Under Osman’s Tree: The Ottoman Empire, Egypt, and Environmental History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017.
Winner
of the
2018 M. Fuat Köprülü Book Prize
2017 Choice Outstanding Academic Title Award
Osman, the founder of the Ottoman Empire, had a dream in which a tree sprouted from his navel. As the tree grew, its shade covered the earth; as Osman’s empire grew, it, too, covered the earth. This is the most widely accepted foundation myth of the longest-lasting empire in the history of Islam, and offers a telling clue to its unique legacy. Underlying every aspect of the Ottoman Empire’s epic history—from its founding around 1300 to its end in the twentieth century—is its successful management of natural resources. Under Osman’s Tree analyzes this rich environmental history to understand the most remarkable qualities of the Ottoman Empire—its longevity, politics, economy, and society.
The early modern Middle East was the world’s most crucial zone of connection and interaction. Accordingly, the Ottoman Empire’s many varied environments affected and were affected by global trade, climate, and disease. From down in the mud of Egypt’s canals to up in the treetops of Anatolia, Alan Mikhail tackles major aspects of the Middle East’s environmental history: natural resource management, climate, human and animal labor, energy, water control, disease, and politics. He also points to some of the ways in which the region’s dominant religious tradition, Islam, has understood and related to the natural world. Marrying environmental and Ottoman history, Under Osman’s Tree offers a bold new interpretation of the past five hundred years of Middle Eastern history.
Reviews
American Historical Review
Mikhail here makes a broad, methodological case for environmental history as a way of understanding the early modern Middle East. . . . Under Osman’s Tree is a persuasive plea for the value of understanding empire as ecosystem. Richly informative yet highly readable, Under Osman’s Tree deserves the attention of anyone interested in how one of the world’s most enduring polities lived on its soil and water.
Choice
‘The Ottoman Empire was an ecosystem.’ Thus, historian Mikhail concludes his rich, part socioeconomic, part environmental history of early modern Ottoman Egypt. Filling a hole in the historiography with a breathtaking array of cases, themes, and illustrations, Mikhail offers an ideal pedagogical tool for all levels of university courses. He digs into his analytical tool box and reveals an Egypt deeply integrated into the larger world, both economically and ecologically. From accounts of droughts and bubonic plagues to the aftereffects of volcanic eruptions in Iceland, Mikhail’s contribution opens a new prism through which to study human interactions with nature. Perhaps the most valuable contribution is the author’s charting of the vibrant synthesis of life patterns between peasants, local landowners, and imperial governors and the ebbs and flows of the natural life upon which the Ottoman Empire’s wealthiest province depended. Add to the mix the equally complex (sometimes deadly) relationship Egyptians necessarily had with beasts of burden, rats, and fleas, all sharing the fate of the temperamental seasonal flooding of the Nile, and this book makes for an outstanding addition to any library. Essential.
Metascience
The new emphasis on Ottoman environmental history is most welcome, and. . . Alan Mikhail is perhaps the most prolific contributor to this field. . . . In presenting the early modern Ottoman regime as relatively benign—at least environmentally benign—Alan Mikhail is upsetting a commonly held view of Ottoman rule as singularly destructive and backward looking. Ottomanists will be less surprised, but will nonetheless find that he also sweeps away some of their long-cherished clichés. Notable among these is the ‘centre–periphery’ model, developed when the works of Immanuel Wallerstein were in fashion. . . . Watching the author demolishes such preconceptions is one of the many pleasures of reading this book. In making a notable contribution to environmental history, from Nile water, to mud, to animals, crops, and finally to humans, Professor Mikhail also helps us to understand how the Ottoman Empire worked as a political system. Highly recommended!
Environmental History
Alan Mikhail’s Under Osman’s Tree frames the Ottoman Empire as an ecosystem. By emphasizing the complex relationships between imperial power and nature, Mikhail introduces a dizzying range of human and nonhuman actors, demonstrating how animals, water, silt, microbes, trees, and volcanoes might recast more traditional readings of sultans, bureaucrats, and peasants. . . . To give substance to this holistic vision of the articulations between regional and global scales, Mikhail makes a persuasive case for empirical ballast. While this book is a plea for more cross-pollination between regional and global environmental narratives, it also anticipates the pitfalls inherent in such an endeavor. . . . In short, Mikhail offers another trailblazing contribution to the burgeoning field of Middle Eastern environmental history.
English Historical Review
A valuable contribution to Middle Eastern environmental history. The author is a gifted storyteller, and he spins his sources into a vivid and often colourful portrait of eighteenth-century Egyptian society. . . . Through his rich source-base, moreover, Mikhail masterfully demonstrates the value of a methodological approach to the history of empires that reaches beyond imperial archives and the scope of the central administration. The book’s greatest strengths lie not only in its nuanced depiction of rural life and its critical update of Middle Eastern historiography, but also in its composition. In general, Mikhail’s rigorous methods, crisp organisation and keen observations make Under Osman’s Tree a useful resource for students and scholars in a range of historiographical fields.
Nazariyat: Journal for the History of Islamic Philosophy and Sciences
Mikhail asserts that local knowledge and practice helped Ottoman officials manage the Nile’s waters effectively. . . . This novel approach, which provides an alternative to the dominant center-periphery model, makes Under Osman’s Tree not only a book of environmental history, but also an administrative and socio-economic study of Egypt in the late Ottoman period. . . . His copious use of archival and secondary sources is reflected in the fact that more than one-third of the book consists of notes and bibliography (209-325). Under Osman’s Tree provides new lenses through which one can gain a better and holistic understanding of Egypt in the late Ottoman period. . . . A must-read for students of Ottoman and environmental history.
Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture
This book helps readers to comprehend the details about the relationship between the Ottoman administration, its subjects, and various environments in the early modern period from an environmental history perspective. In so doing, it rebels against the classical historical approach to the Middle East, which has excluded the relationships between people and their environments.
Roger Owen, Harvard University
Certainly the best work ever on Ottoman environmental history. Brings the Middle East into the global picture in as comprehensive a way as can possibly be imagined.
Brett L. Walker, Montana State University
This is an outstanding book, carefully written and timely. Mikhail has brought the tools of environmental history to bear in this fresh telling of Egyptian, Ottoman, and Middle Eastern history. He focuses on the last five hundred years, after Egypt became the crown jewel of the Ottoman Empire, and masterfully embeds his history into the complex ecologies surrounding the Nile River, an enduring source of both life and cruel natural disasters. With thoughtful thematic categories driving his analysis, Mikhail makes an important contribution not just to Middle Eastern history, but to how a new generation of historians must view the relationship between people and the changing face of our planet, particularly during the new uncertainty of the Anthropocene Epoch.
Richard White, Stanford University
Focusing on early modern Egypt, Mikhail puts power and knowledge in the Ottoman Empire in conversation with environmental relations—the movement of water, the accumulation of silt, the distribution of food, the need for wood for ships, the spread of disease, the possession and use of animals as sentient commodities, climatic fluctuations, and fundamental changes in the organization of human and animal labor. The result is a reinterpretation of the Ottoman Empire as an ecosystem that expands the possibilities of environmental history.
Reşat Kasaba, University of Washington
With this rich and accessible study of the relationship between human communities and their natural environment in Ottoman Egypt, Mikhail offers us an original interpretation of Ottoman history. Rarely does a new book make us rethink completely our assumptions about a subject matter we think we know well. Under Osman’s Tree does precisely that, and as such it is a worthy successor to Fernand Braudel’s magisterial classic, The Mediterranean.