Ottoman History Podcast - The Environmental Origins of Ottoman Iraq

Episode Date: June 27, 2021

with Faisal Husain hosted by Chris Gratien | The Ottoman conquests of the 16th century represented a watershed moment in many senses. Our guest Faisal Husain explains the most literal of these senses: the unification of the Tigris and Euphrates basins under a single political authority and its ramifications for the history of Iraq. In our conversation, we explore how Ottoman rule in Iraq created new ecological possibilities and realities, setting the stage for momentous interventions in the rivers detailed in Husain's recent book Rivers of the Sultan: The Tigris and Euphrates in the Ottoman Empire. We also reflect on what Iraq reveals about Ottoman history writ large and the empire's dualist historical identity as an agrarian empire on one hand and flexible one on the other, in which accommodating local ecological difference was critical to governance. « Click for More »

The Ottoman conquest of Constantinople 1453 paved the way for the transformation of the Black Sea into an Ottoman lake. And what I argue in my book is that the Ottoman conquest of Baghdad paved the way, in a similar fashion, for the transformation of the Tigris and Euphrates into Ottoman rivers. It's the Ottoman History Podcast. I'm Chris Grayton. Today's guest, Faisal Hussain. Faisal is an assistant professor of history at Penn State University, and he has a book out entitled Rivers of the Sultan, the Tigris and Euphrates in the Ottoman Empire. The book answers that question of what it meant to make the rivers Ottoman. A big part of it, as Faisal will explain, was reckoning with the particularity of these rivers in comparison to other places in the empire. Grain cultivation was king in Egypt, and that's because the Nile flood was known for being

very timely. It was in perfect harmony with the agricultural cycle of the sowing and the harvest of the winter crops. The situation in Iraq was very different. If people wanted to use the Tigris and Euphrates for irrigation agriculture, fine, but just be aware that you'll have to invest more resources and effort into the construction of all the canals and the weirs and waterworks and water controls. Iraq's varied ecologies led to diverse methods of production. You rarely find a household or a village that relies entirely on grain cultivation. that relies entirely on grain cultivation. And also at the same time, with a few exceptions, you rarely find cases of a tribe or a town that relied entirely on livestock.

Accordingly, the Ottoman state took novel measures in the region to manage these different strategies. Shortly after the arrival of the Ottomans, during the reign of Suleiman, we see a systematic policy to bring the nomads or the mobile pastoralists of the region under the fold of the Ottoman state. And the way Suleiman and his successors went about it is to establish something interesting, but would sound familiar to historians of the Mediterranean region, which is what we call a herders' associations.

And in the process, the Ottoman state even began to look a little bit like these mobile herders. Just as it appointed a sea judge who traveled with the Grand Admiral of the Mediterranean fleet, Istanbul appointed what could be described as a grassland judge, migrating with some of those herders' associations seasonally, and that Ottoman judge would dispense justice wherever those shepherds pastured their flocks. That, and much more, on back to the Ottoman History Podcast. podcast. The Tigris and Euphrates for many centuries before the arrival of the Ottomans in the early 16th century was really politically fragmented between many different states and local chiefdoms. And with this political fragmentation, it was not possible to exploit the rivers and fully realize their potential for food production and communication to their

fullest extent that you would be able to do if the waters of the rivers were unified. So it's very difficult to talk about the ability of one ruler or one group to organize shipments, for example, from one end of the river to the other end. It was a very random process, it was dependent on the dynamics of supply and demand in the market, and also on the goodwill of the many different powers and power holders along the river channels. And this would considerably change with the arrival of the Ottomans in the early 16th century when for a very long time probably since the early middle ages now you see both rivers are unified under one imperial roof and that was the roof of the Ottoman empire and you see one state was able to coordinate the exploitation of the rivers

for different purposes, but primarily for communication and food production. And all of those provinces and settlements that were located alongside on both sides of the rivers were now answering to one political power, and that was the power of the Ottoman Sultan. That was the supreme power, and of course there were local considerations always. So I think it's fascinating that you use the term unification, because if people are stepping back and thinking about our basic world history, Mesopotamia is a region that we take for granted, and it's shaped by these rivers that have existed for a long time, and even during the ancient period had supported large agricultural

