The Unsettled Plain: An Environmental History of the Late Ottoman Frontier

By Chris Gratien

The Unsettled Plain studies agrarian life in the Ottoman Empire to understand the making of the modern world. Over the course of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the environmental transformation of the Ottoman countryside became intertwined with migration and displacement. Muslim refugees, mountain nomads, families deported in the Armenian Genocide, and seasonal workers from all over the empire endured hardship, exile, and dispossession. Their settlement and survival defined new societies forged in the provincial spaces of the late Ottoman frontier. Through these movements, Chris Gratien reconstructs the remaking of Çukurova, a region at the historical juncture of Anatolia and Syria, and illuminates radical changes brought by the modern state, capitalism, war, and technology.

Drawing on both Ottoman Turkish and Armenian sources, Gratien brings rural populations into the momentous events of the period: Ottoman reform, Mediterranean capitalism, the First World War, and Turkish nation-building. Through the ecological perspectives of everyday people in Çukurova, he charts how familiar facets of quotidian life, like malaria, cotton cultivation, labor, and leisure, attained modern manifestations. As the history of this pivotal region hidden on the geopolitical map reveals, the remarkable ecological transformation of late Ottoman society configured the trajectory of the contemporary societies of the Middle East.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Release date: Mar 8, 2022
• ISBN: 9781503631274

Book preview

THE UNSETTLED PLAIN

An Environmental History of the Late Ottoman Frontier

CHRIS GRATIEN

Stanford University Press

Stanford, California

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Stanford, California

© 2022 by Chris Gratien. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press.

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Gratien, Chris, author.

Title: The unsettled plain : an environmental history of the late Ottoman frontier / Chris Gratien.

Description: Stanford, California : Stanford University Press, 2022. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2021032901 (print) | LCCN 2021032902 (ebook) | ISBN 9781503630895 (cloth) | ISBN 9781503631267 (paperback) | ISBN 9781503631274 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Human ecology—Turkey—Cilicia—History. | Rural population—Turkey—Cilicia—History. | Land use, Rural—Turkey—Cilicia—History. | Cilicia—Environmental conditions. | Turkey—History—19th century. | Turkey—History—20th century.

Classification: LCC GF679.C55 G83 2022 (print) | LCC GF679.C55 (ebook) | DDC 956.4/6015—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021032901

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021032902

Cover art: Julie M. Gratien

Cover design: Rob Ehle

CONTENTS

Notes for the Reader

INTRODUCTION

1. Upland Empire

2. The Stench of Progress

3. Second Nature in the Second Egypt

4. Fallowed Years

5. A Modern Life of Transhumance

Acknowledgments

List of Archives and Libraries

List of Abbreviations and Acronyms

Notes

Index

NOTES FOR THE READER

This work refers to sources in several languages other than English, especially Ottoman Turkish and Armenian. All translations of primary sources are my own, with the exception of sources from Greek, translated by Polina Ivanova, and any secondary translations cited in the endnotes.

I have transliterated Ottoman Turkish words according to the spellings and conventions of modern Turkish. When quoting transliterated sources, I have preserved the spellings of the editor.

In Turkish words, the following letters diverge from what an anglophone reader may expect:

c is j as in jam (muhacir meaning immigrants is pronounced mu-ha-jir, the name Cevdet is jev-det, mucuk meaning mosquito is mu-juk, name of Ceyhan River is jey-han, and so forth)

ç is ch as in cheese (the toponym Çukurova is pronounced chu-kur-o-va, the honorific çelebi is che-le-bi, the toponym Çokmerzimen is chok-mer-zimen)

ğ is silent and elongates the vowel in modern standard Turkish (the ğ is silent in the name Kozanoğlu, the name Dadaloğlu, huğ meaning hut and so forth)

ş is sh as in fish (the ethnonym Avşar is pronounced av-shar, the name Yaşar is ya-shar, aşiret meaning tribe is a-shi-ret, and so forth)

Some Armenian words along with titles of sources in the notes are conveyed in the original Armenian. Names in most cases are transliterated phonetically according to the pronunciation of Western Armenian within the text and consistent with WorldCat.org entries in citations.

