Nature and Empire in Ottoman Egypt: An Environmental History. Studies in Environment and History. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011.
Winner
of the
2012 Gustav Ranis International Book Prize
2011 Roger Owen Book Award
2011 Samuel and Ronnie Heyman Prize
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 Anatolian forest 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.
Watch, listen to, and read interviews with Alan Mikhail about Nature and Empire in Ottoman Egypt.
Reviews
International Journal of Middle East Studies (vol. 44)
An original and compelling environmental history of Egypt’s place in the Ottoman Empire.
Nature and Empire should appeal to a broad scholarly audience in Middle East and environmental history.
One of the first major environmental histories of the Middle East and perhaps the very first on the Ottoman Empire.
A novel and ambitious work.
Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient
This book is a pioneer study.
Through admirable and painstaking research, Mikhail has explored a new and fascinating aspect of Ottoman Egypt, using a timeframe that spans a transitional period, which allowed him to draw comparisons and provide original comments and provocative opinions that will stimulate future debate. This book is highly recommended.
Social History
Nature and Empire is a groundbreaking study. It explores the history of Ottoman Egypt through the prism of environmental history, a field that has so far seen little output in a Middle Eastern context. Through creative use of sources, the book addresses questions social historians of the Ottoman Empire could only fantasize about until now.
Journal of Interdisciplinary History
Mikhail has written an important book that convincingly casts Ottoman Egypt in an entirely new light. His book should be read by every Ottomanist, as well as by environmental historians.
Environmental History
Nature and Empire in Ottoman Egypt is social and political-economic history at its best. It helps that Mikhail is a delightful storyteller. While the book is rigorous and empirically rich, it is also briskly narrated and engaging.
The volume marks a critical intervention in Ottoman historiography and the field of Middle East studies more generally, which has been slow to take up the study of the environment. But Nature and Empire in Ottoman Egypt should be read even more widely by scholars and students alike, for its contributions to political history as well as for challenging how we should understand the nature, function, and erosion of a particular kind of imperial power.
Archives of Natural History
Nature and Empire in Ottoman Egypt is a fine, richly detailed, and provocative book with a compelling central thesis. It should inspire future research both in the model it provides, and in the questions it leaves unanswered. We can only hope that future environmental histories of the Middle East are as good.
Eighteenth-Century Studies
Mikhail has worked through hundreds of court cases—the traditional material of the social historian—and piles of official correspondence, in a herculean effort to find the moments of tension between peasants out on the periphery of Egyptian agrarian life and the demands of an increasingly centralized state. The achievement is impressive and the book deserves to be singled out as a real model of archival history.
Journal of Economic History
The book aims to track the interaction between Egyptian institutions, the conditions of the peasantry in rural Egypt, and environmental factors. This is an ambitious agenda and the book often does an admirable job describing the relationships between institutions, the peasantry, and the environment.
One of the greatest strengths of this book is that it suggests a path forward for future studies of the role of the environment in other regions and time periods of Islamic history.
Middle East Journal
Nature and Empire in Ottoman Egypt: An Environmental History is an impressive work that tackles new issues in an innovative fashion and uses new sources creatively. The book is well written and, for those interested in the subject, a page turner. It is hoped that Mikhail’s approach to this subject matter will elicit further studies in this fruitful area of research.
International Journal of Middle East Studies (vol. 45)
As much as the book is a very good study of the social costs of modern bureaucratic resource management, and as much as it is an excellent study of the biopolitical implications of modern environmental (and environmentalist) discourse, it is also a wonderful extension of the recent writing that has dismantled Westphalian theories of sovereignty and jurisdiction. The book does not shy away from the problem of the environment as a legal and political actor. It turns this problem into the basis of a new trend in legal study broadly defined.
Arab Studies Journal
Mikhail’s use of sources—local Egyptian court records containing detailed information about irrigation works and land surveys as well as documents from the Ottoman archives in Istanbul—is a model for the study of an Ottoman province in conversation with the imperial center.
Agricultural History
Focusing on the long eighteenth century (from 1675 to 1820), Mikhail describes how shifting power relations within the empire—with Egypt becoming virtually independent in the early nineteenth century under Mehmet Ali—influenced the resource flows between the regions and suggests that this led to environmental degradation. Mikhail convincingly describes the dynamic among Egypt, which produced food for much of the empire; the resources that came from elsewhere; and Istanbul at the center of resource distribution networks.
