In the summer of 1897, Muslim refugees from the Caucasus settled a sparsely populated region in the Province of Ankara. The Ottoman government had sent them to the area to build a new life and thereby increase the prosperity of the empire. The region's unfortunate name, Sıtma, which means “malaria” in Turkish, was more than a coincidence. Even the provincial center of Ankara was surrounded by vast swamps that provided a much better habitat for mosquitoes than for humans, and as a result, malaria was a common ailment among residents. The first step in changing the nature of this new settlement was changing its official name to Şehr-i Cedid (New City).Footnote 1 The more challenging task was to eliminate malarial fevers. Although the name Sıtma was taken off the map, endemic malaria persisted in the countryside of the future Turkish capital, affecting subsequent waves of migrants into the World War II period.Footnote 2
Beyond its conspicuous name, the story of Sıtma was not unique. Its new inhabitants faced the same issues as the millions of migrants and refugees who settled new parts of the Ottoman countryside over the course of the empire's last half century. To the extent that the history of migration and settlement in the modern Middle East has been examined, it has largely been viewed in broad political terms or as a subset of nationalist historiographies. This article heeds the call of Dawn Chatty and others to study the everyday and subjective experiences of displacement and to resist the hold that nationalist narratives have maintained over them.Footnote 3 As a fundamental aspect of life in the late Ottoman Empire, malaria offers a lens through which to understand those everyday experiences. Although the disease knew no confessional or ethnic boundaries, its impact was differentiated by social class and was especially severe for migrants and refugees.Footnote 4 As an “anonymous farm wife” from the early Jewish settlements in Ottoman Palestine declared, “every foreigner who comes here from a faraway land has to drink from this cup, no one is spared.”Footnote 5
This study of the relationship between malaria and settlement in the Mediterranean lowlands during the 19th century contributes to the emerging environmental historiography of the Middle East. This literature has begun to shed light on the role of nonhuman factors, from climate and geological processes to animals and microbes, in historical events and why they matter for the history of the Ottoman and post-Ottoman worlds.Footnote 6 This article embraces the perspectives of political ecology that employ a “post-positivist understanding of nature and the production about it, which views these as inseparable from social relations of power.”Footnote 7 Environmental questions like malaria were also political questions that reveal emergent social dynamics and forms of socioeconomic inequality. These approaches allow for a new interpretation of the late Ottoman Empire's well-studied transformation. Whereas it is a common belief that the 19th century and the Tanzimat periodFootnote 8 in particular ushered in revolutionary political and cultural shifts in the Ottoman Empire, this article contends that the period and its aftermath initiated ecological changes as well. A brief history of malaria in the late Ottoman Empire illustrates one important facet of the many new encounters with disease and environment arising from 19th-century global settler movements and migration.
Although a familiar feature in the historiography of many world regions during the periods of settler movements, malaria has received little attention from historians of the Middle East. The Ottoman Empire has been assumed to be outside of those global settler movements due to the historiographical preoccupation with external frontiers tied to imperial expansion.Footnote 9 Likewise, malaria has not been well historicized on the assumption that it was a primordial feature of “premodern” Mediterranean geographies. Old as its presence was, the malaria of the 19th century was in many ways the consequence of the physical changes at the heart of efforts to increase the economic productivity and political integration of the Ottoman provinces. Inhabitants of the Ottoman Empire avoided potentially malarial spaces in a variety of ways, and when they were compelled to change these habits by political and economic forces, their evasive instincts proved justified. Changes in settlement patterns, especially a population increase in the empire's lowlands from the mid-19th century onward, fueled the spread of malaria in the Ottoman Empire.
This history is important because malaria and other diseases affected millions of migrants within a semicoercive settlement context, operating as a form of “silent violence” not captured by the dominant political narratives of the day. Migrants, refugees, and sedentarized tribes faced hardships that stymied Ottoman settlement policy.Footnote 10 The deleterious impacts of fever became a principal reason for these settlers to resist Ottoman policy, impelling state and society to confront the disease in novel ways and modify the terms of settlement. In addition to outlining this Ottoman “quagmire” of malaria and settlement, this article considers how the overarching governmental preoccupation with transforming the environment, expressed through policies aimed at eliminating swamps, might have changed Ottoman society as a whole. Swamp drainage and state-sponsored land reclamation were ultimately costly and uneven in their impacts. As such, the Ottoman government incentivized landholders to acquire vast tracts of property merely by committing to its improvement and drainage. This policy created the space for a distinct political economy whereby absentee landlords contracted sharecroppers and seasonal laborers to cultivate large estates, allowing a wealthy few to prosper as malaria infections became further entrenched in the Ottoman and post-Ottoman countryside.
INVERTING THE TECHNOCRATIC GAZE
For historians of the early modern Ottoman Empire, plague reigns supreme as the disease of interest due to its pervasive and lingering presence in urban contexts.Footnote 11 Based on the little information that has been brought to light, malaria was an equally prevalent affliction during the Ottoman period.Footnote 12 In statistics from the immediate aftermath of World War I, the majority of people in Turkey tested positive for the parasite.Footnote 13 Even if the war had significantly contributed to the spread of disease, late Ottoman sources discussed in this article demonstrate that, whereas plague receded during the 19th century, malaria was the most consistently widespread ailment in the empire.