The spellings of proper names and toponyms adhere to the conventions of transliteration, unless there is already a commonly used spelling in English (Marash, Hadjin, Khaldun, Pasha, and so forth).

All sources, including suggestions for further reading, are cited in the endnotes.

Materials with Islamic lunar (hicri) calendar and Ottoman solar (rumi) calendar dates have been converted to the Gregorian (miladi) calendar using the date conversion tool of the Türk Tarih Kurumu at ttk.gov.tr/tarih-cevirme-kilavuzu/.

Cilicia in the late Ottoman period. Key to place names, Ottoman name with modern name in parentheses: Ayas (Yumurtalık); Çokmerzimen (Dörtyol); Hadjin (Saimbeyli); Kars-ı Zülkadriye (Kadirli); Namrun (Çamlıyayla); Sis (Kozan); Zeytun (Süleymanlı). Map by author.

INTRODUCTION

Ömer was born in a Central Anatolian village called Taf during the early decades of the Republic of Turkey. His family was well off for the area. Ömer was educated. And though it was no place for a young man with big aspirations, the little place where he grew up had its charms. The winters were cold and bleak, but with the return of spring, the bracing mountain air gave way to refreshing breezes. It was a wonderful place to spend the summer. The village was set in a region of expansive plateaus, or yaylas.¹ Ömer’s ancestors, the Avşars, once visited those highlands each year with their flocks to pass the warm months in comfort, surrounded by bountiful, green grass and wildflowers. They would travel hundreds of kilometers between the Central Anatolian plateau and the lowlands of Çukurova on the Mediterranean coast, following pasture, water, and fair weather. But a few generations before Ömer was born, the Ottoman government settled them in villages. By the early twentieth century, the world of a people that had once traversed an empire had become very small.

Ömer was young at the time of his engagement to a girl named Haçça. He really loved her, and he was eager to get married. But marriage was often a family affair. Something happened that caused Ömer to abruptly leave the village behind and head for the fertile lowlands in the south that had become the center of Turkey’s cotton industry. According to those who knew the story, his sudden departure that summer was the result of a falling out with his family (küskün gitmiş). Perhaps they quarreled over his engagement to Haçça. Perhaps Ömer planned to make some money and come back for her. There were certainly other young men who had gone to Çukurova and returned with money and gifts, wearing brand-new suits purchased from tailors in the bustling markets of Adana. There, they found work in the cotton fields and factories that employed tens of thousands of migrant laborers. Çukurova was a place where a kid like Ömer could build a new life or return to his old one as a new man, provided it did not chew him up and spit him out like so many bales of cotton.

Ömer’s mother had begged him not to leave their village. She feared for his safety in the big city. Don’t stay in Adana, my son, she implored. "A mucuk will get in your eye." Mucuk was the word for a type of mosquito in her Turkish dialect.² The mosquito here was metaphorical. She simply meant that misfortune might strike him out of nowhere. There were many hazards awaiting a naïve country boy in a place notorious for exploitation and vice, and there were certainly other men who had gone to Çukurova and never come back. Missing her son and consumed by worry, she made the same long journey to Adana to retrieve him, only to be met with her greatest fear upon arrival. Ömer had died. Some said that he was stricken by the evil eye of envy. But the culprit was no metaphorical mucuk; it was an actual mosquito that got him. Ömer had contracted malaria. It was a common ailment during Adana’s notorious summers, and though it was not always lethal, Ömer probably had not been exposed to the disease before in his highland village. Many a strapping young man like him had traveled to Adana for work during those years and met the same fate. Yet his mother seemed to blame herself. While he was dying, he turned to the wall for help, she recalled in horror, realizing that he had had neither family nor doctor to care for him in his last moments. The trauma inspired her to write a poem, The Lament of Ömer, Son of Durmuş Ağa. One verse reads as if she imagined his final, feverish thoughts: I’m getting on a truck. I’m going to Kayseri. I don’t want to die. I’m going to see Haçça.

