Ottoman History Podcast - An Environmental History of the Late Ottoman Frontier

Episode Date: March 11, 2022

with Chris Gratien hosted by Susanna Ferguson | How did ordinary Ottoman subjects experience the momentous changes that made our modern world? This episode explores that question through the history of the Çukurova region of southern Turkey. As our guest Chris Gratien has argued in a new book entitled The Unsettled Plain: An Environmental History of the Late Ottoman Frontier, Çukurova can be studied as a microcosm of social and environmental change in the late Ottoman Empire. In our conversation, we explore how the approaches of environmental history can offer a fresh perspective on the political history of the Tanzimat period, and we discuss how the history of malaria -- an ancient disease -- sheds light on a modern experience of displacement and dispossession for rural communities in the Ottoman Empire and beyond. « Click for More »

When I first learned about this song, I was drawn into this story because it was one of many, as I found out, one of many stories of how local people resisted and one of many examples of how their culture recorded memory of a political experience that was totally new to me, that I'd never really read about, that there was this whole layer of communal experience that's usually lost in the way people write about the history of the Ottoman Empire, especially in English. How did ordinary people experience the momentous changes that made our modern world? people experienced the momentous changes that made our modern world.

This episode explores that question through the history of a place called Chukarova. Located at the historical junction of Anatolia and Syria, and centered on the city of Adana, this corner of the eastern Mediterranean has occupied a marginal place on the map of Ottoman history. However, as our guest Chris Grayton has argued in a recent book, Chukurova's past is central to understanding the transformation of late Ottoman society. At the outset of the 19th century, the highlands that surrounded the sparsely populated Chukurova plain were centers of political and economic life for the region's diverse inhabitants. Today, its lowlands are among the most agriculturally productive in modern Turkey. But if this transformation was rapid, taking place over less than a century,

it was anything but smooth. Told from the vantage point of rural people, Chukarova's modern history is one of displacement, dispossession, resistance, and resilience. And while its protagonists are peasants and pastoralists, mountains and mosquitoes loom just as large in the story of how people's relationship with an old disease, malaria, took on new forms. Malaria is understood today as a blood-borne parasite transmitted from person to person by mosquitoes, and it isn't something that people in the

region think about that much anymore. But as we'll learn, malaria was once an existential question, a matter of life and death. And though its causes were environmental, they were not merely natural. Ottoman settlement policy, commercial agriculture, war, and science all shaped malaria's modern manifestations in fundamental ways. I'm Susie Ferguson. Join me in this special episode of Ottoman History Podcast with one of our program's original founders as we discuss his new book entitled The Unsettled Plain,

an environmental history of the late Ottoman frontier. here. Chris, thanks for joining us. I'm glad to be here with you, Susie. Now 11 years after we started the Ottoman History Podcast, it's interesting to be in this situation, finally talking about a project that I also started at that time. Well, it's always good to have one of our own on the other side of the mic. So we're very happy to have you. And I'm excited to talk today about your book, Just Out from Stanford University Press. And this is a book that I've read parts of before, but it was really exciting to see

it in its sort of final polished form. And to think about how you're really telling the story of how the lives of rural people transformed over a century, basically, of settlement, capitalism, war, and the remaking of their worlds. You know, I've done, we all do these many projects, but this one started when I was a very young and pure and naive little historian just setting out in grad school and really embodied all of the very fundamental questions that led me to study history, questions about power, the making of modern societies, and sort of the silences in the stories about the making of

these modern societies we live in today. Well, one of the things that the project does that I have known you to do for a long time is that it really takes music and songs as kind of one of its central archives. And, you know, you used to translate songs for people like me who are trying to learn Turkish. And now a lot of those lyrics and those songs have actually meaningfully made their way into the book. So I thought we could start out maybe by playing a clip of one of those songs that really is important to the argument you're making here. Yeah, the songs are sort of one of these things that keep this large narrative that we'll get into rooted in the experience and memory of people who are outside

of the places where the more official narratives of history are written. And so the clip I'm about to play is a performance by Ruhi Su, a very famous Turkish performer who was trained as an opera singer. And then after facing some political persecution because of his communist proclivities he turned to folk music as a way of expressing political sentiments and here what you'll be hearing is composed by an Anatolian bard during the 1860s in a moment of nomadic communities or a number of nomadic communities rebellion against Ottoman forced settlement orders. In the song, there's one iconic line,