Because its effects were often far removed from centers of power and commerce, malaria invites us to invert the technocratic gaze—defined here as the “discursive constellation” shared by the doctor, the scientist, and the bureaucrat—implicit in much of the scholarship. This article endeavors to interpret disease through the perspectives of ordinary Ottoman subjects in the provinces as well.Footnote 14 In the words of Khaled Fahmy, the impulse to “deny doctors the central position they typically occupy in most accounts of medical history” is not merely a matter of highlighting the agency of subaltern historical actors; it is a methodological point about peeling back present perceptions of health-related questions and the assumed primacy of technocratic prescriptions.Footnote 15 As such, the following discussion of disease concerns itself not with the medical but with the environmental, or specifically, malaria as what Alan Mikhail, in his study of plague in Egypt, calls a “biophysical pathology of the environment.”Footnote 16 This approach is more suited to perceptions of disease during the period in question. For Ottoman subjects, malaria was not primarily a medical issue, even if medical understandings and remedies may be identified.
In current scientific terms, malaria is understood to be a disease caused by a blood-borne parasite that is transmitted between human beings by the bite of an anopheles mosquito.Footnote 17 But prior to the dissemination of scientific findings establishing these links during the last decades of the 19th century, people tended to associate malaria and its fevers with place, especially hot and humid regions such as swamps. The foul air produced by such places was in turn understood to have deleterious impacts on the human body. In the 19th-century Ottoman context, describing the air as “heavy” (vahim) was a common way of referring to environments that produced malarial fevers.Footnote 18 These pre–germ theory framings based on miasmatic understandings or loose affective associations were essentially sound to the extent that they linked mosquito-friendly environments to disease, and as a result, the observed behavior of the fevers buttressed the legitimacy of miasmatic theory during the early modern period.Footnote 19 The confounding intransigence of malaria in the colonial world continually pushed science and the field of “tropical medicine” towards social and environmental solutions to disease even after the discovery of microbes began to displace miasmatic frameworks.Footnote 20
This environmental understanding of malaria is apparent in the Ottoman medical school lectures of Feyzullah Pasha, who led the empire's fight against the disease around the turn of the 20th century. He had become interested in medicine at an early age because of his own experiences with malaria in his native İzmit in the Marmara region.Footnote 21 His lectures contained a wealth of information about the mosquito and its role in transmitting malaria between humans. Yet, his earlier lived experienced also figured into the way he understood the disease. Referring to the importance of the nuances of local geography to identifying malaria-prone zones, he pointed out that “although İzmit is surrounded by water and close to the sea, high places on the hills [there] are so safe that they can be considered impervious to [malaria].”Footnote 22 Feyzullah Pasha's commentary, based on his intimate knowledge of local geography, is critical to understanding the history of malaria in the Ottoman Empire because it points to the high variance of environmental conditions even within relatively small geographical spaces. A proper map of malaria risk areas in the empire based on local and medical understandings of the time would focus not on particular provinces but rather on a topography in which only regions several hundred kilometers in elevation could be considered exempt from risk during the warm months. Malaria was not a problem of the Ottoman subtropics so much as it was a feature of the lowlands.
A view of malaria that ascribes disease to place is especially relevant because people acted upon their understandings of disease environments. Contrary to orientalist tropes that cast Ottoman Muslim peasants as fatalist and passive in response to disease, Sam White notes that during the classical Ottoman period “both local and central officials could recognize the dangers of contagion and act accordingly” and that “self-preservation was first on the minds of most subjects.”Footnote 23 In regard to malaria, self-preservation meant avoiding malarial environments altogether, a coping strategy that was not unique to the Ottoman Mediterranean.Footnote 24 In some cases, people simply steered clear of swampy terrain and settling in areas that appeared to be relatively salubrious. In highly malaria-prone regions such as the Eastern Mediterranean, people developed elegant coping mechanisms for seasonal malaria risk. In the city of Adana and the villages of the Çukurova plain, for example, the majority of permanent inhabitants took up residence in the Taurus and Amanus mountains during the summer with the expressed purpose of avoiding fevers and other discomforts that the warm season brought.Footnote 25 These seasonal rhythms mirrored the migrations of the pastoralist population that comprised a majority in the Province of Adana until the 1850s.Footnote 26 That seasonal migration was vital to both would-be nomads and Adana's urban population demonstrates how the complex migration patterns of pastoralists were finely tuned to the specificities of the Mediterranean geography and part of a shared ecological worldview.Footnote 27 Faruk Tabak hypothesizes that the threat of malaria in the Mediterranean basin might have been especially great during the Little Ice Age, which encompassed much of the early modern period. In this view, the shift in climate affected lowland hydrography and fed a major upland shift in settlement between the plains and the mountains.Footnote 28 By the 19th century, the Mediterranean littoral had waned in population while adjacent hill and mountain regions were densely settled with villages.
One final point that will not be addressed here but is certainly relevant to the discussion is that of genetic resistance and acclimation. The effects of the disease on a foreign traveler or migrant in the Ottoman Empire may have been more extreme than its effects on local people who had inhabited malaria-endemic regions for generations.Footnote 29 This is not to say that Ottoman peasants rarely contracted malaria during the early modern period. On the contrary, it was such a major concern for rural communities that it impacted their settlement patterns and ways of life. Moreover, a means of understanding and coping with malaria that had little to do with later technocratic prescriptions was already in place, and rural communities possessed a sense of the types of situations that would give rise to malaria epidemics. Therefore, the new encounter with malaria in the Ottoman Empire during the 19th century was not merely evidence of disease's unseen agency and influence over the course of human events; it was in part the product of a deliberate attempt to change the nature of the Ottoman countryside. The Ottoman state wanted people to settle in the very regions where malaria was believed to be endemic.