settlements. What you're suggesting is that's all contingent on sort of political conditions that shape how people use the rivers. And so in thinking about an interconnected region of Ottoman Iraq, what you're showing us is that the political interconnection of this region under a single imperial state was very important for its ecological transformation and some of the dynamics that changed. So I guess one of the questions I would have for you is, before talking about what those ecological changes were, I want to know, how did the Ottoman Empire come to

control Iraq? Because it's not part of this conquest of the, you know, the period of Selim I, the conquest of Egypt and all that. It's part of a separate political development. I'm wondering if you can tell our listeners about the Ottoman interests in the region and how it got incorporated. Let me first set the geographical stage of the story to make sure that all listeners understand the terms that we use. Because even though the Ottoman chroniclers recounted and narrated Ottoman expansion in the region, really by cities and by provinces. But here, from my perspective, I try to look at it within one broad geographical region that I call the Tigris-Euphrates Basin. And by this term I mean, I mean the lands whose rainfall and snowmelt are drained by the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. So roughly speaking, we're talking about the region between Erzurum and Diyarbakir in the

north, all the way to Iraq in the south. And this is a usage in some ways modern, but at the same time, many Ottoman geographers saw it as a unified region. And this is especially in the case of some maps that we have that show the Tigris and Euphrates and their settlements and the routes between them all in one image. And there was an implicit statement by those Ottoman intellectuals that all those regions could be studied and portrayed and viewed and approached together as a unified region and that's really the unit that I look at. Having defined this term, how did the Ottoman conquest of Iraq unify the entire drainage basin. Generally speaking, Ottoman

expansion in the Tigris-Euphrates basin moved in a vertical fashion, that's from the north in Anatolia all the way to the south in Iraq. So Iraq was the last region in this drainage basin to fall under Ottoman control. And the conventional date for the Ottoman conquest of Iraq is of course 1534, when Suleiman I himself entered the city of Baghdad. And for a long time, whoever controlled Baghdad was really acknowledged by people in the region as the supreme power throughout Iraq. And that's why soon after Baghdad became Ottoman, local chieftains around the region, including Basra, submitted their allegiance to the Ottoman state. From the Ottoman conquest of Baghdad in 1534, we can legitimately call the Tigris and Euphrates as Ottoman rivers, and the institutions and legal codes that were conceived during the reign of

Suleiman, and that's between 1520 to 1566, those legal codes and institutions that Suleiman and his administration built in Iraq would continue to define Ottoman rule in the region for centuries to come. Now, for those who are more familiar with the western part of the Ottoman Empire, think of the centrality of Baghdad and the political history of the Tigris and Euphrates to the centrality of Constantinople and the political history of the Black Sea. So, in short, the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople 1453 paved the way for the transformation of the Black Sea into an Ottoman lake.

And what I argue in my book is that the Ottoman conquest of Baghdad paved the way, in a similar fashion, for the transformation of the Tigris and Euphrates into Ottoman rivers. And of course, this unification, just like the unification of the Black Sea, opened many new opportunities for navigation, food production, but also at the same time, the Ottomans exposed themselves to new challenges, especially the challenges posed by the power that was in Iran, be it the Sabavid Empire or its successors. Early in the 16th century, there was another challenge coming from the European powers that dominated the Persian Gulf, starting with Portugal, and also the challenges posed by the Arab tribes that were used to a

semi or fully independent political way of life that had to contend with the Ottoman presence of the region. So when the Ottomans arrive in Iraq during the 16th century, how were people making their livelihood? What were the activities from which people engaged in subsistence? Or to what extent was their commercial trade within this interconnected region that is becoming more connected with the Ottomans. Just give us a sense of what local life was like on the ecological level. This region, unlike the Nile Valley in Egypt, was known for the diversity of its subsistence systems. So even though Egypt was known for its irrigation agriculture first and foremost, for its irrigation agriculture first and foremost,

and everything else more or less was secondary and overshadowed by the primacy of herbal production. The situation in Iraq was very different in that it was more hospitable to a diverse system of food production. Grain cultivation was an important part to it, but it was, I wouldn't even call the most important part of this food production system. No less important was the system of animal husbandry, primarily sheep and goat. And also another system of food production, we can call it wetland exploitation or wetland habitation and that relied really on the exploitation of the resources that wetlands offered. So it was a very diverse system of