the poet Dadal Olu, he says, The state made this decree about us. the state made this decree about us. The decree is the sultans, but the mountains are ours. So it's this very powerful challenge. It's using geography and a relationship with geography, if you listen to the whole song, as sort of a claim to belonging and indeed claim to sort of having a kind of local hegemony

over a particular kind of space. İzlediğiniz için teşekkür ederim. Erman Padişahın dağlar bizimdir. Bizimdir o. So I think our listeners in Turkey will recognize these lines and maybe even know a little bit about the story. And when I first learned about this song, actually just by listening to Turkish pop music, I had heard it in a performance by Cem Karaca in a rock version from the 60s and 70s when the song kind of had a revival.

I was drawn into this story because it was one of many, as I found out, one of many stories of how, you know, local people resisted and one of many examples of how their culture recorded memory of a political experience that was totally new to me, that I'd never really read about in the grand narratives of the Ottoman Empire and the making of the modern Middle East, which I had read to that point. That there was this whole layer of communal experience that's usually lost in the way people write about the history of the Ottoman Empire, especially in English. And it's certainly not an experience that you would find reflected in the same way in the state archives. But so maybe you can start out by just describing for us this world, Dadolu says, Dalar bizimdir, right? The mountains are ours. What is this world of the

kind of mountain fastnesses and summer pastures that you call in the book and Turkish speakers will know as the yayla, right? This world that transforms over the century of change that you narrate. Behind this song and the reasons why it had been kept and preserved and resonated was the story of a massive transformation of a way of life and a relationship with a geography and environment. The context of the song, as I said, was during some forced settlement campaigns during the 1860s in the Ottoman Empire, in which seasonally mobile communities were subject to controls on their movement, not necessarily for the first time in Ottoman history, but on a scale that we hadn't seen before. Prior to this period, in the region of southern Anatolia, known today as the Chukorova region, or historically as Cilicia, there was a pattern of seasonal movement

defined by summering in the mountains and wintering in the plains. So moving between the highlands and the lowlands, as would make sense, right? In the summer, you go to the mountains where it's cool. And people had discussed this as a form of herding. These are herding societies, largely. They raise sheep and goats. And this is a way to exploit seasonal pasture. People had also talked about, you know, that retreating into the mountains was a very good way to evade the state, to avoid paying taxes, this type of stuff, maintain autonomy. All true. What I also came to realize, this rhythm was actually something larger. It was shared across many communities, not just a rhythm followed by nomadic people, for example, but indeed the majority of the inhabitants in this Chukurova-Silesia region.

And that as a result, the mountains were a space imbued with all this importance, political, yes, economic, yes, but also central to a fundamental sense of well-being and the natural order of time, central to spirituality associated with certain pilgrimages and annual rituals, that you couldn't disentangle all these different ways in which the mountains were really important to people in this region. And you also describe the mountain spaces as part of a way that rural people in particular navigated a particular ecology of disease, right? So that they had figured out or evolved over many, many generations a way of living in this complicated environment that kept them alive. If you check out any of the early modern European sources about this region

of what is today southern Turkey, this region of the Ottoman Empire, one thing you'll notice is a pervasive repetition of tropes that Nukhet Varlik calls epidemiological Orientalism, which is essentially Orientalism about disease. The Orient is a place of sickness, and this region in particular was associated with what we define today as malaria or malarial fevers, as people understood them, that they understood as arising from the environmental conditions. What I found is that this view, while not wholly inaccurate, did not take into account the seasonal rhythm in which people went to the mountains precisely to avoid the seasonal impacts of malaria. This is something that certainly nomads were doing

consciously, but also townsfolk, people who had no reason to go to the mountains for economic purposes. It was very fundamental to a local sense of time and a local relationship with the environment. I invoke the category of indigenous sort of as a position towards the environment that's different than the way these Western travelers moved through the land. But that this was so central to understanding what this place meant to people and utterly lost on most of the authors who had written about it in the past and therefore missing from a lot of the historiography as well. And so I think what's important about what you're saying here is that yes, there is a kind of explanation for these practices that makes sense in terms of modern