MALARIA AND SETTLEMENT DURING THE HIGH TANZIMAT PERIOD (1856–76)
The Ottoman Empire offers a unique and understudied case in the history of 19th-century settler movements and imperialism. Whereas the socioeconomic and ecological transformation brought by what James Belich refers to as the “settler revolution”Footnote 30 was once synonymous with the ascendance of Western European colonialism, scholarship on Russia, South Asia, and China demonstrates that the phenomenon was common in most world empires.Footnote 31 The Ottoman Empire is especially fascinating within this field of scholarship for its rather unusual status as a contracting settler state. By the 19th century, the Ottoman imperial state was experiencing considerable territorial losses. Although the Ottomans did carry out expansionist activities similar to those of other European states in Africa and the Arabian Peninsula during the Tanzimat period,Footnote 32 some of the largest settlement activities took place in the imperial heartland, even on the doorstep of the Ottoman capital.Footnote 33
There were two prongs of Ottoman policy deliberately aimed at increasing cultivation by implanting new agriculturalist populations through an activity usually described as iskân (settlement). Following the Crimean War (1854–56), the Ottoman Empire witnessed perhaps the largest of many influxes of predominantly Muslim migrants from Crimea and the Caucasus. Subsequent political crises brought more waves of displaced persons from the Caucasus, Eastern Europe and the Balkans, and the Mediterranean Islands that had been under Ottoman control. By the end of the Ottoman period, up to 4 million immigrants entered the empire.Footnote 34 Most of this migration was organized by the Muhacirin Commission (and its subsequent iterations), an institution under the Ottoman Ministry of Interior charged with settling the migrants and refugees. The Muhacirin Commission worked with provincial governments to identify and, if necessary, obtain suitable land in sparsely populated areas for immigrants to form new villages.Footnote 35
In addition to settling millions of migrants from the contracting fringes of the Ottoman world, the Ottoman government deployed the policy of iskân in a slightly different sense through attempts to sedentarize large sections of highly mobile pastoralist communities that inhabited many parts of Anatolia, Greater Syria, and Iraq. These policies were at their heart bids to curtail the local autonomy of such communities. As such, iskân could be understood as both “sedentarization” and “pacification.” The predominant pattern of migration in these communities varied from place to place but generally involved seasonal movement between winter and summer quarters according to variations in geography and climate. In Anatolia, where this pattern of migration was largely vertical (i.e., between the plains and the mountains), the Ottoman government usually sought to settle pastoralists into villages located in the lowland winter quarters, which were generally more fertile and subjected these populations to the surveillance of the Ottoman state. These efforts heralded profound changes in the ways in which people interacted with their geographies and environment, and they touched virtually every corner of the empire, albeit in uneven and divergent ways.Footnote 36 Here I will examine the early settlement efforts during the post–Crimean War period through the lens of two influential Ottoman statesmen and their tenures as provincial governors following the creation of the new vilayet system in 1864.
Midhat Pasha and Ahmed Cevdet Pasha are rightly remembered as rivals, but during their stints in the provinces, the rhetoric and policies of these two figures, which typified the discourses espoused by the Tanzimat-era state as a whole, bear strong resemblance. Midhat was the main proponent of the territorial reorganization in the 1864 Vilayet Law, which became a vehicle for extending the Tanzimat reforms into the provinces. He first served as governor in the Province of the Danube (Tuna) on the Ottoman Empire's European frontier overseeing a pilot project of modernization that Milen Petrov has dubbed “Tanzimat for the countryside.”Footnote 37 The rapid building of state institutions associated with the reform of the Danube would be attempted in different settings in the geographically and ethnolinguistically diverse empire. Midhat subsequently moved from the northwest corner of the empire to its easternmost territory, overseeing similar reforms in the Province of Baghdad.Footnote 38 Meanwhile, Ahmed Cevdet was a historian and legal scholar who would participate in the creation of many new initiatives, including land reform, education policy, and the Mecelle, the Ottoman civil code brought into effect in 1877.Footnote 39 In 1864, Cevdet was appointed governor of an augmented Province of Aleppo, which included not only the Aleppo region but also the formerly (and subsequently) separate Province of Adana as well as the large districts surrounding Marash, Urfa, Aintab, and the new sancak of Zor in the desert of Eastern Syria.Footnote 40 For a brief period during the 1860s, the Province of Aleppo stretched across northern Syria from Tarsus and Mersin in the west all the way to the eastern borderlands between modern-day Syria and Iraq.
