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ID:
152367
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| Summary/Abstract |
If historians of the Middle East have turned their attention to the environment rather later than those in other subfields, a recent crop of books indicates that a new generation of scholars has spent much productive time considering environmental histories of other geographies. The books reviewed in this essay stand out for their insistence on examining Middle Eastern environments as both ecological facts and representational spaces. Taken in concert, they indicate the vibrancy of environmental history in the field. Moreover, their careful attention to methodology and creative use of sources opens up spaces for new investigations of politics, culture, and religion as mediated through environmental management and representation. Following on the recent work of Diana K. Davis, Edmund Burke III, and others, these historians have marshaled environmental, climatological, epidemiological, biological, and geological data for historical argument. Thus, the resulting works situate themselves deeply within their respective historiographic narratives, yet also interrupt, redelineate, and unsettle those narrative assumptions. At its best, the so-called “environmental turn” in the history of the Middle East represents not an intellectual fashion, but rather a major methodological shift that involves a reframing of our understanding of the formation of the field.
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| 2 |
ID:
146780
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This article explores the techniques and strategies used by Ottoman authorities to control the Bedouin with a specific focus on the province of Hijaz between 1840 and 1908. Using primary sources from the Ottoman and British archives, it argues that the Ottoman Empire developed a ‘politics of negotiation’ towards the tribes in its attempt to secure cities and major pilgrimage and trade routes against tribal attack. The principal agents of the empire who made this negotiated governance possible were the amir of Mecca and the governor of Hijaz. As a result of this policy, imperial authorities had to give significant concessions to the tribes, and they thus incorporated them into the province's imperial order. When the Ottoman economy went through a crisis, as in the 1900s, negotiated governance and order faced great problems.
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