Ömer meant the world to someone, but he was not the kind of person whose life would normally enter the annals of world history, nor was the place he lived. His village has changed names multiple times, making its history harder to trace. Today, they call it Dadaloğlu, in recognition of the local belief that the famous bard by the same name is buried there. Dadaloğlu’s poetry had championed the resistance to a government decree that the nomadic populations of the region settle in fixed villages during the 1860s. His most memorable line—"the decree is the Sultan’s, but the mountains are ours [dağlar bizimdir]—was a claim to sovereignty in a moment when the future of these communities became a central question of the Ottoman Empire, which deployed more than 10,000 men armed with modern weaponry to enforce the settlement orders. Dadaloğlu had distilled the defiant sentiments of these communities concerning a pivotal moment in their history. Without his songs, they might have been lost to time, so it made sense to rename a village born out of that history in his honor. In the Avşar villages, the practice of preserving songs that commemorate important moments as Dadaloğlu once did continued into the twentieth century. They have been transmitted orally across generations. Like the refrain the mountains are ours," Ömer’s story was known to people his age, who preserved it alongside hundreds of other tales of tragedy and heroism. Thanks to Ömer’s mother and those who learned her song, his eight-verse tale of love and loss lives on today.³

When compared with the archival record, sources for history like these songs follow a more complicated path to survival. An archival source is preserved by an institution for a given purpose, but its survival does not require that anyone else deem it to be valuable. For a folk song such as the Lament of Ömer to survive, others must learn it and repeat it. Members of a community must accept it as valuable in some way, internalizing its words, melodies, and rhythms, and making it their own. Only the greatest hits could survive generations.

Why then did Ömer’s community preserve this song, which described something far more personal than the collective struggle of Dadaloğlu and his contemporaries? Maybe it survived as some form of cautionary tale. Maybe the story resonated with the experiences of other families. For some, Ömer was family. Yet from afar, it may seem that there have been so many Ömers and Haçças over the years and so many laments composed about them, such timeless stories are ostensibly outside history altogether. But in fact, their story is of great value for writing the little-known history of their community, and its significance extends far beyond their remote villages. It was part of a much larger historical epic, the same one documented by Dadaloğlu. The place where Ömer was born, the economic forces that drew people like him to Adana, and even the malaria that killed him embodied the experience of a recent process that transformed rural societies. They were facets of the late Ottoman frontier, a space that defined a century of political, socioeconomic, and ecological change and reshaped life in the Middle East.

*   *   *

This book is about the remaking of Ömer’s world—Çukurova and its mountainous hinterland—between the Ottoman Tanzimat reforms of the mid-nineteenth century and Turkey’s development programs of the mid-twentieth century. In some respects, what follows is a familiar history of the late Ottoman Empire, only it has seldom been told with rural people and places at its center. They made up the vast majority of the Ottoman population. The administrative and commercial decisions made in Istanbul and the provincial capitals were ultimately about them. They were also the pioneers of the late Ottoman frontier, an internal zone of settlement and environmental transformation in the provinces of the empire. The history of these small but numerous spaces collectively shows how Turkey and other post-Ottoman states were the product of agrarian transformation. The remaking of society and politics in the Ottoman world entailed a remaking of rural environments, and in the process, how people understood and ordered the environment also changed. Though the frontier experience in the Ottoman Empire was not the same in all places, Çukurova was in many ways a microcosm of the empire’s transformation. In this study, it begins as a swampy, sparse winter pasture for nomads on horseback in which direct Ottoman authority over the countryside was limited. By the end, it will be overtaken by fields of cotton tended by farmers who sing the laments of once-powerful provincial lords and humble shepherds atop their tractors like the song of a former, foreign world.⁴