The geographies governed by Midhat and Cevdet alone during the 1860s were remarkably diverse. They ranged from the temperate Danube River basin and the subtropical Çukurova delta plain to the highlands of the Taurus and Amanus mountains, the Syrian desert, and the marshes between Basra and Baghdad. What these regions shared, however, was considerable land deemed unused (meaning not continuously cultivated) and suitable for settlement by new immigrants and mobile pastoralist communities. The Province of Tuna was the first or final stop for over 100,000 refugees during the 1860s.Footnote 41 Through Ottoman resettlement policies, tens of thousands of such refugees from Crimea and the Caucasus were also settled in the Çukurova region of the Province of Adana during that same period, and Ahmed Cevdet oversaw the forced sedentarization of pastoralists in Adana—roughly half of the region's population—during the latter half of the 1860s.Footnote 42 On the northern fringes of the Syrian Desert at Resülayn (modern-day Ras al-Ayn, Syria/Ceylanpınar, Turkey), the Ottoman government managed the settlement of thousands of Chechen migrants as well as the tribes near Aleppo and Rakka.Footnote 43 Midhat's policies in Baghdad included an ambitious plan to settle the Muntafig of Iraq, a population that he estimated in the hundreds of thousands, and encourage them to engage in agriculture in the well-watered Mesopotamian countryside.Footnote 44
These settlement projects were predicated on assumptions typical of 19th-century statecraft. The presumed purpose of land was its economic use, primarily agricultural production. Moreover, the Ottoman government claimed the right to dictate the settlement patterns and movement of immigrants and nomads. While the settlement projects included providing money and seed and, in some cases, building villages, migrants had limited control over where they could legally settle. Most importantly, both agriculture and settlement were components of a hierarchal understanding of civilization that further justified the policies.Footnote 45 For example, Midhat's declaration to the Muntafig in Iraq, an unusual document printed in Arabic at the provincial printing house in 1869, justified the settlement plans by proclaiming that,
the places in which you live and reside are suitable for an amount of cultivation unlike any other in the world, and yet you have remained deprived of the wealth, comfort, safety, and prosperity that the subjects and inhabitants living and settled in the rest of the domains of the Sublime State have attained.Footnote 46
Meanwhile, Cevdet cited Ibn Khaldun's dichotomous understanding of the relationship between nomadic and settled societies in his voluminous writings on tribal populations in regions such as Adana, which are extant in both the archival record and within his own memoirs.Footnote 47 Cevdet wrote in his Tarih (History) that “tent-dwelling tribes” were the lowest order of human society followed by villagers and finally urbanites. In this view, land used by pastoralists was wasted and uncultivated and therefore sedentarization would result in agricultural prosperity and civilization (medeniyet).Footnote 48
As the writings of Ottoman statesmen emphasize, the underlying notions of civilization and progress that would justify settlement policy dictated that more cultivation would bring prosperity to the empire while eliminating malaria. Although this view was also present in the much earlier writings of Ibn Khaldun, cultivation as the antidote to malaria was likely conventional wisdom as of the 19th century, as it is frequently invoked in both Ottoman and European sources.Footnote 49 This notion existed within the discursive constellation of the Ottoman doctor Feyzullah Pasha, who told his students that “malaria likes unworked lands and desolate, empty countryside. It cannot hold up in the face of civilization and the efforts of mankind.”Footnote 50 Yet this piece of received knowledge was at odds with Feyzullah's description of other widespread beliefs concerning which groups were most likely to contract malaria. Pointing to the link between agricultural labor and malaria, Feyzullah cited an Ottoman Turkish proverb: “He who plays with the soil digs his own grave” (toprakla oynayan mezarını kazar).Footnote 51 These competing understandings of the relationship between malaria and settlement would sit at the heart of the ecological conundrum of Ottoman settlement policy. Settlement, in theory, improved the land and eliminated swamps, thereby reaping handsome agricultural yields while ridding the geography of malaria. However, all were aware of what might become of those hapless settlers and the few who dared to play with the fertile but deadly soil.
In the settlement ventures that occurred under Midhat and Cevdet's governorships, deadly outbreaks of malaria were an apparent consequence, though determining magnitude is a matter of interpretation. For example, sources from the period state unequivocally that the majority of Nogay and Circassian migrants in Çukurova during the 1860s quickly perished, and while quantitative data is sparse, the pastoralists forced to live year-round in the lowlands did not fare much better.Footnote 52 The Chechens who settled in Resülayn experienced high mortality not only along their circuitous journey but also in the malarial outpost.Footnote 53 In the files of the Muhacirin Commission, a petition from a Chechen migrant apparently educated in Arabic detailed not only his mistreatment at the hands of the local governor but also the sorrows of settlement. It indicated that he had buried fifty-seven of his relatives in Resülayn and lost three sons and two daughters.Footnote 54 In Iraq, there were recurrent malaria outbreaks among the Muntafig over subsequent decades.Footnote 55 These examples came from southern regions of the empire, but evidence indicates that immigrants who settled in the Danube region of southeastern Europe or stayed there before transfer to other locations also experienced the miseries of malaria.Footnote 56
Malaria played a critical role in the failures and reformulations of Ottoman settlement policies during the Tanzimat period. The issue of acclimation to new environments would become central. By the end of the Ottoman period, people could apply for resettlement only on the basis of their village being either too swampy or barren, and an inability to acclimate to a particular geography was enshrined as the sole justification for immigrant applications for resettlement.Footnote 57 The aforementioned examples from the high Tanzimat period point to how this practice was informed by early experiences. In the Adana region, Nogay migrants settled in Çukurova successfully lobbied to form a new settlement in the Taurus Mountains at a site called Uzunyayla.Footnote 58 Meanwhile, the pastoralists in the region almost entirely ignored the settlement orders after a few years, and malaria was cited as a primary reason for them to resume their seasonal migrations between the mountains and the Çukurova plain. The Ottoman government modified the settlement terms during the 1870s, maintaining some state control over mobility but affirming local rights to seasonal migration as a malaria coping strategy.Footnote 59
As Nora Barakat rightly notes, the boisterous language and exceptional magnitude of the settlement policies pursued under the likes of Midhat and Cedvet may give the mistaken impression that settlement policy in the Ottoman Empire was highly coercive, destructive, and transformative in all locales.Footnote 60 The provinces of the two pashas were not entirely exceptional: Yücel Terzibaşoğlu points to similar developments in the Province of Hüdavendigar in Northwestern Anatolia, and case studies of both forced sedentarization and migrant settlement in the empire abound.Footnote 61 But the overall picture is that Ottoman settlement policy—especially forced sedentarization—was not as immediately impactful or lasting as envisioned, and that in some regions, such as Eastern Anatolia, the Ottoman government under Abdulhamid II preferred to co-opt and even empower certain nomadic “tribal” populations in exchange for loyalty.Footnote 62 Nonetheless, with regard to settlement of migrants and nomads, malaria was a critical barrier in that it killed many and engendered resentment toward settlement policies. Therefore, rising concern over the issue of malaria was not merely the logical accompaniment of an overall modernization project but also an outgrowth of settlement policy and its contradictions.
