Bulletin of the School of Oriental and

African Studies
http://journals.cambridge.org/BSO

Additional services for Bulletin

of the School of
Oriental and African Studies:

Email alerts: Click here

Subscriptions: Click here
Commercial reprints: Click here
Terms of use : Click here

Mikhail: Nature and Empire in Ottoman Egypt: An

Environmental History. (Studies in Environment
and History.) xxv, 347 pp. Cambridge and New
York: Cambridge University Press, 2011. 55. ISBN
978 1 107 00976 2.

Seluk Dursun

Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies / Volume 75 / Issue 03 / October 2012, pp
576 - 578
DOI: 10.1017/S0041977X12000705, Published online: 23 October 2012

Link to this article: http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S0041977X12000705

How to cite this article:

Seluk Dursun (2012). Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, 75, pp
576-578 doi:10.1017/S0041977X12000705

Request Permissions : Click here

Downloaded from http://journals.cambridge.org/BSO, IP address: 212.175.32.131 on 04 Nov 2015

576 REVIEWS

whole, presents a welcome opportunity to inject a story about production and indus-
try into a world-systems approach to early modern Egyptian history, and to extend
Hannas previously demonstrated commitment to history from below to a different
and even more marginal social category. While this might sound like a relatively
modest and straightforward project, Hanna sets the stakes of her findings quite
high when she explains that she intends to pursue a more socio-economically
grounded approach to the controversial agenda espoused by Peter Gran in Islamic
Roots of Capitalism (p. 30). It is the weight of this element of Hannas project
that reminds us of the relative dearth of empirical work since Raymonds magnum
opus. Ultimately, then, this thought-provoking study stands as a galvanizing remind-
er to scholars that the urban fabric of early modern Egypt is terrifically complex
although it remains so poorly understood.

Zoe Griffith
Brown University

ALAN MIKHAIL:
Nature and Empire in Ottoman Egypt: An Environmental History.
(Studies in Environment and History.) xxv, 347 pp. Cambridge and
New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011. 55. ISBN 978 1 107
00976 2.
doi:10.1017/S0041977X12000705

What do water, timber, plague, animals, wind, grain, and microbes have in common
in the long eighteenth century of Ottoman Egypt? In this book Alan Mikhail dis-
sects the body environmental into its components and analyses them in detail to
reach a general picture of a social and environmental (ecological) history of water
use and irrigation in the Egyptian countryside from 1675 to 1820. Starting with
water and irrigation, he then looks into forestry, agriculture, transportation, diseases
and the like to uncover the largely hidden and unnoticed environmental history of
Egypt, one of the most productive provinces of the Ottoman Empire.
The book is divided into six chapters which discuss: water usage, and repair and
maintenance of irrigation works in the Egyptian countryside; cultivation and trans-
portation of food; consumption of wood for repairs and construction; organization of
animal and human labour for large-scale public works and reclamation projects; the
effects of plague on humans; and finally the construction of the Ashrafiyya (or
Mahmudiyya) Canal.
Ottoman historiography has for a long time neglected the environmental and eco-
logical history of the Empire. However, Mikhails book confirms that the history of
Egypt in particular, and the Ottoman Empire in general, cannot be written ade-
quately without studying the water and irrigation policies of the Ottoman bureauc-
racy, considering the importance of irrigation for agriculture, and the role of
agriculture in making Egypt the most lucrative province of the Empire. These pol-
icies were initially based on Egyptian peasants experience with and knowledge of
irrigation as well as their management of irrigation works. However, as the author
argues, this development, a kind of localism per se, began to change at the end
of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries and transformed
into a radically centralized and authoritarian regime of environmental resource
management under the administration of Mehmed Ali. When the Ottoman system
of natural resource balance diminished during this period, water, labour,
 REVIEWS 577