food production and of relating oneself to the natural environment and when the Ottomans arrived of course they realized that this region is very different from other river valleys that they experienced and brought under their control earlier, especially Egypt, and that as much as the Ottomans wanted to inject their agrarian biases into how the local population related to the environment, there were certain limits. And that's in part because of the hydrolog related to the environment, there were certain limits. And that's in part because of the hydrology of the Targassum Euphrates system that was just not very well synchronized with the calendar of agricultural production, especially winter grain crops. So grain cultivation was king in Egypt, and that's because the Nile flood was known for being very timely,

and it was in perfect harmony with the agricultural cycle of the sowing and the harvest of the winter crops. The situation in Iraq was very different. If people wanted to use the Tigris and Euphrates for irrigation agriculture, fine, but just be aware that you'll have to invest more resources and effort into the construction of all the canals and the weirs and waterworks and water controls that would just force the Euphrates and the Tigris waters to be aligned with the timing when grain cultivators wanted the waters to be on their fields or to be drained from their fields. One of the things you're noting here is that there's a seasonality to the water and its movement, its ebbs and flows, where it swells and where it dries up and when, and that this doesn't necessarily map on to the seasonal needs of somebody who's trying to plant cereal crops, which, thinking from the modern 21st century perspective, it's hard for us to wrap our heads Iraq, how they use it to their advantages.

You mentioned wetlands exploitation, for example. You mentioned herding strategies that, of course, are probably seasonal and semi-nomadic in some fashion. Can we know a little bit more about that? Because I think it's true that the Ottomans have this cookie-cutter land policy that they want to implement everywhere. But of course, every place has its local particularities. And so we'll need to like really establish what was unique about Iraq before understanding what policy looked like. Awesome. Yeah. If I am to summarize the predominant local solution to the hydrological challenges that the Tigers and Euphrates posed to local society, it's two words, mixed farming. Now, so mixed farming, what do we mean by that? This is something that we know from the Ottoman

cadastral surveys that they compiled when they first arrived in the region, the same way they did it in other regions since the 15th century. So for those who are not familiar with the Ottoman cadastral surveys or the Tapu Tahir Daftar Luri, whenever the Ottomans would arrive in a region, they would dispatch officials to document the revenue sources and the taxable population of the region

to assess the economic potential of this region and how much it expected to collect in taxes from that particular region. These defters or cadasters included a lot of information about the kinds of economic activities that the taxable population pursued. And it's difficult to ignore the fact that almost every household, most of the population, you see them having some flocks of animals, sheep, mostly sheep and goats and cattle, and of course, water buffalo, and also some revenues expected to

be collected from them in terms of wheat, barley, and mostly rice. Those were the three major crops. All right. And this is the beauty of the Ottoman cadastral surveys. It really gives you a unique window into the subsistence strategies of the taxable households and the region. And if you compare the image and the picture that you get from them, they're not very different from centuries old systems of food production that existed in the region since the rise of Sumerian civilization in the 4th millennium BC. So it's a mixed farming system that you rarely find a household or a village that relies entirely on grain cultivation.

And also at the same time, with a few exceptions, major exceptions, you rarely find cases of a tribe or a town that relied entirely on livestock. It was, for the most part, with, and again, with major exceptions, the solution that the population had for a long time, many centuries, for millennia, and it would continue well into the early modern Ottoman period, what we see is that an economic system that was predominantly reliant on mixed farming, and this involved, of course, a lot of division of labor. So you see many tribes, for example, mentioned in one part of the cadastres as specializing in livestock raising, and also the same tribe in another location specialized in the cultivation of crops.

And there is a possibility that those tribes, even though it's not explicitly mentioned in the cadastres, there is a likelihood that this particular tribe was coordinating and its members were in coordination with each other to survive the uncertainties of the ecosystem in which we find ourselves. Why don't we divide our labors? So this segment of the tribe would specialize in one subsistence strategy, say it would exploit the grasslands around us. say it would exploit the grasslands around us. And this one segment of the tribe would specialize in the upkeep of irrigation works and the cultivation of crops.