The fertile lowland of Çukurova became a late Ottoman frontier because merchants and Ottoman officials alike deemed it to be an unsettled plain. Few permanent villages existed there. Its main economic function was as seasonal pasture. The long process by which Çukurova came to be mostly grazing land for pastoralists like Ömer’s ancestors was cast as a historical aberration from a civilizational ideal. Through policies of forced sedentarization, village construction, and agrarian commercialization, Çukurova did become a densely settled region, encompassing not only the large cities of Mersin and Adana but a total of at least seven cities with a population of more than 100,000 today. In this regard, the dynamics of the Ottoman frontier survived long after the Ottoman state itself, revealing a line of historical continuity amid the breakup of a centuries-old empire.

But in serving as a point of continuity, the frontier experience left Çukurova unsettled in another sense. For rural people, the theme of this century of history was disruption, displacement, and dispossession. In the pages that follow, each group that lived in the late Ottoman countryside will have its turn at exile: pastoral nomads of the Taurus Mountains; Muslim villagers violently expelled from the Balkans, Crimea, and the Caucasus; seasonal laborers from Anatolia and Northern Syria; Armenians deported by the Ottoman government; prisoners of war; Kurdish refugees; exchanged peoples on both sides of the Aegean; and eventually, every villager who moved to the city because the nature of village life had forever changed. Their experiences reveal how societies in the modern Middle East were forged through intersecting displacements and movements of people.

The narrative of this work is diachronic, but the subjects of analysis that recur throughout the five chapters that follow are rhythmic. Despite the significant changes that occurred over the period examined in this book, each chapter returns to dimensions of continuity that manifest not through static states but rather through percussive repetition of familiar modes and melodies that can be conceptualized as refrains.⁵ These refrains arise not only from natural rhythms that have long fascinated historians of the Mediterranean but also from the new rhythms of increasingly complex systems of economic production and the modern institutions that order nature and time itself.⁶ The refrains in this study contain interacting rhythms of seasonal migration, agricultural labor, capitalist production, bureaucratic function, and mosquito reproduction. The continuities and the gradual evolution of these refrains drive this story of movement, ecological upheaval, and social transformation.

A major contention of this book is that the disease that killed Ömer—malaria—was fundamental to the unsettled ecology of the late Ottoman frontier and its rhythms, more a product of recent developments than the primordial scourge it is often assumed to be. Caused by a blood-borne parasite transmitted between humans by mosquitos, malaria was present in the Mediterranean for millennia. Only in recent decades have public health measures and mosquito eradication programs nearly eliminated malaria in Turkey. Yet prior to the advent of modern biomedicine, people possessed means of mitigating malaria’s impact rooted in an intimate knowledge of local geography and a seasonal conception of space. Long before Ömer’s encounter with the disease in the city of Adana, people in the region avoided malaria’s impacts through seasonal migration between the mountains and the lowlands. That was one thing groups like the Avşars shared with even their most sedentary and urban neighbors. However, the major forces that shaped the late Ottoman frontier—the modern state, capitalism, war, and science—each changed the region’s ecology and rhythms. In the process, malaria became widespread in new ways as the practices that enabled local people to mitigate the risk of disease and maintain their livelihoods were eroded. Though it was an old ailment, malaria in its modern form was an artifact of rural dispossession.

This history of malaria reveals a new political history of the late Ottoman world, but it was not removed from the more well-charted political violence associated with imperial fragmentation, communal conflict, war, and state-building. On the socioeconomic level, the Ottoman frontier produced a new landed elite enriched by the labors of a new class of agricultural workers. On the communal level, the creation of a new rural ecology placed new groups of settlers and migrants in conflict with local people, while commercial competition created an additional arena of conflict between ethnoreligious groups. Though contention was a persistent feature of the new spaces created by the frontier, large-scale war and political strife during the Ottoman Empire’s final decades accelerated processes of displacement and dispossession. The environmental history of the late Ottoman frontier does not explain the political conflicts that shaped the region. Yet it demonstrates that those conflicts did not emerge from ancient enmities. They unfolded in novel spaces produced by migration, displacement, political reform, and commercialization.