SWAMPS AND THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF THE DEADLANDS
The Ottoman Empire did work to combat malaria through both public health institutions and public works. Ottoman administrators emulated the latest measures in fighting malaria as scientific understandings of the disease transformed.Footnote 63 This section does not address the extent to which Ottoman government policy effectively managed disease. Instead, it examines how particular policies aimed at malaria-prone geographies impacted political and economic life of the people residing in those geographies. Like many governments of the period, the Ottoman government sought to eliminate swamps, and the policies it adopted to achieve this aim had potential implications for the relative distribution of land.Footnote 64
The Ottoman government could, in theory, drain swamps and reclaim land to make it suitable for settlement and cultivation by immigrants, doling it out as might have suited an equitable property distribution. There is evidence of numerous attempts at swamp reclamation in the files of the Ministry of Trade and Public Works (Ticaret ve Nafia). This process—often conceptualized as “cleaning” (tathir) of swampland—would eliminate the pervasive impact of malaria in critical zones by destroying mosquito habitats while increasing agricultural potential. By the end of the Ottoman period, the government would mark all of the wetlands in the empire for eventual drainage.Footnote 65 However, land reclamation was an expensive undertaking further complicated by the empire's economic struggles.Footnote 66 As a result, much of the documentation concerning swamp drainage pertains to aborted or partially completed projects. Even where it was carried out, there was no guarantee that swamp drainage would eliminate malaria, and preventing the swamps from reemerging required further effort. Therefore, it must be stated from the outset that swamp drainage in the Ottoman Empire was an undertaking as momentous as it was ineffective with regard to transforming the malaria ecology of the countryside.
İskenderun (Alexandretta), the Eastern Mediterranean port of Aleppo, offers a vivid illustration of why swamp drainage was difficult to implement. The town was surrounded by massive marshes that inspired Ottoman and foreign visitors alike to ascribe an insalubrious quality and malarial nature to the local environment.Footnote 67 Successive Ottoman administrations sought to improve the quality of life in the port by draining the swamps.Footnote 68 Throughout these attempts, officials complained of exorbitant costs, difficult work, corruption and embezzlement, and intransigence of the swamps themselves.Footnote 69 The final Ottoman attempt to drain the swamps of İskenderun, initiated by the government of Aleppo under the Committee of Union and Progress in 1911, ended with the decision to contract drainage to a foreign company due to insufficient state funds.Footnote 70 When the French administration assumed control of Syria after World War I, it too pursued drainage plans in İskenderun.Footnote 71
Extant work plans and contracts reveal why desiccation was a challenging undertaking during the late Ottoman period. For example, in 1888 the Ottoman government sought to drain the swamps adjacent to the rapidly growing commercial hub of İzmir in order to mitigate their ill health effects and build a new military base. The Ministry of Public Works sent a team of inspectors to determine the total cost of eliminating the swamps. They found that for the price of 515,000 kuruş—the equivalent of roughly $500,000 today—the ministry could fill the swamps.Footnote 72 However, this plan would require “30,000 people to work continuously for five years.” To expedite the desiccation of the swamps, the ministry devised a plan to lay 3,500 meters of Decauville rail to cart gravel, sand, and soil from the nearby mountain.Footnote 73
When it came to areas around lakes or vast swamps that stretched for kilometers on end, the issue of cleanup became even more involved, as it entailed sophisticated engineering, a longer period of work, and legal wrangling over property owned by people or institutions in the vicinity. While often proposed, such reclamation plans were less often realized.Footnote 74 The Ministry of Public Works's dossier on the completed reclamation of swamps and a portion of Lapsista Lake near Yanya (Ionnina) offers a telling illustration of the challenges. Encompassing 363 files containing correspondence between various Ottoman ministries, financial and technical reports regarding the desiccation plans, petitions from bidders and local property holders, permits, telegrams, and an enormous map of the region in question, the dossier is one of the largest in the ministry's records. The documentation began in May 1883 and continued into the 20th century, the last item being a letter to the Ministry of Finance in 1910, just two years prior to the Balkan Wars that would ultimately sever Yanya from the Ottoman Empire.Footnote 75 State involvement in land reclamation therefore required not only large sources of money, labor, and expertise, but also considerable administrative continuity.
These three examples, which highlight the difficulty, cost, and time involved in swamp drainage, are representative of the types of projects that were underway throughout the empire during its last decades. These activities were numerous and not limited to frontier spaces; many of the major land reclamation projects carried out by the Ottoman government occurred right on the outskirts of the capital.Footnote 76 In fact, the sources reveal that cities and crucial ports received much more attention than rural spaces.Footnote 77 The practical and socioeconomic reasons for this tendency are clear, but what it also demonstrates is that while the proliferation of drainage activities around ports gives the impression that the Ottoman government was carrying out a radical ecological transformation of the countryside, that transformation did not generally extend beyond areas of administration and commerce. Drainage activities in a particular province did not translate into a changed situation for most of the inhabitants of that province; villages and towns that were hundreds of kilometers from major centers would be unaffected by such activities. Ottoman land reclamation activities merit detailed study of how an interventionist and increasingly technocratic approach to swamps changed the empire. However, the state-driven transformation of environment was predictably uneven, and land reclamation projects were only a small component of the forces that were reshaping the Ottoman countryside.
