Week 3: Oil, Soil and Water: Imagining, Exploiting and Transforming Middle Eastern Environments

Seminar Readings:

J. R. McNeill,'The Eccentricity of the Middle East and North Africa’s Environmental History,' in Water on Sand: Environmental Histories of the Middle East and North Africa, ed. Alan Mikhail (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), pp.27–50.

Diana K. Davis, 'Imperialism, Orientalism, and the Environment in the Middle East,' in Diana K. Davis and Edmund Burke III, eds., Environmental Imaginaries of the Middle East and North Africa (Ohio: Ohio University Press), pp.1-15.

Timothy Mitchell, 'Introduction” ( and Chap. 2 'The Prize from Fairyland,' Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil (London: Verso, 2013), pp.1-11 & 43-65.

Camille Cole ‘Precarious empires: a social and environmental history of steam navigation on the Tigris,’ Journal of Social History 50, no.1, (2016): 74-101.

Further Readings:

Diana K. Davis, 'Scorched Earth,' in Michael E. Bonine, Abbas Amanat, and Michael Ezekiel Gasper, eds., Is There a Middle East?: The Evolution of a Geopolitical Concept (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011), pp.170-187.

Edmund Burke III, 'The Transformation of the Middle Eastern Environment, 1500 B.C.E -2000.C.E,' in Edmund Burke III & Kenneth Pomeranz, eds., The Environment and World History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), pp.81-117.

Toby Craig Jones, Desert Kingdom: How Oil and Water Forged Modern Saudi Arabia (Harvard: Harvard University Press, 2010).

Alan Mikhail, ed., Water on Sand: Environmental Histories of the Middle East and North Africa (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013).

Onur İnal and Yavuz Köse, eds., Seeds of Power: Explorations in Ottoman Environmental History (Cambridge: The White Horse Press, 2019.

Michael Christopher Low, 'Ottoman Infrastructures of the Saudi Hydro- State: The Technopolitics of Pilgrimage and Potable Water in the Hijaz,' Comparative Studies in Society and History 57 (2015): 1–33.

Alan Mikhail, Nature and Empire in Ottoman Egypt: An Environmental History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).

Diana K. Davis and Edmund Burke III, eds., Environmental Imaginaries of the Middle East and North Africa (Ohio University Press).

Jeniffer L. Derr, The Lived Nile: Environment, Disease, and Material Colonial Economy in Egypt (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2019).

Seth J. Frantzman and Ruth Kark, 'Bedouin Settlement in Late Ottoman and British Mandatory Palestine: Influence on the Cultural and Environmental Landscape, 1870- 1948,' New Middle Eastern Studies 1 (2011): 1-22.

Timothy Mitchell, “Can the Mosquito Speak,” in Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-Politics, Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), pp.19-53.

Aaron Jakes, “Booms, Bugs, Bust: Egypt’s Ecology of Interest, 1882-1914,” Antipode 49, no.4 (2017): 1035-1059.

Keith McLachlan, The Neglected Garden: The Politics and Ecology of Agriculture in Iran (London: I.B. Tauris, 1988),

Farah Al-Nakib, Kuwait Transformed: A History of Oil and Urban Life (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2016).

Arash Khazeni, Tribes and Empire on the Margins of Nineteenth Century Iran (Washington: University of Washington Press, 2009).

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