For many, the experience of the late Ottoman frontier was one of violence and loss, but its history is also full of examples of resistance and resilience. People subjected to settlement policies that threatened their livelihoods, like the communities that rallied around Dadaloğlu’s cry of the mountains are ours, fought and won battles to preserve aspects of their ways of life within a new Ottoman order. People who faced ethnic cleansing and genocide found ways to survive in the direst of conditions, and refugees from distant lands built new lives in the Ottoman countryside against formidable odds. Cultivators and workers defied the demands of the market and maintained local practices while still participating profitably in an increasingly uneven world economy. And even though the entire project of the modern state appeared at times antagonistic to their culture, rural people preserved a sense of place and forms of local knowledge and memory long after the world they came from was irrevocably changed. The past acts of resistance and strategies of survival studied in this work reveal how the creation of the modern world entailed concerted destruction wrought far from centers of political power and capital. Those who endured and resisted this destruction have not received the attention they deserve. Their lives provide a window onto other ways of knowing and being in a present where the narrative of progress is increasingly replaced by a prophecy of impending environmental catastrophe. There is no going back to the world they came from. But the legions of people who resisted developments once simplistically cast as progress show us how to look around rather than ahead.⁷

In the pages that follow, many actors will emerge in this multivocal history of environmental transformation in Çukurova and its mountainous hinterland. Bandits, bureaucrats, immigrants, landlords, workers, doctors, tourists, shepherds, goats, and mosquitos will each have their moments at center stage. Their experiences have been preserved in archival documents, memoirs, newspapers, local histories, and folklore in Turkish, Armenian, and a host of other languages that constitute the fragmentary and international source base for the history of a region that was never the center of a unified modern state. In bridging linguistic and temporal gaps in the historiography of the Ottoman Empire and exploring environmental themes largely ignored by extant work, I hope to have achieved a narrative that not only enriches the study of the modern Middle East but also underscores its relevance for scholars of other times and places. I also hope to have done justice to the historical experience of the actors foregrounded in this study and the place they made or called home. But this is not just the history of that little world over the course of a century of change. It is the history of the unmaking of their worlds and the making of ours. Let’s call it a history of the world and a very small place in the Ottoman Empire.⁸

Environment, Empire, and Indigenous Ecology

Though there are relatively few English-language publications about it, there is a precedent for using a place like Çukurova to write about something bigger. This work is influenced by the greatest chronicler of rural life in Southern Anatolia: the novelist Yaşar Kemal. In an interview from 1960, he addressed the notion that he would eventually run out of material writing about his native Çukurova. What would that even mean? he asked. "Could Çukurova ever run out? [Çukurova biter mi]."⁹ The next year, his award-winning novel İnce Memed was published in an English translation, permanently adding this small region of modern Turkey to the annals of world literature.¹⁰ Born to Kurdish refugees from Eastern Anatolia who settled there during the World War I period, Yaşar Kemal found Çukurova to be an inexhaustible source of inspiration. And over a career that continued up to his death in 2015, he never really ran out of Çukurova to write about. He published dozens of books, most of them dealing with the lives of rural people in the region, how they have transformed, and how they remained the same. When asked to reflect on his work and his choice to focus almost solely on Çukurova, Kemal frequently appealed to universalism. For Kemal, to write about Çukurova was to write about the human experience through his subjective lens. He was not just writing about Çukurova. And in this regard, Kemal was not alone in writing about it. As he once put it, Tolstoy was writing about it, Dostoyevski was . . . no writer can be a great novelist if they don’t have a Çukurova. Stendhal also wrote about his own Çukurova. I’ve written about Çukurova as much as anyone else.¹¹

