Ottoman History Podcast - Environment and Empire in the Ottoman Jazira

Episode Date: May 31, 2023

Samuel Dolbee hosted by Chris Gratien and Reem Bailony | What can we learn about the late Ottoman Empire from the histories of its would-be margins? In this episode, we explore that question in multiple senses through a conversation with longtime Ottoman History Podcast contributor Sam Dolbee about his book "Locusts of Power: Borders, Empire, and Environment in the Modern Middle East." The book studies the dynamic history of the Jazira region, which straddles the modern borders of Turkey, Syria, and Iraq. From the Tanzimat-era reordering of the Ottoman provinces to the fall of the Ottoman Empire and the creation of new nation-states, we discuss how the environment of the Jazira region and its people were both actors and objects in the remaking of the Middle East. Building out from the changing lives of locusts, grasshoppers that intermittently imposed themselves on the Jazira's history by devouring agricultural crops, Dolbee casts light onto communities of nomads and migrants often excluded from the empire's modern history. In the process, he shows how the people of Jazirah both made and resisted new administrative and national borders of the period. « Click for More »

Locusts certainly speak. If by speak we mean they have some sort of impact on the world that we live in. They destroy cotton crops that are being cultivated in the midst of the American Civil War. They do any number of other things that affect politics. But what I want to emphasize alongside that is that people are constantly talking for Locus too. So these are not invisible forces that you need to read the science of today to be able to say anything significant about. It's everywhere. And so once you start looking for these themes of the environment, you realize that you can use a lot of different sources to be able to talk about it. This is the Ottoman History Podcast, and I'm Chris Grayton.

That voice you just heard might be familiar. Over the course of the past decade, Sam Dolby has appeared in dozens of episodes of our program and had a hand in many more in his longtime role as editor-in-chief. He's done all this while completing his first book, entitled Locus of Power, Borders, Empire, and Environment in the Middle East. Locus of Power centers on the locust, a variety of grasshopper that is just one of many creatures which have played an often-ignored role in human history. The book also explores the lives of people often on the margins of Ottoman history,

pastoral nomads, refugees, and survivors of the Armenian Genocide. Fundamentally, it's about the myriad ways in which questions of politics and environment are entangled. Locus of Power narrates the remaking of the Jazeera region of northeast Syria, or if you prefer, southeast Turkey, or if you prefer, northwestern Iraq, beginning in the late Ottoman period, when none of those political boundaries existed. But other sorts of borders and contention over space were already gaining new importance within the context of Ottoman centralization and reform, long before the infamous Sykes-Picot Treaty and the creation of British and French mandates that divided the

Middle East. The book elevates a region that has seldom received treatment from anglophone historians to a lofty place in global environmental history, of which Sam Dolby is a careful student. To put the Jazeera, its people, and its environment at the center of this history, Sam visited so many different archives and libraries. And I was often along for the ride, as were other colleagues, like Reem Baylooni, with whom I traveled to Nashville to visit Sam in fall 2022, where he's now teaching at Vanderbilt University. Oh, suggestion, can we turn off the fridge or is that going to like… It's pretty low.

Shit's not going to melt in like an hour. No. Also, we finished the ice cream, so… It was an interesting sort of reunion between three people who have known each other in many different places and phases, and now find themselves in somewhat similar situations. It's too bad. I would finish the ice cream.

Sam was initially reluctant to make a podcast part of this reunion. He's much more comfortable on the other side of the microphone and the three of us have known each other so long that it felt awkward to have the type of conversation required to make a podcast about an academic book i didn't i wasn't expecting chris your interview voice is very disconcerting you're like all of a sudden i wasn't a different person i wasn't ready for this but you also get riled up about the way i talk when I'm not on the microphone. It's true. It's true. So it's kind of like I'm in a tough position. Either way, yeah. Ideally, we just have you read your own book and then interview yourself.

And you would have saw what I saw and probably, you know, if you were the interviewer. As I told you, while going through the proofs, I read the book out loud to myself while Law & Order was on the TV, muted. And these interesting points that you're pulling out did not occur to me. I would say that, yes, I do feel very nervous being on the other side of the microphone. Very nervous is an overstatement because I also feel very grateful that I'm with friends in a room who have so kindly looked at my work. It's a very strange and humbling experience to hear you talk about the book because your impressions of what are interesting are not necessarily things I intended. And now I hear you placing them in context. I'm thinking,

oh yeah, that is a great idea, even though I didn't intend to put it that way. Like Reem, you said, part of what I was trying to do is examine what's actually going on on the borders and what kind of power can emerge from being on the borders. But Chris is making another point that there are all these important people like Mark Sykes, Mithat Pasha, Javdat Pasha. Zia Gokalp. Zia Gokalp. Who don't appear in their usual role. We typically see these people as being at the center of narratives.