And maybe we can hire our neighbors who are just dedicated buffalo herders who spent most of their lives in wetlands. And so you're painting a picture of something that really challenges some of the terms that even some of the environmental historiography of the Ottoman Empire uses. There's this presentation of a binary between nomads and cultivators in the Middle East that's a trope that just appears in the historiography. And even though some scholars may point out that it's a dialectic and there's a continuum, really Iraq is the place where that entire framework starts to

break down because the same community is specializing in both agriculture and pastoralism precisely in order to manage the uncertainties. So to put them in one category or another would be to imply that these are mutually exclusive activities or specializations. And, you know, mixed farming is a great example of how that's not the case. It's a long-standing problem in Ottoman economic history. There have been attempts, and I think it's worth trying to try to see how much of the Ottoman economy was reliant on arable production, namely grain cultivation, and how much of the Ottoman economy was reliant on arable production, namely grain cultivation, and what part of the Ottoman economy was reliant on livestock herding. And there have been attempts, like Omar Lutfi Barkan, one of the founding fathers of what we

call defterology studies, to study systematically those Ottoman cadastral surveys, he tried to quantify how much there were nomads or mobile pastoralists in each province and each region, and how much were grain cultivators or farmers or settled farmers. And that's a noble effort for him to make, but I find it very difficult. As you say, it's very difficult to separate the two neatly into two groups that you would give them names, because for most cases, at least in this part of the Ottoman Empire and the Tigris-Cifratis Basin, the line between the two was very blurry, and any attempt to quantify how many nomads were in the Ottoman Empire, that's a really tough call. But I would not object to anyone who tries to do it for any reason, as long as they can establish a metric.

The Ottomans are very flexible and pragmatic in terms of their expansion throughout the 16th century and how they incorporate local systems of production. But the situation you're describing sounds more complicated to govern than some of maybe the populations that the Ottoman Empire is inheriting from the Byzantine land system. Certainly, there would have to be some accommodation, but also some modification of the way in which these regions were governed in order to make that easy to manage and tax effectively.

So tell us more about those Ottoman origins there, how they approached this question during the early period of Ottoman rule in Iraq. That's an excellent question. In terms of how the Ottoman Empire and the Ottoman State evolved its conceptions about how to relate to farmers and pastoralists, this is a long-standing question in Ottoman history and long-standing question in world history in general. For the Ottoman state, the general view in the historiography is that the Ottomans emerged as horsemen, reliant entirely on what we

call Turkish nomads, whose origin go back to Central Asia, and at some point, they would transform into a fully settled agrarian empire, because that's how the Ottoman Empire is normally classified in the literature. The Ottoman Empire was an agrarian empire, and that's weird and unusual, because if the Ottomans arrived in Western Anatolia in the late 13th century as nomads and their power relied on the raising and husbandry of horses and sheep, then when did this transition happen? And that's a debate that we are not talking enough about. So one famous answer is offered by Rudy Paul Lindner at the University of Michigan, and he argues that the Ottoman state, because back then it was still one state among others, that the Ottoman states started

to adopt these agrarian biases of the civilizations that it conquered, especially Byzantium early on, and he had a detailed study of the legal codes of how to tax nomads and how to tax agricultural settlements. And in his view, he interpreted the logic behind all these legal codes. For him, it was a coercion policy to force pure nomads to settle and give up sheep herding and start to cultivate the lands. and give up sheep herding and start to cultivate the lands. So this is one opinion that we have in the historiography, that the Ottoman transition from nomadism to agrarianism begun early on in the 14th century from the reign of Orhan. Now, another major answer we have of this,

when this transition happened in the Ottoman state, is offered by the great sociologist in University of Washington, Rashid Qasaba. He wrote The Movable Empire, a wonderful book, and he argues that the transition really happened in the late 17th century. And for him, it was this large-scale settlement efforts that were done in parts of the middle and upper Euphrates region, especially the region around Raqqa in modern Syria. And for him, this marks a turning point. priorities, economic priorities, that the nomads on which they relied on for centuries before the late 17th century were now, were a problem that had to be solved. And the way to do it is just to settle them. And of course, for him, this would continue all the way to the 19th and early 20th century. So that's another answer. So we have one view by Rudi Paul Linder, which is the transition, the agrarian transition happened in the 14th century from Orhan onwards. And then another at the other end of the spectrum, we have, it happened much later in the late 17th century. it's the conquest of Constantinople 1453. And that's when I think Keith Lurie would say,

this is when we can talk about the Ottoman Empire as a settled regional power that no longer ruled from the horseback of the Sultan, but rather it ruled from this major metropolis. And this is when we see the classical institutions of the Ottoman state established. The jury is out. I don't have any strong opinions. And this is the beauty of the field itself, is that we should welcome those theories and engage with them in a respectful manner.