Kemal followed the dictum of write what you know, but his work was also guided by political commitments that always drew him back to rural people. His early work employed ethnographic methods born out of an affinity for songs and stories that began in childhood. He would go on to use the fragments of human experience contained in those songs and stories to author novels of epic proportions. Kemal’s first publication, however, was a collection of laments from the Çukurova region, songs by rural people like the one that commemorated the aforementioned Ömer’s untimely demise. For him, the lament genre, or ağıt, which typically involved a song composed for a person who died a tragic or heroic death, was not just an expression of the relationship between an individual and an author. He wrote about laments as cultural palimpsests, songs that could be modified and added to by other interpreters to bring their own experience into the living composition. The familiar laments that circulated in Çukurova were not songs about individuals; they were frames for narrating the experience of a community rooted in a multilayered past.¹² Kemal regarded the people (halk) of Çukurova as a cultural repository not just of that region but of human history and genius itself. I’ve always wondered: why is a woven carpet as beautiful as a Picasso painting, he mused in one interview. It’s because its design is 10,000 years in the making.¹³

Many social historians of the late Ottoman Empire and modern Turkey find inspiration in Yaşar Kemal’s approach, which brings to life the stories of ordinary people in ways that the archive cannot.¹⁴ Yet if recent scholarship is any indication, the longstanding strain of Ottomanist scholarship concerned with peasants, pastoralists, and provincial people so dear to the late Yaşar Kemal once held a place of higher prominence in the field. Suraiya Faroqhi, who has been writing about the provincial history of the Ottoman Empire for over half a century, has critiqued this trend in terms of a methodological shift, noting that since the cultural turn of the 1980s, Ottoman studies had turned its back on the rural people who made up the vast majority of the empire’s population but have left very few traces of their cultural orientations.¹⁵ If the cultural turn did leave them behind, it is because the operative definition of culture privileged elite written and material culture. By treating human ecology—the relationships between human beings and their environments—as a dimension of culture, however, we can access a whole world of cultural orientations that is yet to be properly explored.

Recently, scholars have returned to the role of rural people in Ottoman life, thanks in part to the emergence of environmental history, defined here as the study of humans and their past relationships with the rest of nature.¹⁶ Environmental history has reinvigorated the study of agrarian spaces in the former Ottoman Empire, drawing greater attention to factors like soil, water, plants, and animals that were fundamental to that polity but treated as marginal in political narratives of its history. The first works of Ottoman environmental history focused mainly on the empire itself as an ecosystem, in the words of Alan Mikhail.¹⁷ This framework allows for the study of cyclical and repeated flows of people, biota, and material, and their role in constituting political and economic life over a broad region. Similarly, large-scale events like epidemics, epizootics, and climatic change may be studied on an imperial level to demonstrate the role of environmental factors in political histories. Newer scholarship explores relations and phenomena that are only legible on a smaller scale, moving away from framing Ottoman environmental history in a manner that reifies the field’s state-centered bias, which erases the texture of local ecologies.¹⁸

Writing good environmental history requires much more than thinking of nonhuman factors as agents and forces in history; it means understanding that the environment and human culture mutually constitute one another. It also requires accounting for how people understood their environments and acted upon those understandings. It means not only looking to new sources about the history of the environment but rereading familiar sources with an ecocritical lens, which is to say, in Robert Kern’s words, to recover the environmental character or orientation of works whose conscious or foregrounded interests lie elsewhere.¹⁹ An ecocritical reading of sources in turn means taking seriously past actors with radically different worldviews, interrogating conceptions of nature itself, and uncovering anthropogenic dimensions of environments one might otherwise regard as natural. This work also adopts the perspective of political ecology, defined here as a post-positivist understanding of nature and the production of knowledge about it, which views these as inseparable from social relations of power.²⁰ Environmental historians draw on the natural sciences, but scientific expertise cannot be taken at face value. The very practices by which nature has been constructed as an object of inquiry have also served political projects that usurped rural people in both cultural and material terms for the purpose of reordering the environment to suit the needs of the modern state and capital.

