Alan Mikhail's Nature and Empire is a welcome addition to the short list of works exploring the role of the environment in the Islamic world historically. The small number of such works is surprising given theories attributing the region's political and economic outcomes to its resource endowments. This is particularly perplexing in the case of Egypt in light of its place as an important example of a “hydraulic civilization” in Karl Wittfogel's Oriental Despotism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1957).

Mikhail's focus on the environmental history of Egypt between 1675 and 1820 thus provides an important new source for those interested in better understanding the rural environmental history of Ottoman Egypt in particular and in Islamic Egypt more generally. Egypt provides a particularly friendly laboratory to substantiate Mikhail's claim that the “environment mattered” in Islamic history. Indeed, Egypt's historic economic dependence on the annual Nile flood is well-known and lies at the heart of much of the book.

The book is structured in two parts. The first three chapters describe the workings of the Ottoman system of natural resource management. In general, these chapters suggest a fairly decentralized equilibrium in which Egyptian peasants played a central role in the management of water, food, and timber in the Egyptian countryside. Chapter 3 contains a particularly insightful discussion of trade patterns between Egypt and Anatolia. This discussion centers on the flow of wood from Anatolia to Egypt in order to maintain Egypt's irrigation system and to thus guarantee the flow of Egyptian agricultural exports to Istanbul. This example of the Ottoman Empire's environmental calculus suggests that imperial officials often attempted to allocate resources across the empire in order to better exploit regional endowments and thus increase output.

Mikhail investigates the evolution of this framework over time in the final three chapters. These chapters provide examples suggesting that over time, the Ottoman-Egyptian state increasingly exhibited autocratic tendencies. Chapter 4 notes that whereas at the beginning of the eighteenth century irrigation repairs were largely small and local affairs, by the start of the nineteenth century an increasingly authoritarian state bureaucracy drew labor from across Egypt to work on large irrigation projects. Chapter 6 describes the reconstruction of the Mahmudiyya Canal between Nile and Alexandria, which marked the end of local control over irrigation works that was characteristic of the eighteenth-century imperial system.

The book's central hypothesis is that as Egypt moved from Ottoman to more independent rule under Mehmet (Muhammad) ‘Ali, the government altered the existing system of natural resource management with negative effects for both the environment and the peasantry. Thus, Mikhail goes against the nationalistic view of Egyptian history and views the rise of Mehmet ‘Ali in a negative light. For example, he notes that the policies of Mehmet ‘Ali failed to improve the lives of Egyptian peasants. Instead, he suggests that Mehmet ‘Ali pursued his interests which ultimately consisted in increasing his personal power (p. 35).

In this sense, the book aims to track the interaction between Egyptian institutions, the conditions of the peasantry in rural Egypt, and environmental factors. This is an ambitious agenda and the book often does an admirable job describing the relationships between institutions, the peasantry, and the environment. For example, it is difficult to read this book and maintain a view of top-down state management of rural Egypt's irrigation system in the eighteenth century. Similarly, it seems clear that Egyptian independence was at best a mixed bag for the Egyptian peasantry. As Mikhail notes, it is probably more historically accurate to conclude that independence led to increased pressure on Egypt's population (p. 293).

Perhaps where the book is at its weakest is when it attempts to use the patterns documented between 1675 and 1820 to inform broader theories of institutional development. The book claims (pp. 36–37) that “imperial government came to Egypt in the early nineteenth century” and that “there was nothing ‘natural’ about this imperial character of Egyptian government.” However, showing that institutional arrangements varied between 1675 and 1820 does not refute the hypothesis that Egypt's resource endowments made it probabilistically more susceptible to autocratic rule. Similarly, this evidence does not disprove that the roots of these autocratic institutions are to be found further in the region's past.

On the whole, however, the book's strengths outnumber its weaknesses. Indeed, one of the greatest strengths of this book is that it suggests a path forward for future studies of the role of the environment in other regions and time periods of Islamic history. It is this reviewer's hope that Nature and Empire in Ottoman Egypt will stimulate similar studies. Such studies seem a fundamental step in enhancing our understanding of the region's historical and institutional development.