biomedicine, right? Avoiding the kind of malarial plane in the summer months when the mosquitoes were everywhere, but that we shouldn't actually reduce it, right? We shouldn't reduce these practices to simply a kind of primitive precursor of understandings of malaria, the way that, you know, modern biomedicine would have it, that these were actually part of a much larger, perhaps we can say, social ecology in which the mountains were summer pasture, they were a way of being healthy in the warmer months, they were a kind of pilgrimage, they were the fastnesses of political leaders, and that all of those things actually have to be considered together. Right. And as I say in the book, they were fundamentally, for many people, home. Home for people that didn't actually have like

a standing house all the time as we would think about a home in the 21st century sense, but home in a spatial sense. And this is where you see the importance of the environmental history methodology or what scholars call ecocritical reading of sources from the past. For me, what is at the center of environmental history is culture. Yes, environmental history is considering how mosquitoes influence the course of events

or how climate change in the past influenced the course of events or how climate change in the past influenced the course of events, how diseases came through and had all these impacts. And that's part of the equation. But more fundamental is understanding how people understood their environments, because that tells us what happened. First of all, they acted and reacted based on those understandings. But also seeing how those understandings have changed is also really important to understanding the political transformations that have taken place. So maybe that's a good moment to kind of begin where your narrative begins, which is in this moment of the 1860s, right? When this world of transhuman migration between the Yala and the plain begins to be remade by an ascendant, centralizing, and quite violent Ottoman state. So can you tell us a little bit about what happens to this world in the 1860s,

and how the life of rural people really begins to be transformed. The world I just briefly described and which I analyzed in social and political and ecological terms in chapter one of the book is, in simple terms, destroyed during the 1860s. But not destroyed entirely. It's just changed in a fundamental way. People in the region remember this as a horrible rupture. And that's interesting because this is the high point of the Tanzimat reforms that had played a very prominent role in a narrative of Ottoman modernization. And that's where this subtitle of an environmental history of the late Ottoman frontier comes in. Yes, I'm talking about Chukurova, but the processes and policies that we observe during that period are observable throughout many provinces of the

Ottoman Empire with different geographies, and I call this the late Ottoman frontier. It's a space of social, political, and environmental change that is defined by an active attempt by the Ottoman government to implement new settlement policies and reconfigure rural life, to fundamentally quote-unquote reform agrarian life in the empire, whether by settling nomads or bringing Muhajirs or immigrants to settle in uncultivated areas. So it is reading the Tanzimat as an environmental program using rural transformation to thereby transform a larger empire that is beset by all of these issues and presented with all these opportunities during the middle of the 19th century. So maybe you could say a little bit more about what these settlement policies actually looked like and how people responded.

There were two forms of settlement policy intertwined in the high Tanzimat reform of what was the province of Aleppo, but what is the region of Adana, around the province of Adana, the city of Adana, during the 1860s. And these are not unique to this region. We can see these throughout the empire at various points and times. One is the sedentarization of what we might call nomadic people, or people engaged in seasonal migration between the mountains and the lowlands. And the policy was to settle them in the fertile and uncultivated lowlands that were their winter pastures. So it was their home turf, but not a place that they would live year-round. The other settlement policy was of immigrants, people called the Muhajirs. They're essentially refugees of

conflict with the Russian Empire from Crimea and the Caucasus, later the Balkans as well. And the idea was to settle such people, of whom there were millions during the Ottoman Empire's last decades, in places that were ripe for agricultural development. So why was it that the state was so interested in, or the government, in particular bureaucrats in the government, were so interested in settling people into these lowland towns and these fertile areas? You know, in the book, at one point, I mentioned that this is like the zeitgeist of empire at the time, that we shouldn't see these things as foreign to Ottoman settlement policy because there were previous settlement policies, but we also shouldn't

be surprised that they really resemble what other empires were doing at that time. I mean, this is like the history of the United States, essentially. The settlement of the West begins during the same period. This is the beginning of settlement in Algeria, right? This is like when settler colonialism really comes into its own. So there are specific reasons that, you know, you have a situation where nomadic communities are still largely, you know, they're semi-autonomous. They're not doing military service, even though the Ottoman Empire has implemented mass conscription. They don't fit into the modern land regime that forms a tax base of the empire. And so for such groups, they're kind of like a problem for the government. At the same time, a large refugee population is a problem in another