If people like Ömer are still marginal in the field of Ottoman studies, they are increasingly important within the environmental humanities turn toward indigenous ecology. As an analytical category, the term indigenous can be juxtaposed with a host of entities associated with colonialism, capitalism, and globalization over the past centuries: the settler, the plantation owner, the corporation, the technocratic state, and so forth.²¹ If the environmental history of human societies over the past few centuries could be summarized in a word, it would be usurpation—of local people, of their communal and political formations, and of their ways of knowing and ordering nature. Plants, animals, microbes, and a range of ecological practices pertaining to agriculture, water management, resource extraction, and manufacture that were initially confined to specific regions have spread—albeit unevenly—throughout the world.²² Local ecologies have also been reoriented by production for the demands of a global market as opposed to more local networks. In the process, indigenous understandings of nature were maligned as economically inefficient and environmentally irresponsible, especially in areas subject to European colonialism, as scholars such as Diana Davis have convincingly demonstrated.²³ This process of dispossession involved what Jason Moore describes as a reordering of the environment to produce cheap nature that served the extractive systems associated with the capitalist world economy.²⁴

As a result of these developments, the world saw the greatest-ever rise in human population, but it was accompanied by escalating economic disparity. Pollution and environmental destruction have likewise occurred unevenly. Climate change is the greatest expression of this process.²⁵ Environmental activities that have produced wealth in primarily temperate regions of the world disproportionately threaten environments nearest to the equator and the poles, and pose the greatest immediate threat to communities whose relationships with their lived environments are often least mediated by technology. Megacities have emerged in places most likely to be devastated by climate change, ranging from the arid southwestern United States to the historically shifting Bengal Delta. Amitav Ghosh has called this revolution the great derangement, inverting Polanyi’s notion of the great transformation to fashion a more dystopian understanding of what modernity is and what it holds for our future.²⁶

This monograph belongs to a growing number of studies examining the erosion and destruction of indigenous ecologies over the past two centuries throughout the making of the world ecology. Though it was part of the Ottoman Empire, Çukurova is kin to a variety of places. Like Beringia in Bathsheba Demuth’s The Floating Coast, they are places far from sight that endured dramatic changes once spotted by the rapacious gaze of capital.²⁷ Like La Huasteca in Myrna Santiago’s The Ecology of Oil, they are unique environments stripped down to produce commodities and extract resources for the market, only to become sites of conflict between workers and owners.²⁸ Like Bengal in Debjani Bhattacharyya’s Empire and Ecology, they are liminal environments entirely reordered to support a population of millions for the profit of a few.²⁹ And like so many important corners of the globe, Çukurova has long awaited an environmental history of internal colonization buried under the national space of modern historiography.³⁰

The Late Ottoman Frontier

Like so many such places, Çukurova was a settlement frontier, a space where modern societies were produced through what James Belich terms the settler revolution.³¹ These frontiers saw foreign people, ecologies, and state forms imposed upon local communities in some fashion, and they were ubiquitous in nineteenth-century empires. What follows will certainly harken to the history of the American West, the Russian East, French Algeria, South Africa, and a host of other examples of the unending frontiers inherited from early modern empires.³² The Ottoman frontier is special among this club, not just because it has barely been included within its historiography, but also because the Ottoman Empire was contracting as a territorial entity. Over the course of its last century, the tricontinental empire lost provinces in Europe and North Africa to incursions by European empires and uprisings by national independence movements. By its end, all that was left was Anatolia, Thrace, and the lands of the Arab Mashriq.