And they're on the edge of this one. They're part of it, but they're occupying kind of different roles. And that's something I think I did that just because I wanted to try and make it interesting. Or to me, it was interesting in the first place. Maybe it's not a deliberate method, but I think that method of narrating is intertwined with the method of how you approach space. The fact that that logic is operative on two levels, right? The narrative and the analytical was pretty cool. All right, Sam, welcome to the podcast. Thanks for coming. Thanks for having me. In your own home. Yes. I'm excited to be having this conversation at the, I would say,

urging of my colleague Reem Baylooney, who's really made this all come together, converging on Nashville here to discuss the book with you. Sam, could you tell us a little bit about how you came to this topic? There are a number of ways to narrate the beginning of any project. And maybe the best way to do it here is to talk about being in the Ottoman archive and going through uncatalogued boxes. These are boxes, of course, that don't have little summaries of what they are. They don't necessarily have much information about where they're from. They're usually just from a particular ministry. In the case of this folder that I opened, it was a map. And it was a map of

the Ottoman Empire in Ottoman Turkish. And it looks strangely familiar to me because it looks like a line almost exactly of the Syrian-Turkish border, which was strange to me because the Syrian-Turkish border is not around during the Ottoman period. And then I realized, once I looked more closely at the map, that it was a map of the proposed route of the Berlin to Baghdad railway. And it crystallized for me this point that a large portion of the border between Turkey and Syria, still today, it was actually drawn in the absence of any other line to divide these connected spaces. It was drawn based on exactly where that railway line went. And it was striking to me when I first realized this. And of course, this isn't a secret,

right? People know about this, people write about this. But this project, the Berlin to Baghdad railway, that was intended to rejuvenate the late Ottoman Empire, it literally served to divide post-Ottoman states. And so in a way, that kind of symbol had me thinking about what are the afterlives of empire? And what are the afterlives of empire in a material way? How are they connected to borders? The other question that it brought up for me is how are people moving in this space? Also, how are other creatures moving in this space? Because the Berlin to Baghdad railway, it's not completed until more than 20 years after the end of the Ottoman Empire.

And there's this huge space in between Nusaybin and where it reaches in Iraq before the end of the Ottoman Empire. And so that got me kind of thinking of that this broader space, this region called the Jezira. Okay, so then what is the Jezira? So the Jezira is a term for the region located between the Tigris and the Euphrates at the foot of the Anatolian plateau. It doesn't have fixed boundaries because this is one of these vague place names that isn't attached to a state. However, if you look at Muslim geographies from a medieval period or even later, the Jazeera is up there on the list of place names that we still know today alongside Egypt, alongside Iraq, alongside Syria.

It's known as a place. It's known as a geography. But by the mid-19th century in the Ottoman Empire, it doesn't exist as a province of its own. However, people in the late 19th century in the Ottoman Empire, it doesn't exist as a province of its own. However, people in the late 19th century are aware of it. They refer to it even as it's not a provincial name. And sometimes on maps, you'll see it kind of jotted in the corner. One of the problems of answering the question of what is the Jazeera is a lot of times when we talk about where our place is, we resort to being like, well, you know, it's this area and the biggest city there is, you know, it's this city and it's hinterland. But this is a region that certainly could be thought of as a hinterland of many cities, but is not defined by that kind of relationship. Yeah, I mean, I probably should have described it in terms of cities as well.

So roughly the region in between Aleppo, Diyarbakir, Baghdad, Mosul, this space in between. What does it look like qualitatively? This is exactly along the line where rainfall allows for you to grow things without irrigation. So it's right on the edge between areas where you can grow things and where you can still grow things, but you need irrigation, you need fertilizers, you need fuel, things like this. So it's a space in between on many levels. It's a space in between in terms of where it is in relation to cities. Environmentally, we can think about it as in between in terms of a division between cultivated areas and uncultivated areas, desert and not desert. And there were in between characters. Yes, there are a number of in between characters. And maybe the one that we can begin with here

is the figure of the locust. There is a particular species of locust that lives in this region. It's known commonly as the Moroccan locust. It emerges in the springtime in March or April. Some years, they have a low population density in response to precipitation, in response to temperature. They're just kind of harmless grasshoppers out there. And then some years, because of variations in all of these factors, climate, population density, precipitation, they become swarms. And within about six weeks, they go from being little hoppers that can only move along the ground by hopping, as the name suggests,

to being able to fly up to great distances. And they call that the gregarious mode. Yeah, it's known as the gregarious mode. That's an interesting term. They're being friendly. They're being friendly and they're consuming great quantities of wheat, in some cases, cotton, all of these crops that the Ottomans are trying

to expand the cultivation of in the Jazeera. Another distinctively in-between aspect of the locusts is that they are particularly powerful in these zones where cultivation is expanding. In Algeria, this species of locust is even called Aljerada al-Adani, the human locust because they're seen as such a tight connection between expansion of human cultivation into kind of spaces that are used by pastoralists and the appearance of the locust. So in some ways, if you want to think of it from a locust's eye view, which is problematic because locusts have eyes on either sides of their heads. So they don't actually have a very smooth view of things. It would be headache inducing for you to