sense, but also a powerful opportunity to reverse this and create a new, let's say, obedient population in these different provinces that had been an issue. And the last point that ties us all together is the fact that agriculture is changing with the opening of the Mediterranean economy to export new forms of agriculture that require new forms of land use and a new ecology are coming to the fore. So I want to talk about the agricultural transformation

in a second. But first, I think it's important to note that you really pay attention in the book, not only to how Ottoman bureaucrats desire to remake rural and nomadic lives through settlement, but also how people respond, right? And to remind ourselves, as always, that what the state wants to have happen is not always what happens. So maybe you could just say a little bit about that. How do people who had been engaged in seasonal migration push back against the settlement by the state? The pushback is that song we started with, right? That song performed by Ruhi Su and written by Dada Alolu. They resisted Ottoman settlement policy, but even after the military resistance failed, they began to resist Ottoman settlement policy by continuing their seasonal migrations. And the reason why they did this is because, by all accounts and sources we have from the period, a large percentage of the population, both the local nomadic populations, but also the new immigrant populations died during this process. They died of malaria, the seasonal risk in this region. They died of cholera epidemics.

This was a period of economic crisis. So there were famines in Anatolia. And so this was an incredibly violent period for these people. And when you look at the historical memory, one of the interesting things to think about is that malaria, famine, these are things that hurt society's most vulnerable the most. Children are most likely to die of malaria, but also pregnant mothers. The people who were killed by settlement policy were not combatants on the battlefield with the Ottoman Empire. You know, in a way, forced settlement was more cruel than the types of like armed clashes that these communities would have had with previous, you know, Ottoman attempts at reform, or, you know, internal to the region. There are political conflicts within the region, that this was kind of like, you know, it was a kind of political crime, and that's

borne out by like the way they remembered it and resisted. It wasn't just these people, but also the immigrants settled in the region who began to petition the Ottoman government to be resettled and explicitly invoked their understanding of the environment and its insalubrious quality that malaria was present as a justification. That's the point I want to emphasize in this issue, that everyone involved in this process was conscious of what was going on. We could narrate this as just like an Ottoman policy that was foiled by the environmental realities of the region, but we shouldn't maintain the fiction that nobody knew what was going on. The Ottoman officials and the people subject to these settlement policies were aware and acted based on their awareness and understandings of the

environment. But I'll also just say that what people can find in the book is citations and translations of documents from the Ottoman archive in which we see both, you know, nomadic people who'd lived in the Chukrova region for a long time, as well as the immigrants, the Muhajirs, actually, I think, using their detailed knowledge of the ecology and also their knowledge of the kind of problems that the Ottoman state was having, right? So on one hand, they wanted to settle the nomads for the reasons that you've discussed. And on the other hand, they realized that they couldn't fully do it because they needed the animals that those people produced. And they couldn't afford to have them all die in the new lowland settlements.

land settlements. So there's actually documents in which particular tribal groups or configurations negotiated with the state to allow them partial or even whole migration abilities. And they made a case to the state based on the state's own logic in a certain way, and also on their knowledge of the local ecology. So I do think that that's an important piece of this story of kind of high modernization or frontier settlement in the Ottoman Empire. That it wasn't just a story of kind of mountain resistance and, you know, a kind of a disaster, the outcome, the compromise that occurs on political terms represents the ultimate success of the Tanzimat policies. After this renegotiation of the terms of settlement, this region, which for centuries, you know, was like one of the hard regions for the Ottoman Empire to control, becomes not only a pacified region in the military

sense, but also a real center of economic transformation and Ottoman centralization and incorporation of these further provinces of Anatolia and Syria during this time. The Adana province becomes a gateway to a larger frontier in another sense, where the Ottoman Empire is seeking to establish uniform and centralized government. The main point of centering the rural people who are the subjects of these policies is they allow us to see a more complex picture and give us a more interesting story. I think places that were considered kind of marginal, especially within the Anglophone historiography, experienced so much change and so many momentous events during these times. And being aware of that is really essential