A more complete picture might begin with the narrative presented by Meltem Toksöz in her study of Çukurova, which became a region “of shared hegemony between large landholders, export merchants, foreign capitalists, and local bureaucrats” where the rise in commercial cultivation of the Eastern Mediterranean littoral was driven primarily by nonstate actors.Footnote 78 The swamps of the Çukurova plain were transformed not so much by Ottoman policy but by individuals and companies pursuing financial enrichment within (and sometimes beyond) the confines of the Ottoman legal apparatus. Within the considerable scholarship on land laws and property during the Ottoman period, the category of land that has drawn the least attention is that of mevat (waste, or dead) land.Footnote 79 Added to this legal category is the more ambiguous designation of empty (hali) land that one finds within 19th-century Ottoman sources concerning settlement and agriculture.Footnote 80 Whereas scholars such as Halil İnalcık have argued that mevat land when taken up and cultivated by a wealthy individual could lead to the genesis of a planation-style çiftlik considerably larger than the typical landholding, others have pointed out that this phenomenon may not have been widespread enough to effect dramatic changes throughout the empire.Footnote 81 Here, I will focus on the potential significance of mevat land within the context of the great push to expand settlement and cultivation in the Ottoman countryside during the last decades of the 19th century, particularly efforts to reclaim land and drain swamps.
Throughout the 19th century, the principal source of the rise in agricultural output in the Ottoman Empire was cultivation of previously vacant or nonagricultural land as opposed to changing methods or technologies.Footnote 82 Land was therefore not just transformed and transferred through the economic restructuring of the empire and the emergence of private property beginning in 1858, when a new land code required the registration of all land and the issuance of title deeds (tapu senedi). It was also created out of the abundant dead space in the provinces. In the 1860s, for example, the Ottoman government encouraged this development by allowing cultivators to use the new land code to register mevat land for free.Footnote 83 Then, in 1882, the Ottoman government announced a new update to the land code specifying that individuals or small groups who volunteer to clean (tathir) “a few thousand dönümsFootnote 84 of swamp” were eligible for free title deeds (tapu) to that land and, depending on the size and scale of the undertaking, three years or more of tax exemption.Footnote 85 This regulation explicitly linked the lingering issue of swamps and malaria to that of the mevat lands exception. The implication was that if the owners of these tracts of swamp and what was deemed wasteland could demonstrate improvement and cultivation of the land, they would become freeholders of enormous properties at a bargain rate.
The archival record reveals the creation of many large estates on mevat land under this law. Outcomes regarding the sale and settlement of such lands were unpredictable. For example, a piece of loose correspondence in the records of the Ministry of Trade and Public Works referred to a “foreigner” Emile Baudouy, a Levantine in Istanbul, who owned and drained a gigantic 15,000-dönüm stretch of land near Adapazarı.Footnote 86 The land had originally been awarded to two local Muslim men who never fulfilled their pledge to drain the swamps, and it is easy to see why. The drainage project required a canal five kilometers long, eight meters wide, and two meters deep that would channel water away in order to clear the swamps for agriculture and enable irrigation. When they were unable to make good on their commitments to drainage, the deed for the land became available again.Footnote 87 Baudouy, a lighthouse inspector from Galata, claimed the land in partnership with the son of the palace chamberlain. However, Bosnian (Boşnak) immigrants had been settling in the vicinity for several years and were encroaching on the adjacent forests to create new agricultural fields. Although the provincial government judged these encroachments to be illegal, they continued for years as Baudouy drained the swamps.Footnote 88 By 1901, they had occupied more than 4,000 dönüms of the property, and in the end Baudouy was compensated for the land that he had worked to desiccate but had been taken over by migrants.Footnote 89 The story of Baudouy's swamps in Adapazarı exposes many issues regarding the mevat category within late Ottoman land policy: claimants did not always clean up the land as promised, the creation of large estates sometimes clashed with immigrant settlement policy, and disputes over such land was common.
Another contemporaneous case concerning the acquisition of swampland involved immigrants from the Russian Empire near the ports of Haifa and Jaffa. Unlike most immigrantsFootnote 90 in the Ottoman Empire, they were not Muslim but rather Jewish families that came with the first wave of migration from Eastern Europe during the late 19th century. They settled on around 20,000 dönüms of swamp that had been awarded to Baron Rothschild.Footnote 91 However, the agreement had imposed limits on the settlements: the territory occupied could not exceed 22,000 dönüms of land in specified villages and the settlers could not build and occupy more than 130 homes. Yet the arrival of more settlers in the region resulted in an investigation into reports that Rothschild's settlement had exceeded its limits. Immigrants who had come to Yeshua Hankin's settlements and were moving to swamplands cleared Rothschild's properties.Footnote 92 Correspondence between the Porte and Rothschild's representative Elie Scheid concerning the small land purchases in the region demonstrate how discourses surrounding the swamp and uncultivated land aided in overcoming bureaucratic obstacles. In the instance of one 300-dönüm property, the purchase of which was being blocked by the Mufti of Jaffa, Scheid cited eliminating swamps and the damage of malaria as a justification in an apparently successful bid to secure an intercession from the Ottoman government.Footnote 93 While the history of land and settlement in Ottoman Palestine is complex, this example, when placed in the context of other issues concerning mevat land and swamps in the empire, demonstrates how the Hamidian government, which generally sought to limit Jewish migration to Palestine, made a partial exception based in part on the understanding that the new settlements would serve the larger ecological goals of the empire.Footnote 94
Achieving a comprehensive picture of this phenomenon requires more work on the distribution of land and property in the Ottoman Empire using the Ottoman tapu records in Ankara. But private archives of wealthy families may serve as an alternative window onto the large estates of the late Ottoman period. The papers of the Sursock family of Lebanon, for example, contain correspondence with intermediaries reflecting day-to-day business details, offering kinds of information not typically found in the Ottoman archives.Footnote 95 These documents show what the profile of a large landholding family might have looked like. The Sursocks were part of a network of local entrepreneurs in the Eastern Mediterranean and began to amass wealth over the course of the 19th century, especially as Beirut grew into a major economic center.Footnote 96 They represented a new elite that “circulated amid Alexandria, Istanbul, Beirut, Paris, Rome, and other European capitals.”Footnote 97 Their lands, which increased during the late 19th century, belonged to a different geography. By 1900, they owned property stretching along the Mediterranean coast from Mersin in the Çukurova plain to Alexandria in the Nile Delta (including Cyprus). With the exception of properties at their summer home in Sofar, all of these lands appear to have been in littoral lowland districts surrounding Mediterranean ports.Footnote 98 Ottoman archival documentation reveals that much of the land held by the Sursocks was categorized as mevat.Footnote 99 The history of the Sursocks may be especially relevant for understanding the complexity and importance of swampland in the making of the modern Middle East, as the historiography frequently cites the Sursocks for their sales to Jewish settlers during the Ottoman period.Footnote 100 The mevat clause of the Ottoman Land Code rendered large amounts of property not only easily obtainable but also potentially transferrable.