imagine this. But if you could, what you would see is the Ottomans, the Ottoman state, Ottoman landholders, as they're expanding cultivation into the Jazeera, they are offering locusts a wonderful buffet of cereals. You want some wheat, they can get some wheat. You want some barley, there's barley too. They eat the barley less, but there's a way that they're occupying this in between space as well. specifically because of the way the locust lives and because of the spaces it lives in people really have a hard time talking about this creature without anthropomorphizing it

and one of the most interesting dimensions of that for me was the fact that the locusts also use anthropogenic landscape features like the tells, these mounds in the Jezero region as part of their ecosystem. You want to tell us a little bit about that? people is a really important one for me. And I should note that starting off this conversation by talking about the biology of the locust and like its scientific name and the species, it's not exactly what I want to do because I don't want to give the sense that, you know, we just understand the science of today and that's how we explain history. All you need to know is locust biology and it helps you understand everything. All of that stuff is very important, yes. I am not dismissing that by any means, but what became clear to me in the course of the research was that locusts were popping up in all these places I didn't expect to see them. They are used again and again as a way of describing mobile human beings. So people in cities who

see nomads coming toward them and perhaps destroying crops by feeding their animals on them, they refer to them as locusts. A figure like Zia Gokalp himself compares the Shammar nomadic group to locusts. And this comes up again and again. Armenian deportees compare themselves to locusts by saying, these creatures who are being crushed by the side of the street, that's us. That's what's happening to us too. So there's this kind of mix of it being a symbol of either potence or impotence, but there's something about moving. There's something about being on the edge. There's something maybe about destructiveness that again and again prompts people to think about how you can see human actions and locus. In terms of the landscape that you mentioned,

part of what's appealing to the Ottomans about this space in the late 19th century is that they look at it and they see these humble hills all across the landscape and they're called Tal. humble hills all across the landscape and they're called tal. And these of course are not hills of natural geological processes, but rather remains of ancient settlements in this space. So the Ottomans and also Europeans who are increasingly coming here to dig up these places for archeological remains, they see them and they say, this looks like a desert now, but it used to be something else. And so that prompts them to blame. Oftentimes Europeans see it as Ottoman ineffectiveness as to why this environment is the way it is. Ottomans are perhaps blaming pastoralists, at least certain Ottomans are doing that.

So these hills are prompting people to dream about how to make this space something else. At the same time, locusts are actually using these very same hills to do something very different, which is lay eggs. So it turns out that these hills are preferred by locusts for laying their eggs, which they do before they die in the spring. And then these eggs remain in the ground for about 10 and a half months until they hatch the following year. But this is another image that just really stuck with me. The elevations that for people are evidence that we should cultivate this land are actually the material way that the locusts are expanding into that very same cultivated land. You know, it's just a way that you can see these inextricable connections, connections that are both cultural and material. Yeah, and it gives us the impression that at the outset of, let's say, the Tanzimat period, with which the story kind of begins in the book, that the locusts have the higher ground,

that they are perceived as almost in control of the nature of the Jezira. And of course, for many of of these observers this is bad because humans should be the default um stewards of that landscape but we have a starting point in which the locusts are very present in human life yeah and i mean this is the case with so many creatures that we call pests right i think part of what makes it difficult to talk about them is that they're either objects of mundane annoyance or the possibility of apocalypse, right? It's either the mosquito that's annoying you, or it's a swarm of locusts that's blocking out the sun and threatening to destroy your harvest. And in so many

representations of pests, we see them kind of caught between this. In literature, so often they appear as a plot device. We could even say this in the Bible if we wanted to, right? They appear as a sign for something else. The other thing that is maybe relevant is while locusts clearly have power in this space, the Ottomans don't necessarily see it that way. They see what destruction is happening. But for them, it's always a question of forcing people to settle or encouraging people to settle or coaxing them into settlement. They don't think we need to lock these locusts down and then we can expand. And there's actually a lot of logic to that, right? We know that if land is plowed, locust eggs are dislodged and destroyed very quickly. And so around this very same time in the United States, for people who are fans of Little House on the Prairie, they know this, that locusts devastated cultivation in the United States all the way to the 1870s, and then they disappeared. And they disappeared not because of effective control techniques, but simply because cultivation had expanded so much that they wiped out the possibility of any locust egg reservoirs.

So can you maybe talk a little bit more about how locusts are like a site for the modernizing projects of the Ottoman state and how those projects intersect with the prerogative of the state to sedentarize mobile populations? And what do those populations look like? Who are they? In this landscape of locusts, it's kind of difficult to have a field of wheat or a field of cotton, right? The locusts come in April. You've just planted the cotton, perhaps. They destroy it. Maybe you plant the cotton again. Maybe the locusts come again. There are cases of this, of cotton being replanted again and again, or cases of the wheat being destroyed, wheat which ripens in the spring. So it makes a lot of sense to use this arid landscape to raise sheep and camels. And so there are large populations of nomadic pastoralists who do this. If locusts come, it's not like they are unaffected, right? Of course, they have to go other places. They have to find other pastures.