environmental resources, local control over rural irrigation, and ultimately Egyptian
peasants biological lives were taken over as never before by a despotic form of
bureaucratic government (p. 4). Mikhail displays this transformation by telling a
lively story of labour and plague during the reconstruction of the Mahmudiyya
Canal, between the Nile and Alexandria, which symbolizes the end of Egypt
being the most productive province of the Ottoman Empire.
Large-scale irrigation repair projects, such as the Mahmudiyya Canal in the early
nineteenth century, marked the beginning of a new conceptualization of population
and society in Egypt, based largely on the modern state logic developed after the
Ottoman bureaucracys envisaging the population as a wealth-producing source,
but also as a social and political problem that had to be managed, enumerated,
employed, acted upon, and instrumentalized (p. 185). For example, in his discus-
sion of disease and labour, Mikhail touches upon the importance of population num-
bers for the Ottoman bureaucracy, which was also binding for other parts of the
empire in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. On this point I agree
with the author because my experience with forestry and population policies of
the nineteenth century confirms that the Ottoman state came to reckon with the
population as a source of wealth during this period and, accordingly, took great
pains to protect and procreate it.
Mikhails exploration of the localism-turned-to-centralized-bureaucratic-system
trajectory is extremely useful because it offers insights into the difficult problem
of Ottoman modern statemaking in the nineteenth century. His concept of coordi-
nated localism for resource allocation provides a fruitful ground for discussing
imperial governance of natural resources, which established a system of balance
in irrigation schemes and other related phenomena. The authors presentation of
the story reminds us of another shift from the traditional moral economy and com-
mon property regime, in this case Egyptian peasants, to a modern and rational
monopoly of administering natural resources by the modern, authoritarian and
bureaucratic state. According to the author, the environmental history of
Ottoman Egypt that ended with the Mahmudiyya was at its heart a history of
struggle between Egyptian peasants and various forms of Ottoman administration
over the control of natural resources (p. 293).
Drawing examples from a wide selection of Ottoman and Egyptian archival
documents and provincial court records/testimonials, where precedent, rather than
shara law was the prime mover behind judicial decisions, 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 pre-
ponderance in resource allocation. Significantly, Mikhails treatment of Egyptian
experience reveals that Egyptian peasants preceeded Ottoman bureaucrats in initiat-
ing 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.
In conclusion, Nature and Empire in Ottoman Egypt is without doubt an impor-
tant contribution to Ottoman and Middle Eastern historiography which supplements
our knowledge of the period as well as contributing to the history of the natural
resource management systems of early modern states and societies. In this context,
Mikhails findings have important consequences for the broader domain of growing
revision to traditional Ottoman historiography. Finally, this book should be
required reading for any undergraduate and graduate course on Ottoman and
Egyptian history as it will broaden the perspective of students on how an early
578 REVIEWS

modern state dealt with major ecological problems concerning natural resource
management.

Seluk Dursun
Middle East Technical University

THOMAS KUEHN:
Empire, Islam, and Politics of Difference: Ottoman Rule in Yemen,
18491919.
(The Ottoman Empire and Its Heritage.) xviii, 292 pp. Leiden and
Boston: Brill, 2011. E121. ISBN 978 90 04 21131 5.
doi:10.1017/S0041977X12000717

In his challenging new book, Thomas Kuehn studies the Ottoman administration of
Yemen (18721919) for the purposes of both engaging, for comparative effect,
other research on Ottoman governance of the periphery and expanding the scho-
larship on modern imperialism. What proves unique to Kuehns story is that factors
of Ottoman imperial rule as opposed to Ottoman imperialism are best understood
as the product of some administrators attempts to impose au-courant concepts of
social (civilizational) hierarchy a politics of difference on Yemen. In this
respect, the author constructs a rich history of the concepts and practices of
Ottoman imperial rule [reflecting] . . . the disagreement among . . . bureaucrats as
to whether there was [a need for] . . . an Ottoman colonialism of Yemen. He
does this by closely reading government reports, provincial gazettes and other
forms of colonial knowledge, all extensions of administrative practices which,
under the banner of Ottomanism . . . [created a] hybrid form of imperial rule
unique to Ottoman Yemen (p. 2).
By inspecting what Kuehn calls a hybrid form of government colonial or not
the reader is rewarded with an excellent, labour-intensive exposition of Ottoman
governmental practices in Yemen spread across six well-written chapters. This
includes an interesting albeit decontextualized reading of attempts by early auth-
orities in Yemen, such as Ahmed Rashid, to position the enterprise in a larger
Ottoman framework (pp. 628). This is where Kuehns strengths are best demon-
strated, as he analyses the policies of those locally-based officials who occasionally
moved beyond their main task of integrating Yemen into the larger empire. For
instance, Kuehn laboriously scans reports composed by Mustafa Shevket and
Namik Efendi, who both urged the central government to move away from a policy
that had, until 1891, sought to integrate local allies by granting them important pos-
itions in the local courts and within the gendarmerie (pp. 15266).
While it would have helped if Kuehn had put these important temporary policy
shifts in the broader Ottoman political and economic context (the study does not
consider Ottoman financial insolvency or the coups in 1876 and 1908 as possible
sources of change in administrative personnel or practice) the reader still benefits
from the particularly close reading of reports written between 189198 and 1909
14. Kuehn shines when reading closely these ideologically-charged documents on
how local Zaydi leaders imams and sheikhs mobilized their constituencies
to challenge Ottoman authority. In response, the authorities resorted to typical colo-
nialist epistemologies whereby the Zaydi rebellion was spurred on by a savage
set of customs and dispositions (adat ve emzice) that needed to be either har-
nessed or condemned depending on local conditions (pp. 91145). This is