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 dissects 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 transportation 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 ecological history of the Empire. However, Mikhail's book confirms that the history of Egypt in particular, and the Ottoman Empire in general, cannot be written adequately without studying the water and irrigation policies of the Ottoman bureaucracy, considering the importance of irrigation for agriculture, and the role of agriculture in making Egypt the most lucrative province of the Empire. These policies 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, 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 bureaucracy's 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 discussion of disease and labour, Mikhail touches upon the importance of population numbers 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.
Mikhail's 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 “coordinated 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 author's presentation of the story reminds us of another shift from the traditional moral economy and common 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 sharīʿa 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’ preponderance in resource allocation. Significantly, Mikhail's treatment of Egyptian experience reveals that Egyptian peasants preceeded Ottoman bureaucrats in initiating 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 important 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, Mikhail's 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 modern state dealt with major ecological problems concerning natural resource management.