The concerns of scholars and the Ottoman government itself have caused foreigners and non-Muslims to stand out when they obtained large amounts of land in the empire, but all those who possessed the means and desire to buy land could take advantage of bargain rates. In the Çukurova region, ascendant landlords from seemingly every walk of life acquired thousands of dönüms of swamp. Many of these were Ottoman Greek and Armenian merchants based in Adana, Tarsus, and Mersin, but numerous Muslim landlords also benefited from the policy. These ranged from imperial figures such as Abidin Pasha, the governor of Adana during the 1880s,Footnote 101 to notables of newly sedentarized tribes such as Alaybeyzade Mahmud, whom Toksöz refers to as a “former nomad” in possession of 5,000 dönüms of land.Footnote 102 Of course, it was not only the elite who capitalized on the availability of empty land. In some cases, migrants themselves collectively made claims on swamp that they drained. For example, in 1892 about 300 Balkan and Circassian migrant families in Western Anatolia laid claim to more than 2,000 dönüms of land near Lake Manyas on the basis that they had cleared the swamps.Footnote 103
Ottoman land reform was aimed at increasing the economic base of the empire without upsetting the distribution of wealth in the provinces. The research of Martha Mundy and Richard Saumarez Smith on land in Transjordan shows that registration occurred in piecemeal fashion, by and large striving to commit to paper what was more or less practiced on the ground. Their mapping of land tenure also shows that the geographical nature and agricultural purpose of land played a role in determining the classification of a given property and its average size.Footnote 104 Property holding in the Ottoman Empire, much like the geography itself, was highly differentiated even on a very local scale. The findings of the Ottoman agricultural survey, which was published over the course of 1910–11 in two volumes, reflected this differentiation and the government's general concern about relative distribution of property.Footnote 105 The survey asked cultivating households to report the size of the property that they worked, defining small parcels as less than ten dönüms and large parcels as more than fifty dönüms. In most provinces, the average landholding size was somewhere between these two figures.
In the survey, a few districts stood out for unusually high concentrations of “large” farms. Districts in the Çukurova plain, for example, were reported to have virtually no small or medium landholdings. The coastal Kaza of Söke, south of Izmir in the Province of Aydın, was another such outlier. In the Kazas of Haifa and Nazareth (Nasıra), 98 percent of the households cultivated parcels of fifty dönüms or more. The above districts were particularly remarkable in that neighboring districts in their respective provinces reflected no such uneven distribution of land. What these regions shared was a particular preponderance of low-lying swamps that only recently had been brought under cultivation, a general feature of much of the Ottoman Mediterranean littoral. Whereas normal parcels of land in the agricultural survey ranged from ten to fifty dönüms, the properties claimed under the provision for mevat land were often at least thousands of dönüms, many times larger than the largest category of land in the survey.
Returning to the question of malaria and the swamp, the particular landholding pattern associated with newly cultivated mevat land carries implications for our understanding of late Ottoman political economy. This particular method of facilitating the draining of swamps empowered absentee landlords, while migrants, sharecroppers, and seasonal laborers who carried out the actual work of draining, irrigating, and cultivating the land in question bore the brunt of malaria's wrath whether they owned the land or not. In regions such as Çukurova where annual migrant labor flows were as large as the population of the city of Adana itself, malaria took on epidemic proportions among the workers.Footnote 106 As the Ottoman public health inspector Şerafeddin Mağmumi put it,
They depart mostly from cold regions, walk for weeks, and come to a warm and humid climate like Çukurova, and in exchange for 30–40 paras, they work under that burning sun and spend their nights in the open. Because of such unhealthy foods [that they eat], most of them just up and die.Footnote 107
A post-1908 investigation of labor conditions in Çukurova described the situation of workers as “miserable in every respect” (ez her cihet perişan).Footnote 108 Although cotton and wheat were the main crops of the Çukurova region, rice cultivation offers an even more complex example of the irreconcilable tension between the commercialization of the Mediterranean littoral and the issue of malaria. Rice required the maintenance of wet paddies resembling the mosquito-friendly wetlands environments associated with malaria. In fact, the Ottoman government sought to regulate and limit the cultivation of rice in order to reduce the spread of malaria near large settlements.Footnote 109 However, the regulations concerning rice, which forbade its cultivation within 3,000 meters of any significant settlement, also contained exceptions for rice paddies established on mevat land for the purposes of its improvement.Footnote 110 Tensions between landlords and the government concerning rice and malaria would last well into the republican period.Footnote 111
MIRED IN THE PAST
Syrian author Hanna Minah's autobiographical novel al-Mustanqaʿ (The Swamp) tells the story of a poor family living under the French Mandate during the years immediately following the breakup of the Ottoman Empire. The people of Minah's village suffered the tyranny of a local landlord who exploited the peasants, leading Minah's family to move to the town of İskenderun. They took up residence in the Saz neighborhood—saz meaning “swamp” in Turkish. The name owed to the fact that the neighborhood was founded on reclaimed swamps that had long surrounded the port. Minah recalled the terrible sickness his father contracted while working around the swamp, and how he had nearly died in the inadequate care of the local doctor.Footnote 112 The socioeconomic setting of Minah's novel is similar to that used by his contemporary Yaşar Kemal, who grew up just on the other side of the border in Southern Anatolia. The theme of an impoverished peasantry struggling under the thumb of merciless landlords in the malarial countryside of Çukurova runs throughout Kemal's extensive oeuvre.Footnote 113 The dynamics of rural society in the modern Middle East have been documented in such iconic works of literature from the region, which form the basis of national literatures and stand as mirrors for the social historiography of the region. This article has endeavored to show that malaria merits inclusion within those narratives. It was a quotidian but vital concern that disproportionately impacted migrants, villagers, and agricultural workers and was part and parcel of their disenfranchisement.