Often it creates tension in cultivated areas. So it's not as if there's no impact on them, but in their mobility, they have a little bit more flexibility. You can't move a field of wheat or a field of cotton, right? As the Ottomans are looking at these populations, again, this is the period of the Tanzimat I'm thinking about, 1860s, 1870s. And particularly, they're thinking about how do we manage space in this empire of ours? And we have this shift to the vilayet system of clarifying both administrative structures and clarifying what space they are in control of and clarifying where certain taxes are paid. Nomadic pastoralists who are moving around are a problem for this, right? So specifically

in the Jazeera, they see groups like the Shamar, a large Arabic-speaking tribe. They see them moving between different provinces. If they get in trouble in one province, they go to another. If they want to hide their sheep from one province, they go to another. If they want to collect a tax called khawa on people, maybe they go to one province and then they move into another. So there's a way that they're using these political boundaries against the Ottoman state itself and counting on the lack of coordination between different administrations

to be able to do what they want. So one of the foremost examples of where the Ottomans are trying to fix this is the creation of the district known as Zor. What we now know more commonly as Deir ez-Zor, roughly northeast Syria today, but not only that. And this is a district created with the intention of including nomadic migration in one district. They say the way to fix this is to have a district that extends all across the desert of these separate provinces that divide the desert up, and we can keep them in one province, and then it's much easier to control. That doesn't really happen. There's a huge revolt. I write about this a little bit in the book, in a separate article. But I think what's maybe more important for our purposes here, our conversation, is just this tension between

mobility, the environment of the desert, and these different lines that divide it up. And there's this idea that, yeah, if only we get the lines to perfectly match the desert, then things will be okay. Which of course leaves out the fact that people are moving in response to the lines in addition to moving in response to what the environment is. There's always the caveat that we shouldn't think of nomadic pastoralists as separate from settled people in any way, that we shouldn't think of them as just out in the desert wandering around without any connections. Part of the reason they're moving around so much is because they are so connected to the

merchant networks based in cities. Part of the reason why it ends up being really good to raise sheep and create wool in the 1860s in the Jazeera is because there's a worldwide fiber shortage thanks to the civil war in the United States. The Shamar who are raising wool are doing well, not because they're just by themselves in the desert all the time. They're doing well because they're very savvy business people who know how to make a profit from those environmental and political margins.

That's one of the things that the book does really well is disaggregating people who are kind of often described as just nomads or pastoralists. So could you give us a sense about this shifting human geography of the Jazeera during the last decades of the Ottoman period that you look at? Sure. Yeah, so one point that I try to make in the book is that if you're looking at these spaces from those provincial capital cities, from Aleppo, from Diyarbakir, nomadic pastoralists moving on the edge of that province, they will look marginal to you, perhaps, in the sense of being unimportant. If you are a historian trying to figure out what's going on, and you're relying on the records of people in that situation, those people will look marginal, again, in the sense of being somewhat unimportant. But if you start to put together the accounts of different provinces, reports from Aleppo, from Diyarbakir, from Mosul, from Baghdad, you can start to trace motion all across this

space. And so this is one thing I tried to do methodologically. I think part of what I was trying to do was to show that they're marginal in the literal sense of the word, that they are on the edge. And it was only an edge in the sense of the political divisions of this space. And there is actually a lot more movement going on than just appearing on the edge and stealing some stuff or trampling on some crops. And the same dynamic is going on with locusts, right? If you just read from Aleppo, you'll see the locusts in only certain years. But if you start to read along this broader geography, then you see kind of more intricate connections between the locust swarms and the movements of people. In terms of ethnicity, if we want to talk about that,

right, of course, in the late 19th century, there's not necessarily the same kind of national sense of what it means to be Kurdish or Arab as there is today. These terms are used, absolutely. Urban is the term often used to refer to these Arabic-speaking nomadic groups in the desert. Kurdish Akrad is used too to refer to groups often in the northern part of the Jazeera. But it doesn't mean it in the same way we understand it today. It doesn't even necessarily mean what we might assume it means linguistically. Often these are groups that speak many different languages, Kurdish groups that speak Arabic as well. And there's also a sense that if you're in the desert, you're an Arab.

In the years before World War I, there are these debates in the Ottoman parliament about settlement of nomads. And there's a proposal for the Shamar, which is this Arabic-speaking group, moves all around the Jizya. There's a proposal for them to be settled in Diyarbakir province. And this causes a huge controversy. One of my favorite sources to work with are these Ottoman parliamentary records, because sometimes Ottoman bureaucratic correspondence can be a little dry, a little filled with lots of honorifics, and it's tough to figure out what actually happened. But just to see the transcripts of conversations that are alive is so much fun. And in this case, as I said, there was this controversy that it seemed like at some times it almost broke out.

A fistfight almost broke out, you know, messages of, well, come over here and say that again to my face, these sorts of things. So what were the objections about in this case? There were a few objections. One of them was that where the Shamar were going to be settled was not in fact in Diyarbakir province, but rather in the district of Zor. So this was one objection, a very basic one that where you want to settle these people is not in Diyarbakir and so Diyarbakir should not be getting money for it. But there's a more profound objection from a number of Arab deputies in parliament, which is Zohr is an Arab district. The Shammar are Arabs. And if you're taking them to Diyarbakir,

that is a Kurdish district. You are trying to destroy the district of Zohr by siphoning these people out of it. And you're trying to siphon our resources away from our district. And what was striking to me about that moment is there's a way that suddenly solidarity between urban notables like Hamid Zahrawi, who's from Hama, and Arab nomads is manifested, is instantiated.