to just thinking through any question under the heading, the problematic heading of the modern Middle East. You have a chapter in the book in which you describe Cilicia, newly settled, becomes the kind of epicenter for really a complete agricultural transformation, the beginning of a cotton economy that transforms how the region is farmed, but also how it's lived. So maybe you could say a little bit more about this massive transformation in agriculture beginning in the 1860s. One of my advisors, John McNeill, the environmental historian, commented in an early draft of my dissertation that I really like the word transformation. And it does seem to come up a lot when talking about the big picture of this process, because really what we're talking about when we're looking at

late Ottoman Chukorova and the developments there is an utter reconfiguration of people's relationship with the environment, and implicitly a slow change in how they're thinking about that environment. I should note that on this issue of commercialization, there was an excellent study published about a decade ago now by Meltem Toksos on the development of what we could call local capitalism in this region of the Mediterranean. So what happened during the period of the US Civil War is that many regions of the globe, let's say, were tapped as possible alternatives to American cotton production, because the world economy, the cotton economy was very reliant on American plantation slavery up until that point. Certain parts of the former Ottoman Empire served as good alternatives

or possible alternatives as sources for cotton. Egypt was held up as the model where Mehmed Ali Pasha and his successors built a state with a highly commercialized economy, completely converting lots of land over to cotton. And so Egypt was seen as a model of a place in the former Ottoman Empire that could be applied elsewhere for commercialization of agrarian production. And in addition, because the Ottoman Empire had effectively lost control of Egypt, places like Chukurova were also seen as a site of redemption for the Tanzimat period state, places where the riches of Egypt could be recovered. So how did that change things for people who lived there? I mean, it changed patterns of landholding, it changed patterns of labor. Tell us more about this

transformation, to use your favorite word. One of the things that occurred is the creation of large plantation-like estates called çiftliks, which have a larger history in the Ottoman Empire, but were associated with the sort of centralized production of these export crops. Now, the people who worked these estates, unlike in the Americas, were not enslaved. They were seasonal migrants who came to Chukurova for wages, essentially. From many other parts of the empire. From many other parts of the empire. There was a local labor supply, but it wasn't enough. So, I mean, northern Syria, the Nusayris or modern day Alawite communities supplied a huge

number of workers to Chukurova. In the east, as far as the other side of the Iranian border, Kurdish, Armenian, and assyrian workers were coming workers were coming from all over you know the state played a role in orchestrating these movements um so it wasn't totally like a market driven uh process by any means but part of what you described for us is that these transformations that are brought about by the coming of modern commercial agriculture for global export are really uneven, right? So it's not a situation of everyone in this region profits equally from this opportunity. Exactly. You have the landowning class and the merchant middle class and this

Ottoman cosmopolitan urban class emerging in the Adana-Tarsus-Mersin region during this time. But then for these workers, while it does put a little cash in their pocket, the conditions of laboring in Chukorova are brutal. First of all, cotton is planted and harvested during the warm months of the year. And so just in terms of their bodily comfort, it's extremely uncomfortable. In the summer, the Adana region is as hot as Egypt and more humid. And definitely people coming from other parts of Anatolia would not have been accustomed to that. But this also comes with that risk of malaria. Cotton is harvested during the autumn period in September. Mosquitoes have had the whole

summer to make generations of other mosquitoes. And this is the peak malaria season, peak risk of infection. And what we see is that malaria infections among the worker population are so pervasive and commonplace. It so, you know, it's just everywhere in the sources. The local government in these cities of the Chukarov region builds hospitals, they're called Gureba hospitals, whose sole purpose is really to provide medical care to these seasonal workers. So the story you're telling here of the incorporation of the Adana-Maracanth-Tarsus region into global networks of commodities for export, particularly cotton, is one that's been narrated by scholars for the last 70 plus years as a story of economic peripheralization, right?

