Nature and Empire
Nature and Empire in Ottoman Egypt is one of the first environmental histories of the Ottoman Empire and the only one to use both Ottoman Turkish and Arabic archival sources to narrate an ecological history of the complex relationships between the Ottoman Empire and its most lucrative province of Egypt. Though perhaps no other land relied on water more than Egypt, there have been precious few studies of Egyptians’ reliance on, harnessing, and fear of the Nile or, more generally, of human relationships to nature in Egypt. Nature and Empire tells just one part of this story during the period of Ottoman rule in Egypt between the sixteenth and the nineteenth centuries. In doing so, this book charts how changes in the control of natural resources fundamentally altered the nature of Ottoman imperial sovereignty in Egypt and throughout the empire.
The main protagonists in this story are water, grain, wood, microbes, and the peasant laborers in Egypt, Anatolia, and elsewhere who dredged the canals, worked the land, and shipped the grain. Water in rural Egypt bound the empire and Egyptian peasants into the most intimate of cooperative relationships.
Grain moving out of Egypt fed peoples all over the empire.
Wood was brought to Egypt’s forestless landscape from across the Mediterranean to channel water, build ships, and forge infrastructure.
Disease, sickness, and death created all sorts of social, cultural, ecological, and economic phenomena that over centuries became interwoven into Egyptian society and Egyptian nature.
And peasant labor was the caloric motor that made this entire system of natural resource management function efficiently and effectively.
Nature and Empire argues that peasants were the most important human actors in the environmental history of the relationship between Egypt and the Ottoman Empire. Without these locals, the empire would have been helpless in dealing with the complexities and ecological variation of rural Egypt. This primacy of peasant knowledge, experience, and history was however hastily, violently, and ultimately unsuccessfully challenged at the end of the eighteenth century. This transition away from the local expertise of the Egyptian peasantry was the crucial turning point that made possible Egypt’s first major public works project of the nineteenth century—the Maḥmūdiyya Canal.
This tragic environmental, social, human, and political story is told in the final chapter.
By tracing the rise and fall of how Egyptian peasants were able to use their knowledge and experience of local environments to force the hand of the Ottoman imperial state, Nature and Empire tells a story of empire that stretches from canals in the Egyptian countryside to the palace in Istanbul, from the forests of Anatolia to the shores of the Red Sea, and from a plague flea’s bite to the fortunes of one of the most powerful states of the early modern world.