Whereas 50 years before, that's not necessarily the way people would be making political claims. They wouldn't be saying, you need to take care of these people out there because they're Arabs, just like I'm an Arab. And so this, of course, gets into post-1908 politics and how people are thinking about their ethnicity and political possibilities differently. But that's what I mean in a sense that in the late 19th century, it's still kind of messy what these terms mean. I was wondering if you could maybe talk a little bit more about the implications of 1908 and the counter-revolution, but also reactions to the centralizing efforts of the CUP in places like Aleppo, for example, and how, you know, attempts to kind of stand up to these new officials being sent to places like Aleppo to kind of tell them how to control the locusts are kind of then used against that.

So the locusts are then used against these centralizing CUP figures by the governor of Aleppo, for example. In the wake of 1908, there's this reformist governor, Hussein Qasim, who's appointed as the governor of Aleppo. And he comes out guns blazing. He says, I want to take care of the peasants in this province. Of course, the large landholding notables of Aleppo, and of course, at this time, Aleppo extends into what is now Turkey as well. So we're talking about Manas, Eintab as well. Landholders from all these places, they do not like what Hussein Qasim is doing. At the same time, there is a very harsh winter.

There's more snow than there has been in a long time in Aleppo, but all across the Jazeera. It means that it's difficult for people to do the work of locust destruction. So it's so cold that they can't plow the ground or collect locust eggs as they usually do. So there become a number of objections from large landholding notables in Aleppo province, not about Hussein Kazim supporting peasants, not about Hussein Kazim doing any number of other things.

They say, this guy's not doing the work of locust control. He's busy with journalism because he wrote these kind of fiery articles decrying the role of notables in these provinces. kind of fiery articles decrying the role of notables in these provinces. And eventually, it leads to Hussein Qasim being recalled from his position. Of course, this is also a totally disingenuous argument being made. I mean, no one was able to stop the locusts because of the snow that year, but they were opportunistically using it as a way to discredit their political rival. It's interesting to know that, knowing what happens just a few years later during the First World War, you already have people making arguments that human politics and activity

profoundly influences the question of locusts. And we're not talking just people locally on the ground who know the desert and have this long-standing relationship with the locusts. And we're not talking just people locally on the ground who know the desert and have this longstanding relationship with the locusts. We're talking about parliamentarians in the Ottoman parliament. We're talking about governors. During the First World War, the locusts play a major role in a story of what is also great human upheaval. Can we talk about the war period? Yeah, so we can talk about the Armenian Genocide, right? So this is something that I didn't know what I was going to do with when I started thinking about this project.

There were times when I just imagined having a dissertation chapter that was just blank because it just seemed like this blank space. I didn't know what sources I could use. I didn't know how I could talk about this in any meaningful way. When I did start finding materials on the genocide, there were a few things I saw. I looked at League of Nations orphanage records, which dealt with Armenian kids who survived the genocide, often by living with nomadic pastoralists in the Jizira. I also started reading on locusts. And so part of what I've tried to do in the book is show that the reason the Armenians were sent to Zor, this space that was once intended to be a site for a nomadic settlement, it was once intended to bring together the desert edges of all these different provinces, right? It had been repurposed

into serving as this place to kill people, this place to send, you know, ostensibly to send people away, to not be a problem anymore. What I'm trying to show is that they were sent there because it was seen as empty, essentially. But of course, it's not. And so these people who are there, of course, they're involved in complicated ways in what happened, both in the violence of the genocide and in the survival of many people. We know about the year of the locusts, 1915, and what role that played in the famine in greater Syria. The species of the locust that's largely striking Mount Lebanon, coastal regions of the eastern Mediterranean, is actually different than the locust that afflicts the Jezira most years.

So another point I want to make is that during World War I, during the genocide, the Jezero was once again hit by locusts, as it had been many years before. And in many ways, the deserved attention that's given to the year of the locusts on these coastal regions overshadows the fact that there was this longer-term pattern of locusts afflicting the Jezero, and that it happened once again during these years. There's always been debate about the causes. We can think about it as random, but there's no way to read a book like yours and to understand human ecology and to just settle on the notion that we can't really know why the locusts come and when and where and how much.