Of the ways in which industrialization, first around textiles and then around other industries in Europe, draws in other parts of the world, particularly in the colonial world and the so-called non-West, as exporters of raw materials. In the book, you write that Cilicia, this region, was incorporated into a world economy on its own terms. And I noticed that phrase because I was thinking maybe you were trying to tell us something new and different about this story that people think they know about how the non-West was drawn into the world economy as a set of peripheries, producers of raw materials for European industry, or about how we should think about that story from the perspective of rural people in southern

Turkey. story from the perspective of rural people in southern Turkey. I'm always shocked by how many people seem to be drawn by these big narratives of global transformation that completely erase the texture of local life in places like Chukurova. I'm not invalidating the predominant historiography of the world economy. I think they've got the processes essentially right. But when I said Chukurova's incorporated on its own terms, there's certain things that get lost in that story. The one I will focus on is the very species of cotton that continues to be grown in Chukarova. Long story short, most of the cotton we wear today is what we would call American cotton, species of cotton originating in the Americas. And this was true for Egyptian cotton as well. It was an American

strain adapted for Egypt. In Chukarova, you have a local form of cotton. They call it Yerli in Turkey, but it's just like the local variety that had been grown in that region even before the Columbian Exchange. And it is morphologically completely different. It grows in a protected pod. They call it a coza, like a cocoon. And the pods are harvested in their entirety and then cleaned off the fields, whereas American cotton, the fibers are picked directly from the plant, which is a very laborious process and indeed required the enslavement and the persistent enslavement of people in the American South to even sustain. In Chukarova, we see they try to introduce American cotton and the cultivators don't do it because one, it requires irrigation, right? It can't grow

just rain fed. So it's not drought resistant, but also the cost of labor is too high to do it that way. Instead, it's being produced in this kind of multi-stage process where the workers go out, they harvest the cotton bowls, the heads of the cotton, and then they're taken to homes where men, women, and children sit around and clean them out and clean out the fibers. They get a little cotton for themselves that they can do whatever they want with it, and then it goes back to the merchants who then ship it it out so it's this totally different kind of cotton um it has

totally different uses germany's importing it lots of it because it blends with wool but then like so great britain which was promoting this cotton boom in the ottoman empire to replace american cotton never ends up importing that much chikorova cotton. It's going elsewhere and for other purposes. And so when I say the region is incorporated on its own terms, I mean really in the ecological sense that like it would have taken a lot of force to turn Chukarova into a place where American style cotton has grown in large numbers. It would have taken coercion of laborers. It would have taken coercion of laborers. It would have taken coercion of cultivators. It would have taken a lot of centralized control. There's great incentive to do this economically. It's more valuable cotton. You can export it to Manchester, whatever.

But this process is not taking place by natural forces of the market, quote unquote. The region's ecology resists this dimension of it with every fiber of its being, no pun intended. And we see this go on right up until the 1950s, that in this region of Turkey, the local variety of cotton continues to predominate for basically the same reasons I just described. I think this is a great example because what it has me thinking about is that the story of peripheralization both flattens the world of the commodity into a single item, right? Cotton, rather than the many different varieties, which entailed many different political economies and politics of labor. So in this sense, Egypt is not, the American South is not Chukarova, right? As we might be tempted to

think from the kind of grand narrative of peripheralization in the world economy but what the story you're telling also reminds us is that even in the so-called metropoles this was not a natural or seamless process and that there were regions of the world there were varieties of of cotton there were ecologies of labor that resisted being folded into these so-called market forces in different ways and that those stories fall away if we as you say ignore the texture of local life as we tell the story of economic transformation in the middle east in the 19th century late adamant chukarova's transformation was environmental. But it was intertwined with another transformation in the relations between Muslims and Christians in the Adana region.

During a period of turmoil for the empire as a whole, emergent rifts between confessional groups manifested in the horrific violence that rocked the province of Adana in April 1909, right as seasonal workers descended on the region. Many thousands of people were killed in two waves of massacres orchestrated against Armenians in both the city of Adana and in the countryside. These events are explored in detail by Bedros Dermatosian

in a new book called The Horrors of Adana. The Adana massacres exposed the precarious nature of the multi-confessional society promoted by the constitutional revolution of 1908. And a few years later, when the outbreak of the First World War ended the Adana region's long history as a home to both Muslim and Christian communities, the precarity of its new economy became equally clear. became equally clear. So maybe we can move a little bit forward in time and think about the period of World War I. And one of the things you talk about in the book is how the kind of winners of this process of settlement and commercial agriculture, right? The prosperous multi-confessional