The Arab World Geographer
Mikhail has embarked on an ambitious task, and his success in meeting his objectives is impressive and inspiring. His study is based on extensive support from archival collections in Egypt and Istanbul as well as from a broad range of scholarship in environmental history. The result is a ground-breaking achievement in Ottoman environmental history that also offers significant contributions to studies of colonialism, social issues, and world systems.
This book represents an immense achievement. As a pioneering work of Ottoman environmental history, it sets an excellent example. Mikhail has produced a clear, comprehensive history of the environment in Ottoman Egypt. Even more significantly, the scope of his project and his masterful execution make this book a major contribution to the world of scholarship. Through this work, Mikhail ensures that the field of Ottoman environmental history will not continue to go unnoticed.
Mamlūk Studies Review
This book fills a methodological gap in historical accounts of Egypt and challenges us to consider similar approaches to other periods of history.
British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies
By drawing a vivid picture of the Egyptian countryside and looking at the environment through the eyes of peasants, Mikhail sheds light on various dimensions of the struggles between peasants and the different forms of administration in the context of early modern Egypt.
American Historical Review
Mikhail’s work is an early attempt at viewing Ottoman and Middle Eastern history through the prism of environmental studies. Ottomanists have only begun such projects within the past decade. Mikhail’s approach is very much informed by geographically minded historians such as J. R. McNeill, an environmental historian of world history, Karl A. Wittfogel, the sociologist who described premodern China as a “hydraulic empire,” and James C. Scott, who argued that non-Western authoritarian modernists were bound to fail because top-down reform could not overcome the challenges of nature itself.
Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies
Mikhail’s book confirms that the history of Egypt in particular, and the Ottoman Empire in general, cannot be written adequately without studying the water and irrigation policies of the Ottoman bureaucracy, considering the importance of irrigation for agriculture, and the role of agriculture in making Egypt the most lucrative province of the Empire.
Nature and Empire in Ottoman Egypt is a well-researched and well-presented work as well as offering an effective critique of nationalist historiographies which deny local dynamics and reciprocal relations between different “centres” and “peripheries” in the Empire, as well as of urban-centred historiographies which emphasize cities’ preponderance in resource allocation. Significantly, Mikhail’s treatment of Egyptian experience reveals that Egyptian peasants preceded Ottoman bureaucrats in initiating the repair and maintenance of irrigation works in the countryside. His findings thus challenge the work of earlier researchers who tended to assume that Ottoman rule was oppressive in rural Egypt in the eighteenth century.
Ankara Üniversitesi Siyasal Bilgiler Fakültesi Dergisi
Nature and Empire in Ottoman Egypt: An Environmental History is an account of the use, control, and management of the irrigation system in pre-modern Egypt, and how it coincided with Egypt’s transformation from a remote Ottoman province loosely connected to the capital into a sovereign state ruled by an autarch. Mikhail’s argument is clear: Egypt’s move away from being a remote province of the Ottoman empire into a strong, centralized, and authoritarian polity controlled by Egyptian bureaucracy transformed the management of environmental resources. This transformation necessitated the abandonment of old ways and habits, caused tension between the local populations and Egyptian bureaucracy; and eliminated the rights of peasants over land and water use.
International Journal of Turkish Studies
In this ambitious study Alan Mikhail is not merely opening a new field of inquiry in historical studies of Egypt, but also advancing a critique of the modem regime, the roots of which he locates in the late decades of the “long” eighteenth century (1675-1820).
Geographical Review
Mikhail has facility with Arabic and Ottoman Turkish and used manuscript repositories in Cairo and Istanbul to add a wealth of archival materials to the socioeconomic discourse about irrigation management in early-modern Egypt.
Jane Hathaway, Ohio State University, author of The Arab Lands under Ottoman Rule, 1516-1800
This book adds an important new dimension to the historiography of Ottoman Egypt. The author makes very intelligent use of Ottoman administrative documents and Muslim court records from a variety of Egyptian locales in order to situate this critical region within the new cutting-edge scholarship on the role of the environment and natural resource management in history.
Richard W. Bulliet, Columbia University
Alan Mikhail deploys an impressive array of environmental history insights. He asks new questions and comes up with startling answers.
Timothy Mitchell, Columbia University
Nature and Empire in Ottoman Egypt offers a history of the Ottoman world like no other. The force of environmental processes, the lived detail of peasant life, and the emergent forms of modern governmental power interact in this highly original account of early modern Egypt.