So I think one thing I would say, and you kind of alluded to this in your question, is no natural disaster is natural. Of course, there are factors beyond human control that create earthquakes or locust invasions. I'm not trying to say that. create earthquakes or locust invasions. I'm not trying to say that. But the impact that it has on people and the rest of the environment is inextricably linked to human politics. And so if there are people out there who are suspicious of environmental history, as they should be in some ways, given its environmentally deterministic origins,

this is a point that I would emphasize. In the case of the locusts during World War I that afflicted the Jezira, there is even the suggestion that the Armenian genocide intensified the locust invasions. Why? Well, we know that the extent of land that's cultivated has this close relationship with locust invasions. And we know that there was a great expansion of cultivation in the Jezira and elsewhere in the years leading up to World War I. years leading up to World War I. With not only the extermination of Armenians in southeast Anatolia, but also the conscription of large percentages of the Ottoman population, the death of many by disease or otherwise, this led to a lot of land not being cultivated anymore. And those were ideal spaces for locusts to lay their eggs. Now, I had this supposition that that would be the case. And then, as so often happens, if you're looking through historical records, you eventually find someone who agrees with what you

suspected might be the case. And so, in the midst of World War I, the Germans send a number of locust experts to the empire and the Jazeera specifically to take a look at the locust invasions. And one of them says exactly this, that the extermination of the Armenians and the mass conscription of people for the military has made our work of locust control so much harder. So there are real close links between devastation of the war and the human devastation of the war. They're tied up together. But this isn't just a story about violence, right? Because in some ways, if the Armenian genocide played a role in the return

of the locusts during World War I, the return of the locusts also allowed opportunities for some figures, Armenian figures, to survive. Could you tell us a little bit about the story of the locust control officer, Dumanian? One point I really wanted to emphasize in doing this work was exactly what you said, survival, right? This is a story of horrific suffering, horrific violence, but also perseverance and incredible stories of survival. The first place I started to see this, as I mentioned, were these League of Nations orphanage records, which a number of people have looked at and used. and for me I mean I didn't analyze the photographs really in in the book but they just left such um a mark on how I thought about this stuff like fucking being

able to see the faces of people who had experienced the worst things imaginable. Like, I couldn't shake that. And I went from, you know, not really seriously thinking about just leaving a blank chapter to just seeing these faces and these like four sentence biographies of their lives. And as I mentioned, many of them ended up surviving with nomadic pastoralists, groups like the Shamar or Anaza. And when I say that they survived with them, I don't mean this in some romantic notion of coexistence, because a lot of these situations were really grim. There were also situations where people felt like they were loved and genuinely part of families. And in some cases, people stayed. There's also a very gendered story to be told here about women who were forced into marriage and stayed because they wanted to stay

with their kids or they just couldn't imagine a way to escape. Another way we see survival, as you mentioned, was this locust officer, Dumanion. And he has this unpublished memoir, which our colleague Hachig Muradian shared with me. And he tells the story of growing up around Adana, being trained as an agricultural officer in the empire, being deported with his family to Aleppo. And he manages to, through some connections and through his agricultural training, become a locust control officer in the Jezira in the midst of the genocide. And so something I had also been puzzling over were these locust reports written by the Germans. I mean, they acknowledged the fact that, you know, the genocide on a macro level had affected the locust swarms, but it was so surreal to be reading

these descriptions of locust swarms in a space where people are being killed and killed and killed. And then here was this Armenian guy in his memoir who was in this space and he was charged with killing locusts. And he was really proud of the locusts he killed, right? He was outfitted with a number of substances that he used and described how the wheat in a particular district was all protected thanks to the effort of him and his men. But there was also a grim side to this, which is that he saw those things that were left out of so many other reports. And in some cases, he would even encounter Armenian deportees. And when he was around other Ottoman officials, he couldn't say anything or help them.

Ottoman officials, he couldn't say anything or help them. But in a few cases, he describes, you know, once he got out of earshot of his colleagues, he was able to tell them that he was Armenian and that he knew how to get them somewhere safe. And he describes a few cases where this happens. So this is a really stunning story in many ways. This person who is targeted for extermination is surviving by exterminating locusts. So I guess a follow-up question I wanted to ask was about the World War I period and what happens after World War I and the ambiguity of the borders in this very same region. How did the British and the French, who of course end up having mandates over the Jazeera, different parts of the Jazeera, how do they then interpret the either characters or people, the characters being here, the locusts in the jizya.

So one of the big arguments of the book is to suggest that borders matter more during the late Ottoman period and in some ways less in the post-Ottoman period than we typically think. And I think this is a kind of received narrative that is less something that someone individually is saying than kind of a product of the scholarly division of labor of how we tell these stories. You're a late Ottomanist or you study the post-Ottoman period. When we teach surveys, we talk about Sykes-Picot and a shift from fluid Ottoman space to rigid post-Ottoman space. And so one of the things I was really struck by is not only all these points I already mentioned about constantly talking about borders in the Ottoman period, but even as late as 1917 and 1918, there are proposals discussed in the Ottoman parliament and at high levels of the bureaucracy about, well, this is how we should actually draw these borders. So in the midst of World War I, in the midst of the bureaucracy about, well, this is how we should actually draw these borders.

So in the midst of World War I, in the midst of the genocide, there are reports being drawn up about these spaces and talking about how, again, if we really get these lines right, it's gonna be okay. So what I'm trying to suggest in emphasizing these points in part is there are absolutely new things about the British and the French and the Republic of Turkey in this space in the post-Ottoman period. But in some ways, this is how life has been in the Jezero for a while. New borders. There aren't fences. You can just walk across any of these borders if you want. There aren't widespread passports.

