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The Ottoman Empire captured Egypt and much of the Arab Middle East from the Mamluks in 1517. With this conquest came many spoils: a near doubling of the empire’s territory; the inclusion of Islam’s holiest sites into Ottoman domains; access to the Red Sea and Indian Ocean; strategic control of most of the eastern Mediterranean; sovereignty over some of the largest cities in the Middle East; and a massive influx of money, people, and resources from these newly conquered lands. Most of the current scholarship on Ottoman shipbuilding and timber provisioning in the Red Sea focuses on the sixteenth century. This was the period when the Ottomans first expanded into the Red Sea and captured parts of Yemen, Bahrain, and other sites on the Arabian Peninsula. Wood in the Ottoman Empire was harvested in the forests of southwestern Anatolia and parts of the southern Black Sea coast every three to four years by peasants in those areas.

This article offers a chronology of climate events in Iran over the last millennium to challenge traditional chronologies of the Iranian past based on politics, war, and economics. Using insights gleaned from the historiography of climate in Iran, and from neighboring regions, especially the Ottoman Empire, four episodes of climate cooling show how climate-induced environmental processes affected more people for longer in Iran than did the policies of the empires ostensibly ruling over them. Thus, the article aims to put climate more squarely on the agenda of historians of Iran so that the conjectures advanced here can be confirmed, revised, or discarded through future empirical research. Moreover, the article seeks to bring Iran into wider conversations in environmental and global history.

This handbook offers the first comprehensive, state-of-the-field guide to past weather and climate and their role in human societies. Bringing together dozens of international specialists from the sciences and humanities, this volume describes the methods, sources, and major findings of historical climate reconstruction and impact research. Its chapters take the reader through each key source of past climate and weather information and each technique of analysis; through each historical period and region of the world; through the major topics of climate and history and core case studies; and finally through the history of climate ideas and science. Using clear, non-technical language, The Palgrave Handbook of Climate History serves as a textbook for students, a reference guide for specialists and an introduction to climate history for scholars and interested readers.

This article analyzes how the political and economic transformation of Ottoman Egypt at the turn of the nineteenth century impacted relationships between humans and dogs. Dogs were integral and essential social actors in Egypt for millennia, but in the decades around 1800 they came to be set apart from society as useless and dangerous sources of pollution, disease, and annoyance. Thus, for the first time in Egypt’s history, large-scale dog eradication campaigns were carried out in Cairo and the countryside. Violence was not the only strategy for dealing with this changing role of dogs in Egypt. Another that began to develop in the early nineteenth century but that would only fully emerge later was the phenomenon of interspecies affective relations. In addition to offering a history of human-dog relations in Ottoman Egypt, Mikhail’s article also considers the seeming contradiction of the contemporaneous emergence of human violence and affection toward dogs.

In June 1783, the Laki volcanic fissure began erupting in Iceland. It would continue to do so for the next eight months. One of the largest volcanic discharges in recorded history, the ash ...

Montesquieu, Hegel, Marx, Weber, and Wittfogel all employed the concept of Oriental despotism to describe forms of non-European politics. Although each of these thinkers used the idea in different ways for different purposes, they all accepted that one of its crucial aspects was the notion that irrigation produced forms of authoritarian politics. With the world's longest river and one of history's oldest civilisations, Egypt was seen as the quintessential example of Oriental despotism. This article uses the copious sources of the Ottoman period of rule in Egypt to tell quite a different story of irrigation and politics. It shows how peasant cultivators held much of the power in the cooperative arrangements of imperially-coordinated localism that characterised the management of irrigation in rural Egypt. Egyptian peasants had the autonomy and wherewithal to initiate and control repairs to the countryside's irrigation network from beginning to end. They - not the imperial state - were thus the most vital actors in the politics and economics of rural Ottoman Egypt.

Taking the long view, this article analyzes how the expanding power of Egyptian elites, and the emergent commercial agriculture they sponsored, forever changed the rural labor practices of peasant cultivators and their relationships to environmental resources. From the Ottoman conquest of Egypt in 1517 until the second half of the eighteenth century, Egyptian farmers initiated and oversaw the construction and repair of small-scale irrigation and other infrastructural works in their local environments. They controlled how and when their labor was used. At the end of the eighteenth century, rural labor in Egypt dramatically changed. It became coerced, required the large-scale movement of peasant laborers, resulted in enormous environmental manipulation, and was often deadly. This article thus explains how forced labor, deleterious environmental exploitation, extractive economics, and population movements emerged at the end of the eighteenth century and how they have come to characterize the relationship between work and the environment in rural Egypt from that period until today.