urban or landholding society of Cilicia was actually revealed in the First World War to be extremely fragile and precarious. Mobilization for the First World War and its impacts have recently become a popular topic in Ottoman historiography. We featured episodes with Yigit Akın and other scholars who have addressed this. And for commercial agriculture, what we can observe is that the conditions of war were incompatible with the very things that made commercial agriculture profitable in the Ottoman Empire. So much so that the very regions like Chukorova that were economically very central to the new formation of the Ottoman Empire were unable to play the role that the Ottoman army really needed, which was to produce agricultural goods for the army, so mainly food, the food that would feed soldiers and eventually feed Ottoman society. In his dissertation, Graham Pitts makes this argument most forcefully,

how the war conditions interacting with the forces of local capitalism in the Eastern Mediterranean kind of conspired to create conditions of mass famine. The Sugar Rover region didn't quite experience mass famine, but it was not a pretty situation there either. No one will be surprised that the history of the Ottoman Empire, its social history of the First World War, is a tale of woe. One of the things I talk about in the book that actually comes through very strongly in the Ottoman archival sources is the impact of the Armenian genocide on the agrarian economy of the Adana region, the economic aftershocks of deporting upwards of 100,000 people from this region were massive and instantly palpable for people in this part of the empire. There were numerous impacts of the deportations economically, politically, socially, I even talk about how they played a

role in a particularly unusual malaria epidemic that occurs in 1916. So it's just an indication that we can't, like, while it was very interesting to write a local history of a region of the Ottoman Empire during the war, what that local history really showed is this is a period in which, you know, the fate of the Ottoman Empire itself is sort of influencing the course of events locally in basically every place. What it shows us is that, you know, a sort of globalizing impact, but in a way that ends up being, you know... Ungeneralizable from region to region.

Yeah, exactly. And highly destructive, both for ordinary people, but also for this merchant class that had been doing really well during the last decades of the Ottoman period. It also creates opportunity for profiteers and whatnot. I'm not saying that nobody had it good during the war, but certainly the dominant historiographical perspective at this point is that not only was the war a disaster for provincial society in the Ottoman Empire, but perhaps the Ottoman Empire had a worse experience of the First World War than any of the other combatant states, even though it's usually marginal in the narratives about the war. It seems like the Ottoman world suffered the worst of the

war's impacts in every sense. So despite all of the ways in which the war constituted a rupture and a destruction in the lives of both rural laborers and emerging merchant elites in Cilicia, the book doesn't stop there, right? And it actually continues to trace these themes of transhuman migration, And it actually continues to trace these themes of transhuman migration, of uneven capital accumulation, and of travel from the Islay to the plain into the Republican period. So what are the continuities that you see? modernization program, a nation-building project, is effectively a continuation of the Tanzimat project to reshape the countryside. And all the types of policies and developments we see during the late Ottoman period in Chukurova also occur during the first decades of the Republican period. This includes settlement. This includes commercialization. There's a lot of parallels.

This also extends to everything I've been saying about malaria. And furthermore, it extends to the types of interventions the state is making, using science and medicine as an important prong of what the Kamal saw as a revolution of society. And it was, but it was a revolution rooted in the trajectories that were very much set by the late Ottoman period. How so? We talked about cotton and its role in the agrarian economy, but I'm going to leave that aside and talk about medicine, which is an important focus of the last chapter of the book. What we see in the arena of medicine is a really aggressive attempt by the new Republican

government to address a whole series of public health issues, foremost among them malaria, and with Ankara, the capital, the new capital, and Adana being the centers of malaria control in Turkey. Now, if we just think about this as a Republican story, we might take the doctors at their word that this was a noble-minded national project to eliminate a primordial scourge. And we shouldn't forget this dimension of why this project was so important to everyone in Turkey. The project of eradicating malaria. Of eradicating malaria. Yes, malaria control. to everyone in Turkey.

The project of eradicating malaria. Of eradicating malaria. Yes, malaria control. However, with that Ottoman history behind it, we can see that malaria in its modern manifestation, how people were experiencing it, right? As a disease of agricultural laborers, as a thing that people couldn't escape as they once had done.