For me, myself, I don't have any, I haven't settled on one opinion, but those are three theories that we can engage with. But Iraq allows us to test this, right? Because Iraq is a place where you have mixed farming, you have not only people who could be identified as either nomads or cultivators, but communities that are doing both at the same time. So understanding how the Ottomans governed Iraq actually tells us about those inclinations and how flexible they were. So have you found that that case, the early period in Iraq speaks to these debates and maybe bring some nuance to some of what you've presented here? Of course. And this is the beauty of studying

this region is that it is understudied relatively compared to other Ottoman provinces, and it allows us to test some of the major themes, to test the canon of Ottoman history that we have, which has been constructed based on the Ottoman experience in the Mediterranean basin, the Mediterranean coastlines. Let's take an overview of how the Ottomans managed this dichotomy between nomadism and settlement, cultivation, and animal husbandry. So with the arrival of the Ottomans in the region, it was very clear that those who specialized in the raising of livestock, especially sheep and cattle and water buffalo,

they were here to stay. And these were so widespread as economic activities that possibly Ottoman officials realized it would be too detrimental for their economic interests and also for their political interests to say, no, that's not how you make a living. The proper way of earning a living is just to settle down and cultivate your fields. Possibly that's the realization Ottoman officials soon came

to. And I say this based on the policies that were followed soon after the Ottoman conquest. So we see some episodic random attempts by the Ottoman state to encourage those who occupied wetlands or those who specialized in grain cultivation to turn those landscapes that were deemed as wastelands like wetlands for example example, and grasslands, to bring them into cultivation. And we know this from the Ottoman law codes that were compiled in the 16th century, especially under Suleyman I and later by Selim II, to create all these incentives for everybody that if you reclaim this derelict canal, then those are the rewards. You get some tax exemptions for a couple of years, and those are the safeties of tenure that we will grant you

if you decide to undertake this reclamation of those canals that have been abandoned for centuries, or to build your own new canal. And also, there are cases of incentives that the Ottoman state created for the destruction of wetlands to drain them and bring them under cultivation. Now, all of those cases are really episodic and random, and I would not call them a systematic policy to impose grain cultivation on a large scale on the region because that was maybe some Ottoman historians probably would say well this

is what the Ottoman state is all about it's all about flexibility and accommodation. But another way to view it is that just Ottoman officials were just being realistic. At certain points, too much investment, too much money, too much effort and to re-engineer the economy of this frontier region, which had its own political problems from Iran and from the desert, it was just too costly for them. The way to go about it is just to dig deeper into the pockets of each sector of the economy and funnel this money into

your treasury. In order to manage this landscape, the Ottoman state adjusted its mechanisms for local rule. Shortly after the arrival of the Ottomans, during the reign of Suleiman, what we see is that aside from these random efforts for reclamation of land, we see also a systematic policy to bring the nomads or the mobile passorals of the region under the fold of the Ottoman state. And the way Suleiman and his successors went about it is to establish something interesting but would sound familiar to historians of the Mediterranean region, which is what we call a herders associations. So those who are familiar with Spanish history

and also with Italian history, there is a long-standing history of state attempts to sponsor and bring under control its animal herding population and what I call social aggregation. So those small and separate groups, you bring them together under one coherent and legible herders association sponsored by the Ottoman state on which you appoint your own officials and with the clear communication channels between you and this herder association in order for you to track and also tax this population more efficiently and more easily every year in a way that was not possible when you let everybody do their own work randomly without any institutional arrangement. And this institutional arrangement was introduced to Iraq during the reign of Suleiman I. And what we see is the

creation by the Ottoman state of about five herders associations. The largest of them, one of them was specialized entirely in sheep herding, and it was called the Ahshamat. An Ahshamat comes from a Persian word called Hashem, which is to tend or to care for, which is to tend or to care for, and by extension, it was meant to tend and care for and raise livestock. So this is one of the biggest and most important herders' associations that the Ottoman state established from the 16th century. The second largest herders' association was specialized and dedicated to the herding of water buffalo. And this, this herders association was called the Jammasat from Jamus, uh, the Arabic and Turkish word, uh, for Buffalo.

