Seeds of Power: Exploration in Ottoman Environmental History. Winwick: The White Horse Press

Year 2019, Volume: 1, 205 - 208, 27.12.2019

Önder Eren Akgül

https://doi.org/10.53979/yillik.2019.14

Abstract

In 2006, the late John F. Richards published The Unending Frontier: An Environmental History of the Early Modern World. In this landmark book, Richards initiated the writing of the global environmental history of the early modern world. It was this world in which the Ottoman Empire expanded its territory from the northwestern Balkans to the shores of the Red Sea and from the slopes of Mount Ararat to the southwestern Mediterranean. Yet aside from brief references to the Ottoman environment and its inhabitants, Unending Frontier did not integrate the Ottoman Empire into the story of global environmental change in the early modern period. The possible reasons for this are beyond the scope of this review.

Keywords

urban history, environmental history, history of technology, Istanbul, ottoman empire

References

• 1 See selected works, Alan Mikhail, Nature and Empire in Ottoman Egypt: An Environmental History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011); Antonis Hadjikyriacou, “Society and Economy on an Ottoman Island: Cyprus in the Eighteenth Century” (PhD diss., University of London, 2011); Faisal Husain, “In the Bellies of the Marshes: Water and Power in the Countryside of Ottoman Baghdad,” Environmental History 19 (2014): 638–64. Onur Inal, “A Port and Its Hinterland: An Environmental History of Izmir in the Late-Ottoman Period” (PhD diss., The University of Arizona, 2015); Michael Christopher Low, “The Mechanics of Mecca: The Technopolitics of the Late Ottoman Hijaz and the Colonial Hajj” (PhD diss., Columbia University, 2015); Zozan Pehlivan, “Beyond ‘the Desert and the Sown’: Peasants, Pastoralists, and Climate Crises in Ottoman Diyarbekir, 1840–1890” (PhD diss., Queens College, 2016); Chris Gratien, “The Ottoman Quagmire: Malaria, Swamps, and Settlement in the Late Ottoman Mediterranean,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 49 (2017), 583-604; Samuel Dolbee, “The Locust and the Starling: People, Insects, and Disease in the Late Ottoman Jazira and After, 1860–1940” (PhD diss., New York University, 2017); Mehmet Kuru, “Locating an Ottoman Port City in the Early Modern Mediterranean: İzmir 1580-1780” (PhD diss, University of Toronto, 2017); K. Mehmet Kentel, “Assembling ‘Cosmopolitan’ Pera: An Infrastructural History of Late Ottoman Istanbul” (PhD diss., University of Washington, 2018).
• 2 Sam White, The Climate of Rebellion in the Early Modern Ottoman Empire (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011).