Age' Effects in the Ottoman Greek Lands: The Cases of Salonica and Crete / ELIAS KOLOVOS and PHOKION KOTZAGEORGIS
Chapter 2. A `Magnificent' Climate: Demography, Land and Labour in Sixteenth-Century Anatolia / MEHMET KURU
Chapter 3. Producing Grapes and Wine on the Bosporus in the Eighteenth Century: The Testimony of Domenico Sestini / SURAIYA FAROQHI

Part II. Resources and Energies
Chapter 4. Fruits of Empire: Figs, Raisins, and Transformation of Western Anatolia in the Late Nineteenth Century / ONUR İNAL
Chapter 5. 'It's a Bad Fate to be Born Near a Forest': Forest, People and Buffaloes in the Mid-Nineteenth Century North-western Anatolia / SEMIH CELIK
Chapter 6. Water Management Issues in an Ottoman Province: The Case of Cyprus in the Seventeenth Century / STYLIANI LEPIDA

Part III. Technologies and Infrastructures
Chapter 7. Nature's 'Cosmopolitanism': Villagers, Engineers and Animals along Terkos Waterworks in Late Nineteenth-Century Istanbul / K. MEHMET KENTEL
Chapter 8. Cesspools, Mosquitos and Fever: An Environmental History of Malaria Prevention in Isma'iliyya and Port Sa'id, 1869-1910 / MOHAMED GAMAL-ELDIN

Part IV. Ideas and Actors
Chapter 9. The Rice Debates: Political Ecology in the Ottoman Parliament / CHRIS GRATIEN
Chapter 10. Discovering the Nature of the New Homeland: Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859) in the Ottoman Empire and in Early Republican Turkey / YAVUZ KÖSE
Chapter 11. Dispossession by Concession: Forest Commons in the Ottoman Empire and Early Turkish Republic / SELCUK DURSUN

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Biography

Onur İnal is a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Vienna and founder of Network for the Environmental History of Turkey (NEHT). His research focuses on the urban and environmental histories of the late Ottoman Empire and early Republican Turkey.

Yavuz Köse is Professor of Turcology at the University of Vienna, board member of TürkeiEuropaZentrum (TEZ), and president of the Society of Turkic, Ottoman and Turkish Studies (GTOT). He researches the social, economic, and consumption history of the Ottoman Empire and Turkey. Particularly, he is interested in the effects of modernisation and globalisation in the late Ottoman Empire.