And this is a clear evidence from the early years of the Ottoman presence in the lower Tagus Euphrates Basin in Iraq, of how the Ottoman state really reconciled itself to the system, the mixed farming system that we talked about. That, of course, we have our own laws and regulations for those who cultivated the land, but also we want to make peace and collaborate with the livestock herders of the region and the way you do it is the strategy that the Ottomans adopted was the creation of those herders associations which was not an unfamiliar strategy that was pursued in other parts of the

Mediterranean basin and allowed the Ottoman state to socially aggregate this mobile population and make it easier to govern and tax and go after if any problem emerged. These herders associations, how are they themselves governed? Are we talking about a wide degree of local autonomy? Does the local governors in Baghdad or Basra play a role? As an institution, what is the place of central authority? How is this different from having large tribal confederations that you tax collectively? Or is it?

So the way that the Ottoman state brought these herders associations under control in a way that was not possible, these herders associations under control in a way that was not possible, say, in an informal tribal confederation, is by the appointment of its own officials to those associations. And of course, many of those officials could come from within one of those tribes, but also others may not be, right? so i was able to locate and find three officials and probably those titles changed over time so one official that the ottoman state appointed to these associations was what it called in ottoman sources as the ahshamat aghase and the ahshamat of course as we said is the name of one of those herders' association. And for them, the primary point of contact was the Ahshamat al-Ghaseh. And the

Ahshamat al-Ghaseh, of course, is the commander of the Ahshamat, of this tribal confederation. And also, in other contexts, you would find references to the Tububan Beyi, and Chuban of course shepherd, and Beyi, so the leader of the shepherds. Lastly, another point of contact, and that was very important, and very likely, those officials were appointed from Istanbul itself, and these were the judges that the Ottoman state appointed to move around with these mobile populations wherever they went to graze and fatten their sheep and goat. And we know about these judges through their correspondence in the Muhammed Afterlary, and those are the registers of important affairs for some of you who may not know those sources. And so those sources primarily deal with the communication between the Ottoman Central Administration in Istanbul

with all provinces within the Ottoman Empire. Mostly, this correspondence happened between the governors of each province. But believe it or not, some of those correspondences also in the Muhammad Af Tarlari also happened between Istanbul and also the judges who were assigned to follow and accompany those herders association to make sure that there is royal justice among those groups and also to have an eye on them wherever they went. And of course,

this sounds a bit unusual because most Ottoman judges throughout the Ottoman Empire were stationed in major settlements in the Ottoman state. But in a few cases, we are aware of some very mobile judges in the Ottoman state. So a good way to think about it is to compare them, those judges who were assigned to the herders associations, is to compare them, those judges who were assigned to the herders associations, to what Joshua White, your colleague, in his work on the Mediterranean, where he studied what he calls the sea judge. And the sea judge was the Ottoman judge that accompanied the Ottoman fleet on the Mediterranean Sea. It didn't have a fixed place to communicate and run the affairs of a particular

settled group, but it was this sea judge simply traveled wherever the Ottoman fleet, Mediterranean fleet went, wherever it went. Just as it appointed a sea judge who traveled with the Grand Admiral of the Mediterranean Fleet, Istanbul appointed what could be described as a grassland judge, migrating with some of those herders' associations seasonally, and that Ottoman judge would dispense justice wherever those shepherds pastured their flocks and also served as a point of contact between the central government and those mobile groups.

These local measures can actually offer some insight into that old question of when the Ottoman state became an agrarian empire. We can use those herders associations as a way for us to see how the Ottoman states related to them over time and how it related to the system of animal husbandry over time and nomadism and mobile pastoralism. And if we use the Ottoman relationship to its herders associations over time in this particular region, none of the theories that we went over of how when the Ottoman state became agrarian, whether it's in the 14th century or

the 17th century or the 15th century, none of them are applied to this particular region because until well into the 18th century and in fact those herders associations they would not be abolished until the Tanzimat period

which was introduced to Iraq. The conventional date is 1831. So if we approach this question in this way, by looking at how the Ottoman state related to the Herders Associations, which itself established in the early 16th century, and it would not be dissolved until the early 19th century, then it's very difficult to say that there was the Ottoman state in this part of the region was fully agrarian. And of course, this doesn't mean that the Ottoman state had its own agrarian dream and preferences that tried to implement wherever possible, right? So we should not use the case of Iraq just to say to those who adopted the agrarian model

