Nature and Empire in Ottoman Egypt offers an original and compelling environmental history of Egypt's place in the Ottoman Empire and its transformation under Mehmed Ali. Author Alan Mikhail first examines the Ottomans’ blend of top-down and bottom-up management of Egypt's natural resources in the 18th century and the role those resources played in the workings of the empire. He next makes the case that new public works and official responses to natural disaster during the 1780s and 1790s inaugurated a new phase of rising state control over land and labor. The author argues that these changes paved the way for Mehmed Ali and his successors to claim autocratic powers over Egypt's population and natural resources.

In the opening pages, Mikhail presents his work simply as a “social and environmental history of water usage and irrigation in the Egyptian countryside in the long eighteenth century (1675 to 1820)” (p. 3). However, this rather modest description belies the larger scope of the study. Building on extensive research on Egyptian and Ottoman Turkish documents, the author builds his case systematically—literally from the ground up. The work begins in Chapter 1 with an analysis of Egyptian irrigation and water usage. Mikhail argues that 18th-century authorities in Istanbul traditionally deferred to local knowledge in managing water distribution and canals. Drawing skillfully on Egyptian court records, the author illustrates the delicate balancing act among local and imperial interests over irrigation. Because they regarded Egypt as a “goose that laid the golden eggs” (p. 61), the Ottomans pursued policies that proved, if not benevolent, at least pragmatic.

The next two chapters turn to Egypt's role as a producer and consumer of resources within the empire. Mikhail emphasizes the scale and importance of commodity flows not just from imperial periphery to center but also across the expanse of Ottoman territory, which he describes as “a story of early modern natural resource management” (p. 83). Chapter 2 (“The Food Chain”) focuses on Egypt's vital production and distribution of grain, especially the major deliveries to the Hijaz and Istanbul, which the author quantifies in some detail. These operations demanded not only imperial oversight but also a diverse array of public and private networks and modes of transport. Chapter 3 (“The Framework of Empire”), in contrast, describes Egypt's lack of forests and its enormous demand for timber, which it had to import from Anatolia. By contrasting these two commodities, the author underlines the Ottoman practice of balancing key resources across regions of surplus and deficit. This comparison also introduces the wrenching impact of Egypt's break from the empire in the 19th century, cutting the land off from Ottoman resource management and forcing Mehmed Ali and his successors to invade neighboring territories to obtain the same commodities Egypt once received as an Ottoman province.

The second half of the book explores the imperial management of what we might call biological resources: animals, diseases, and the Egyptian people themselves. The author identifies two related themes over the late 18th century: the rising scale of public projects and the increasing regimentation and “simplification” (in James Scott's sense) of Egyptian labor, as the imperial government attempted to reduce its heterogeneous subjects into countable units. In Chapter 4 (“In Working Order”), Mikhail describes the increasing use of corvée and a gradual “abstraction” (p. 192) of the human and animal workforce, as the state turned to an increasingly top-down management of labor and resources. Chapter 5 (“From Nature to Disease”) turns to the succession of natural disasters in the 1780s and 1790s, examining how a series of poor floods, famine, and flight caused a major outbreak of plague. According to the author, the decision of the French occupiers to institute quarantine in 1799 marked a “conceptual shift” (pp. 201–2) regarding disease. Whereas Egyptians had once perceived cycles of plague as an integral part of the region's environment, new public health measures turned infections and infected people into distinct problems for the state to regulate—a shift that entailed far-reaching new powers over the population during Mehmed Ali's reign.

The book's final chapter (“Another Nile”) uses the Mahmudiyya Canal to illustrate this transformation in state control over labor and resources. The author presents this project as an environmental and human catastrophe. The canal demanded an army of over 300,000 coerced laborers, of whom as many as one third died during their work. Nevertheless, siltation, salination, and seepage soon rendered the waterway nearly unusable. According to Mikhail, this undertaking presaged the high costs and repeated failures of giant public works by Egyptian autocrats ever since.

Nature and Empire should appeal to a broad scholarly audience in Middle East and environmental history. For Ottomanists, the book offers new insights on a crucial province of the empire and on the complex and vital workings of imperial provisioning systems. For historians of modern Egypt, the work provides valuable historical background and environmental perspectives on the policies of Mehmed Ali. Although scholars such as Timothy Mitchell have previously examined issues of land use, disease, and population in modern Egypt, Nature and Empire offers arguably the first real environmental history of the country—one that takes an environmental focus throughout and actively engages with literature of the field. In fact, the author's decision to publish in Cambridge's “Studies in Environment and History” rather than its Middle East series further underscores the book's significance as one of the first major environmental histories of the Middle East and perhaps the very first on the Ottoman Empire.

Although it is hard to find fault with such a novel and ambitious work, three issues deserve mention here. First, Nature and Empire assumes some prior knowledge of Ottoman and Egyptian history—an assumption that will save time for specialists but could limit its utility for undergraduates and scholars in other fields. Second, the author may at times overstate the role of Egypt in provisioning Istanbul. Using his own figures, it seems that the Nile could only have fed a fraction of the inhabitants in the capital. (Its supply to the Hijaz was probably more significant.) Finally, the book might have benefitted from more historical comparisons, both among Ottoman provinces and between Egypt and other riverine countries. For instance, did Egypt's special importance to the empire during the 18th century arise, at least in part, from the loss of Ottoman territory and resources in the Balkans? And how does the history of irrigation works along the Nile compare with the history of those along the Tigris and Euphrates? It may be that the absence of comparisons in this book only emphasizes how much remains to be done in the field and points to the intriguing possibilities for further research in Ottoman and world environmental history.