So there's still a lot of mobility in this space. And it's not new to the people in this space. It's not new to the Shomar to be on an ecological edge or a political edge. They have been dealing with these kinds of dynamics for decades. They haven't been hidden from state authorities. When French officers say that it's the first time that these tribes have ever interacted with state officials, it's not true. They've been doing it for decades with the Ottomans. Right. But yeah, conveniently, the Republic of Turkey can say, well, these locusts are coming from Syria, right? Or they're coming from Iraq.

CB Right. And so similarly, there are these arguments about where locusts are coming from. And we didn't talk about this yet in this conversation, but these are the same arguments that are happening in the Ottoman period too. And these same things are happening in the post-Ottoman period. This is a broadly connected ecology. Locusts live in all these places. And almost every year in the 1920s, there are these fights. And sometimes it's kind of surreal. There are these discussions of, well, where were the locusts born? Where did they cross the border? So there is a way even that the kind of language that's being applied to humans and state relationships to humans is also kind of being applied to these locusts. I love that in that last chapter of the

book, the locusts are still so present as they are in the earlier chapters, given that this is also a period of humans continuing to move in the Jazeera now with totally different border regimes, totally different states than prior. And so the continued struggle with locusts as these pests, in quotation marks, overlaps with continued efforts and challenges of managing populations from the state perspective in a region where people have always moved and where it's very normal. Right. So in the post-Ottoman period, there's still continued motion. There are still calls to use the Jazeera as a solution to political problems by settling refugees there, right?

In the 1860s, you see Chechens being resettled in Ras Al Ayn. In the 1920s and 1930s, you see Armenians and Kurds and Assyrians being resettled in the Syrian portion of the Jizyirah specifically. Seda Al Tug describes this as a microcosm in reverse of Turkish nationalism. You have all of the others of the Republic of Turkey ending up in the Jazeera across the border. And this happens at the same time as there are new methods for handling locusts. I said before that the arguments are in some ways the same,

but what's new are chemical insecticides, mostly arsenic compounds that are used all around the world in the 1920s and 1930s, kind of an outgrowth of using chemical weapons against humans during World War I. And they're more effective than many of these other techniques that have been used. I didn't mention this, but one of the previous techniques that's used against locusts, in addition to something simple like plowing the ground, is a belief that starlings can be attracted by a Sufi-blessed holy water. And you hang this up in a mosque and it attracts these starlings. By the 1920s and 1930s, there's a new magic water in town, right? It's these chemical insecticides that can be sprayed everywhere. And so locusts are still a part of all of these deliberations, but they're

also receding. So by the early 1930s, you see people really imagining an end to locusts grip on this space. And they do that because of the effectiveness of these chemical insecticides. And they also do this because the kind of luck of the cycles of loc chemical insecticides. And they also do this because the kind of luck of the cycles of locusts that there were just a few down years at the end of the 1930s. They come back in the 1940s again, and they come back a few times in the 1950s. But they really recede by that point from being a huge problem for cultivation. And I see that it's connected to this broader expansion of cultivation that happens in the Jazeera by then. LS You are able to have so many different actors

speak on one topic. And in particular, what's interesting here is that you're giving us the perspective not only of the statesmen or officials who are introducing chemical pesticides in the Jazeera, but also of the people who are being affected by chemical pesticides and what they're thinking and how they feel about it. CB So one of the things about these chemical insecticides is it's really clear to groups like the Shamar what they mean for them, because they see it being a war on their pastures. These sprays, they're assured by various experts that they're safe for cattle or sheep to consume. And according to some laboratory calculations, that's true. But as we know from the wonderful work of many people, but the book

that comes to mind for me is Linda Nash's Inescapable Ecologies. Once these substances are out there in the world, it's really tough to use our laboratory calculations to understand what will happen. And so there are a number of cases where the nomads' flocks are harmed by these insecticides. And this is an endpoint on a theme that I see throughout this history and that I try to trace during the book, which is that these people who have been compared to pests for so long for the way that they're on the outside and the way that they're destructive, they are falling victim to the substances that are directed at the locus to whom they were compared to for so long. And so there's a way that this metaphor of people as locus, it becomes bodily, it becomes real. And so these

realms of material and metaphorical are kind of blurred at that point. And you end on an interesting note with regard to that, saying that there is a change in the relationship between states and the people of the Jazeera, particularly the mobile communities that are at the center of your narrative, in that by the end, we're talking about citizens, but in the sense that they've been domesticated by national regimes. but in the sense that they've been domesticated by national regimes. And so we get to the point where a new world is imagined once that, I don't know what we could call it, enclosure of them has taken place. Yeah, I think that's what I've tried to convey.