in other parts of the empire to say it's wrong. That's not the case. The Ottoman Empire probably in an ideal situation, its preference was to rule a settled population that was engaged in the cultivation of crops because it's per unit area that was more profitable, generated more money, and this kind of population was easier to control and rule over. So whatever conclusions we derive from the experience of this part of the Ottoman Empire

and the lower Tagus-Ufratis Basin, especially in Iraq, of course it challenges these, it doesn't in Iraq, of course, it challenges these. It doesn't challenge them. It just gives us some qualifications. It says, okay, yes, that's right. The Ottoman state was agrarian. That was its primary preference in an ideal world. But the case of Iraq tells us that there were major qualifications.

So Faisal, this is very fascinating. And our listeners are going to be really looking forward to the second part of this story, either in your book or in a subsequent conversation. But can you give us a sense of like, what is the time period during which this system prevailed or worked? Or maybe what is the turning point in the history of Ottoman Iraq where we start to see it transform? Just a preview.

So this system prevailed more or less throughout the 16th and 17th centuries. Now, there was a setback during the Sabavid conquest of the region during the reign of Shah Abbas I, but it didn't last too long. So the Ottoman system of organizing land use in Iraq or the lower Tigris Basin more or less remained, the broad contours of the system remained the same throughout the major ecological and political disaster that begins to unfold from the late 1680s. And that's when the channel of the Euphrates, a large chunk of it, about 100 miles in length, would shift its course eastward. With the ecological transformation of the region, we see also a political reconfiguration to which the Ottoman state had to adapt. And of course, this transformation happened at a critical moment in Ottoman history, when the Ottoman state was fighting a prolonged war with the Holy League in the West that curtailed any effort and initiative by the Ottoman state was fighting a prolonged war with the Holy League in the West that curtailed any

effort and initiative by the Ottoman state to bring the region and its rivers under normalcy and control the same way it was. So in many ways, from the late 17th century, we see Iraq or this part of the drainage basin really, a while was detached from the Ottoman imperial orbit and was just chaos and death and destruction and there was very little that the Ottoman state could do and to restore Ottoman authority in the region and to restore all these institutions that were designed for the efficient exploitation of the region, those heritage associations and the management of all these canals and those settlements and the exploitation of the rivers for navigation, all of those systems were impossible to restore

without just coming up with an entirely new way of governing the region. to restore without just coming up with an entirely new way of governing the region. And there were so many governors that the Ottoman state assigned on Iraq from 1689, and just one governor after another. And some of them are more successful than others. But for a permanent or a durable settlement of the crisis would not come until 1704, when it would appoint a veteran statesman called Hassan Pasha. He was born in Greece to a Georgian officer who would finally be assigned as governor of Baghdad in 1704. And from then, we see a really a new era in the history of the region.

So in many ways we can divide the history of the region before the late 17th century and after the 17th century. Gradually this governor, like many other parts of the Ottoman state in later decades, would establish his own household that mirrored the household of the Ottoman Sultan in Istanbul, in which he was educated himself. So he was a product of the palace school and the Topkapi Palace. So he was very familiar with how to raise a disciplined and loyal bureaucracy and also army that was loyal more to himself and less to Ottoman authorities in Istanbul. And gradually over time, what we see is the establishment of a new center of power. So the center of power in the Tigris and Euphrates, the people who called the shots in terms what to ship and what to cultivate

and what animals to raise and who collects the taxes. So all these uses related to the management of the Tigris and Euphrates were now gradually, those powers moved and shifted to Baghdad and away from Istanbul. So for example, the Ottoman imperial fleet that we didn't talk about was overtaken by the Pashalik of Baghdad. So the commander of the fleet was appointed by the household of the Pashalik of Baghdad.

And so many other things. So most of the institutions were taken over by this man and his household and successors. There's lots more to discuss, but we'll leave it at that for now. That was Faisal Hussain. His book, Rivers of the Sultan, is available now from Oxford University Press. You can find a bibliography and more information about that book on our website,

ottomanhistorypodcast.com. I'm Chris Grayton. Thanks for listening.