In a crude reading of the processes in question, malaria and the geographies that nurtured it appear as natural factors that changed and even determined the outcome of settlement policies. But this article has emphasized that malaria in the Middle East or elsewhere is not a primordial artifact so much as a political one. Decisions about land and, in turn, the movement of population contributed to the spread of malaria, and both state and nonstate actors were conscious of the dynamics in play throughout the settlement processes initiated during the last decades of the Ottoman Empire's history. Rather than emphasizing a malarial geography that preconfigured an intense encounter with disease during the 19th century, I have shown that presumptions about commercial agriculture, the commodification of land, and the authority of the state to dictate patterns of settlement were also critical components of the encounter with malaria. Both the centrality of disease in the violent experience of displacement and the seemingly pervasive relationship between malaria and the restructuring of land tenure in the Ottoman Empire demand further study. They are part of the historical political ecology in the Middle East, which treats environmental issues as inherently political questions and highlights aspects of political economy that cannot be easily understood or quantified by economic means.
By demonstrating that malaria was political, this article also links the daily travails of ordinary villagers to the socioeconomic transformations that have defined the region's history. The death and suffering incurred by those caught up in mass displacements and the settlement policies that came with the Tanzimat reforms attest to the observation of James C. Scott that “political tragedies have flown the banner of progress, emancipation, and reform.”Footnote 114 The political tragedies of displacement in the Ottoman context have often been studied through experiences of communal conflict, ethnic cleansing, and genocides in either historiographical isolation or juxtaposition. However, the history of these displacements is encircled by yet another political tragedy touched upon in this article. As Isa Blumı notes, “the emergence of finance capitalism created a particular kind of refugee exposed to a form of exploitation that increasingly scoured the earth for cheap labor.”Footnote 115 The disease and suffering endured by, for example, Muslims from the Caucasus in the Ottoman Empire were a consequence not only of the Russian Empire's violent expulsion of local communities but also of socioeconomic marginalization in emerging spaces of the world economy.
Though it differed in many ways from colonial empires, the Ottoman Empire was similar to most states of its time, which championed the ideas of civilization and modernity to legitimate what were ultimately coercive and often exploitative arrangements. The empire's political and economic restructuring were part of what C. A. Bayly calls the “uneven and unsettling” changes that birthed the modern world and “opened up differentials between groups and between different societies.”Footnote 116 Whether the flight of Muslim migrants from European zones of conflict, the commercial development of the Mediterranean littoral, or the oft-cited defensive modernization of the empire, the Ottoman settlement experience was driven by imperial competition and the spread of capitalism. The longer Ottoman experience with malaria may also offer a prehistory to recent historiography that has called into question the common trope of modernity as the antidote to a range of human diseases that were targeted for elimination by 19th- and 20th-century states. Although major discoveries about the nature of malaria were made by European doctors in the colonial settings of Algeria and India, the historiography on colonial medicine now increasingly emphasizes that, as Anne Marie Moulin notes, “colonialism has contributed to combating a fire which it had in great part kindled.”Footnote 117 Colonial policies in the countryside created malaria epidemics not only in the relatively early stages of conquest when malaria was still a mystery to European doctors, but also, as Timothy Mitchell demonstrates, as the result of ecological restructuring brought by much later administrative measures, capitalist transformation, and even policies designed to eradicate disease.Footnote 118
The “Ottoman quagmire” described here did shape the nature of national and colonial successor states in the post-Ottoman world, which touted malaria eradication within modernization campaigns aimed at transforming what was uncritically envisioned as an eternally malaria-ridden landscape wherein the backwardness of the countryside was a fundamental factor.Footnote 119 Given the inescapable grip that malaria once held on local populations throughout the world, it is dangerous to be too cynical about malaria eradication programs. Yet as I have shown for the Ottoman case, the widespread malaria of the 20th century was in some ways an ecological legacy of changes that occurred during the prior century. These were the very changes that gave rise to modern political institutions and economic relations. If the technologies they produced now hold malaria at bay, it is only after countless millions of immigrants, refugees, workers, and farmers spent decades—often against their will—on the frontlines of an intractable quagmire. The history of malaria presented here serves not only to reorient our historiographical perspectives towards those silenced actors but also to allow us to rethink contemporary developmentalist discourses about malaria and other mosquito-borne diseases in many regions of the world.