And my thinking on it was that, especially when I was reading in graduate school and after, there were so many accounts of the emergence of these post-Ottoman nations. And so often, they were kind of discursively oriented about how are people describing themselves as Syrian or Iraqi or Turkish. And these are really important arguments. And what I want to suggest alongside them is what if these nations emerge from clouds of chemical insecticides that are allowing for new kinds of state control over populations in this space, that are allowing the Jazeera to no longer be this zone of ambiguity where you could disappear, you could be killed, you could

survive, you could do any number of other things. That margin, it's not all the way gone, right? We know that there are still tons of smuggling networks that are going on through the 20th century into today across the Jazeera. But that margin has gotten smaller. And that's one of the longer term processes that I wanted to outline. And to make that point, by attending to the border itself in a material way, what does the border of this nation imagined or otherwise actually look like? And what can that tell us? otherwise actually look like? And what can that tell us? For me, it's interesting that the sort of the post-pesticides Jezira is dystopian in light of what comes before, which is the inverse of the old narratives about the desert that have been critiqued by environmental historiography, which is that the desert is a fallen land that is dystopian and that must be restored. In fact, is a fallen land that is dystopian and that must be restored. In fact, we see the opposite argument taking place. The fact that the Jezero becomes the most agriculturally productive part of Syria in the 20th century. That's dystopian. That wouldn't normally be considered dystopian.

Right. But there is a way that this transformation that people have been calling for for so long, it requires a lot of input. So it's precarious in ways. It requires irrigation and fuel and insecticides and any number of other things to make the desert bloom, right? I know throughout the time of working on this project that one thing that has continually sustained your energy is finding an incredible story that draws you in in some way. Your favorites are not always the ones that prove what you already wanted to prove, but the ones that you just weren't expecting at all. But the one that stood out for me over the years was the example of a moment in suddenly camels emerge as these, I don't, I wouldn't even say protagonists, but just characters with emotions and this energy that is very rare in history writing when it comes to animals. Writing a book is a strange experience

because it's a record of your ideas over the previous decade and can sometimes be hard to know what's actually interesting and what I've just gotten sick of. I've also tried to include things that I just think are strange or funny. I think I'm a big proponent of this for people out there writing dissertations or books. You should make your argument, but you should also keep some stuff in there just for you. The story that you mentioned is not in there just for me, but it was this detail that was just so bizarre and arresting and intimate in a way that I couldn't have expected at all. And so it's a story about a conflict between the Mili, a Kurdish tribe with a Hamidiyya brigade led by Ibrahim Pasha. And in 1901, all through the 1890s really, there's these tensions between the Shamar and the Mili. And provincial borders are at the center of it. Are the Shamar in Zor? Are they crossing over into Diyarbakir? Is Ibrahim Pasha

doing the same thing? And at some point in 1901, it escalates so much that there's finally this battle that people have been worried is going to happen for a long time. And Ibrahim Pasha's forces strike the Shammar at a time when they're at their most vulnerable. This is according to a number of accounts that are written about this battle, and I'll explain why that is interesting in a second. But they strike at a time when they're most vulnerable, which is when they're unpacking their gear from the camels. And so part of the story is that estimates of somewhere around 100 women and children of the Shamar are killed due to a stampede of camels caused by Ibrahim Pasha firing and attacking the Shamar. There's some cruel irony there that this group that is mobile because of camels, they make a place on the edge because of camels,

they meet their end because of camels too. And in the wake of this horrific episode, the Shamar disperse. They try to escape this attack. Ibrahim Pasha is able to capture a number of young camels from the Shamar herds. And then several days later, the mother camels that the Shamar have held on to, they join Ibrahim Pasha as well. They have escaped from the Shamar to find their young camel offspring. And to me, that's where I start to see some real excitement with environmental history, is that there are logics that human politics can't necessarily make sense of. These logics are not always contained by our human stories of places. The other detail about this story is that we know about it in part because

in the wake of the fight, the Ottomans did a number of interrogations of people who were at the battle, and they weren't able to depose any Shammar, if I remember correctly. The people they were able to interrogate about this battle were all Christian merchants from Mardin who were moving along with the Shammar. There are just dozens of testimonies from these Christian blacksmiths and dry goods sellers and butchers even. And this too is a mark of the kind of connected histories that we have here, that this divide between city and pastoralist or Christian and Muslim or any number of other ones that you want to have. In episodes like this, it's really clear that they don't really make sense for thinking about these questions. And

in fact, the reason why we know anything about any of this is because those divisions don't make sense. I should say that it's an excellently written book. And as somebody who doesn't do environmental history, I think it offers a really great example of how the environment is not just a passive receiver of history, but actively shapes history and contributes to the events that we tend to center in our historical narratives. we tend to center in our historical narratives. There's a chronicle-like dimension of the book, even though it's the opposite of a chronicle in terms of the types of analysis it's pursuing, which is very cool. I don't read a lot of books like this. It's hard to describe what I mean.

You just got to read the book. Thank you. Thank you, Sam. It was a pleasure it's really it's really surreal to have this conversation oh this is super surreal like it's like the book might actually be real yeah yeah exciting times so happy to have this moment even though life took us in different directions than we would have imagined in 2007 or eight or whatever,

whatever the hell we were in grad school. It's a, it's profound. Well, thank you. Um, I'm, I'm happy that you came and visited.

Um, I'm happy that we did this interview and I'm also happy that I won't be in a room with you two while you're both reading my proofs for a while, for a while until the next time until next so nerve-wracking but yeah thank you both