We see that as part of the larger process, the larger political transformation, economic transformation of this region. So what I mean is that while malaria is not something that's new entirely in this region, that would be a ridiculous thing to say, it's nonetheless, I think, very important to emphasize that the experience of malaria by the inhabitants of this region was really shaped by these modern questions of commercialization, of settlement policy, and the slippages in sort of a more smooth narrative of progress that would just have these things disappear, have things like malaria disappear with modernization. Dolanıyor, dostlar gider. Bu ne zannediyor İstanbul?

Hasta el día de hoy. Hasta el día de hoy. Hasta el día de hoy. So it seems to me that one of the promises of your work and of environmental history more broadly is to ask us to see the relationship between categories of the human and nature in a new way. So I'm wondering if you could say a little bit about how you approach that problem in this book. You know, what we understand as natural, what we understand as the environment are ultimately based on a cultural perspective that has implications for every arena of human life. So thinking about all the ways in which nature is constructed in our present, then we start to think about, well, how has this changed and what does it mean? And that's where sort of we get to the heart of what I was coming back to again and again in the book. Anand Singh has a great quote in the book,

The Mushroom at the End of the World, that people who are outside of capitalism or resist capitalism, rather than showing us a way ahead and sort of a progressivist narrative of the future, they show us how to look around. And so that's really the value I found in writing this environmental history of a change in a really small place that is still an environmental history of the making of the modern world. In seeing how past people viewed the environment, in seeing people's relationship with the environment in the past and how it changed, it tells us something as well about where we are now.

about where we are now. As a reader, what I saw in your book was an argument that when you look at the warp and weft of rural life in the intimate detail that you do in this book, it actually becomes impossible to think about categories of nature, environment, and human because the things that we see as central to quote-unquote human culture, right? The idea of home, that which is sacred, that which is as central to quote-unquote human culture, right? The idea of home,

that which is sacred, that which is passed down to children, that which is fruitful of human life, are intimately forged and embedded in a world that goes far beyond the human to encompass the mosquito, to encompass the cotton bowl, to encompass the yaila, and that it actually becomes really, really hard in these archival stories that you draw out with such care to even think about those categories as meaningful in the way we tell a history. Yes, and that's the other side of the coin of saying that nature is constructed, that the boundary is constructed. And so human societies and the environment are mutually constituted. And we think we have this objective

knowledge, scientific knowledge, and it can be useful for understanding the past. But every time we look at the past and don't set aside those assumptions, we're missing an opportunity to see something really valuable, valuable for understanding what people experienced, what historical events meant to them. But also in kind of observing that friction, then we also learn something about the modern society that maybe we didn't know before, and maybe become attuned to something that we weren't aware of even being an issue. And that's why the book continually returns to the question of malaria. Malaria is not something easy to quantify in economic terms, like what its impact on a person

is, right? How do we give that a number? It doesn't necessarily fall into the conventional metrics through which the history of socioeconomic change is written. You got to think about it from a qualitative dimension. What was a person willing to sacrifice to not get malaria? I found that in a way, people's entire lives revolved around that. They made it work. They weren't imprisoned by the question of malaria, but it definitely shaped their concerns. And so knowing that isn't just like a nice story about how things used to be. It's actually still fundamental to questions of environmental justice today. Why a local community or group might resist a particular policy or trend that influences their environment

could seem irrational in certain economic terms that would want us to just think of humans as rational economic actors and they should follow their economic interests. People's reasons for resisting might be entirely different, but they are valuable. And looking at how this played out in the past only helps us emphasize how valuable that is because through this history that I charted over about a century, you can really see what some of these changes cost ordinary people and that they were aware of what it cost them. Fundamentally, that's what the book was about. Well, Chris, thanks so much for coming on the podcast today.

It was a pleasure to have you. Thanks, Susie. It was so weird to be talking to you about my own book after we spent so much time talking to so many other people about their books. Well, on behalf of Ottoman History Podcast and many of our listeners, I'll congratulate you on the finishing of this 11-year journey. And I'll encourage our listeners to check out The Unsettled Plain and Environmental History of the Late Ottoman Frontier, just out from Stanford University Press.