History 3514W: Water and Oil: An Environmental History of the Middle East

this volume combines thematic and country-based, multi-disciplinary analysis in order to reconsider half a century of scholarship and to critically examine the defining processes and structures of historical developments from Morocco to Iran and from Turkey to Yemen over the past two centuries. Chapter 1 is Environmental History.

Middle East and North Africa: Climate, Culture, and Conflicts - too hot to handle? The volume offers an account of ideas, historical case studies and current debates on climate change and its consequences from perspectives of eco-theology, archeology, history, geography, political science and technology.

Argues that the Age of Empire was driven by coal, and the Middle East--as an idea--was made by coal. Focusing on the flow of British carbon energy to the Middle East, On Barak excavates the historic nexus between coal and empire to reveal the political and military motives behind what is conventionally seen as a technological innovation. He recounts the carbon-intensive entanglements of Western and non-Western powers and reveals unfamiliar resources--such as Islamic risk-aversion and Gandhian vegetarianism--for a climate justice that relies on more diverse and ethical solutions worldwide.

Provides an overview of the principal economic problems, policies and performances relating to the countries in the Middle East and North Africa region. Topics include Growth and development in comparative perspectives; Labour force and human development; Natural resources, resource curse and trade; Poverty, inequality and social policy; Institutions and transition to democracy; corruption, conflict and refugees.

In the early sixteenth century, a series of military campaigns between the Mediterranean Sea and Persian Gulf brought the entirety of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers under Ottoman control. This book offers a history of this rare political unification of the longest rivers in West Asia and its impact on the Ottoman state, provincial society, and the environment.

Why, for many centuries, was the wheel abandoned in the Middle East in favor of the camel as a means of transport? This richly illustrated study explains this anomaly. Drawing on archaeology, art, technology, anthropology, linguistics, and camel husbandry, Bulliet explores the implications for the region's economic and social development during the Middle Ages and into modern times.

In one of the first ever environmental histories of the Ottoman Empire, Alan Mikhail examines relations between the empire and its most lucrative province of Egypt. Based on both the local records of various towns and villages in rural Egypt and the imperial orders of the Ottoman state, 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. In revealing how Egyptian peasants were able to use their knowledge and experience of local environments to force the hand of the imperial state, Nature and Empire in Ottoman Egypt tells a story of the connections of empire stretching 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.

In this highly original environmental history, Samuel Dolbee sheds new light on borders and state formation by following locusts and revealing how they shaped both the environment and people's imaginations from the late Ottoman Empire to the Second World War. Drawing on a wide range of archival research in multiple languages, Dolbee details environmental, political, and spatial transformations in the region's history by tracing the movements of locusts and their intimate relationship to people in motion, including Arab and Kurdish nomads, Armenian deportees, and Assyrian refugees, as well as states of the region. With locusts and moving people at center stage, surprising continuities and ruptures appear in the Jazira, the borderlands of today's Iraq, Syria, and Turkey. Transcending approaches focused on the collapse of the Ottoman Empire or the creation of nation states, Dolbee provides a new perspective on the modern Middle East grounded in environmental change, state violence, and popular resistance.