The historiography of the late Ottoman frontier is currently most robust at the empire’s edges in North Africa, the Arabian Peninsula, and the borderlands of Eastern Anatolia and Iraq. It shows that even while losing territory, Ottoman officials harbored expansionist visions.³³ Thomas Kuehn’s work on late Ottoman expansion in Yemen and its Tanzimat imperialism has explored how in seeking to secure its frontiers, officials adopted an approach to local communities that resembled the practices of modern European colonialism in the production of both knowledge and political difference.³⁴ However, less distant from its major centers, the Ottoman Empire produced a different and, in some ways, more intense frontier experience in the Balkans, Anatolia, and Syria. The wars and territory it lost in the Black Sea region, the Balkans, and the Aegean produced millions of refugees who settled in the remaining Ottoman domains. Designated as muhacir (pl. muhacirin), the vast majority of these refugees were Muslims, and they received Ottoman nationality.³⁵ A new immigrant class became the vanguard of an empire-wide program of iskân, or settlement, projected not out into the wild expanses of a territory in the process of being conquered but rather into pockets of sparse population and contested hegemony that had been part of the empire for centuries. Meanwhile, as Isa Blumı notes, finance capitalism created a particular kind of refugee exposed to a form of exploitation that increasingly scoured the earth for cheap labor.³⁶ Migrants of various sorts became central to the commercialization of the Ottoman countryside and the emergence of local forms of capitalism, which further expanded the environmental frontier.

The fate of the Ottoman Empire’s new class of settlers became intertwined with the reform of the Ottoman government known as the Tanzimat, aimed at reasserting central imperial control to increase tax revenues and meet the needs of a growing, modern conscript army. The provinces became the site of a bold program of rural reorganization which Milen Petrov has aptly described as Tanzimat for the countryside.³⁷ The project of Tanzimat for the countryside began in full force after the Crimean War (1853–56), when provincial reform became central to government policy. New land tenure policies, infrastructural projects, water and forest management, and the promotion of novel crops and commercial agriculture were accompanied by efforts to settle millions of migrants throughout the empire. The Tanzimat government also employed its own nomadic population in this settlement program, sometimes by constructing new villages and compelling pastoralists, such as Ömer’s Avşar ancestors, to change their modes of habitation. Though its policies took different forms and brought different impacts from region to region, in total Tanzimat in the provinces amounted to an Ottoman civilizing mission. The policies initiated under the Tanzimat reforms continued to shape the Ottoman countryside under Sultan Abdülhamid II, as well as under the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP) that usurped him in the constitutional revolution of 1908. The Republic of Turkey—largely built by former CUP figures and other former Ottoman officials—expanded the vision of the Tanzimat even further.

Although frontier settings varied widely from place to place within the Ottoman Empire, the imaginaries of the frontier were portable. Similar rhetoric was applied to settlement in regions with environments very different from Çukurova’s. The most striking example perhaps is the Ottoman project to settle Cretan Muslim refugees in Cyrenaica (eastern Libya) at the turn of the twentieth century, recently examined by Frederick Walter Lorenz. These migrants were envisioned as a vanguard of Ottoman civilization and cultivation in an area dominated by nomadic communities that were cast as savage in official discourse. Moreover, just as in Çukurova, Ottoman officials promoted the idea of developing Cyrenaica as a second Egypt, gesturing to how the project of the late Ottoman settlement frontier was tied to the idea of recovering the wealth lost through territorial contraction in the Balkans and Egypt’s de facto independence.³⁸

The late Ottoman frontier was a frontier in three senses. It was a frontier of the state, a space in which new forms of state presence were asserted or reasserted in rural settings.³⁹ It was also a settlement frontier involving millions of people on the move. Finally, it was an ecological frontier, one in which novel plants, animals, microbes, methods of land use, modes of agrarian production, forms of resource extraction, and environmental understandings emerged in tandem with the processes of state-building, settlement, and commercialization. Key to the concept of frontier as defined above is that the most important spaces of the Ottoman frontier were not necessarily regions of political borderlands. They were pockets of transformation within the Ottoman provinces, and there is a growing body of work dealing with these spaces, though not always under the precise heading of frontier and more frequently under the heading of provincial reform.⁴⁰ The concept of the frontier not only sharpens our understanding of what was taking place in such spaces but also draws attention to what they shared. When treated as a collective, these disparate provinces reveal a common story that was central to the remaking of Ottoman society. Çukurova’s historical experience contained many of the dynamics typical of the frontier moment.

One such dynamic, which has received the most attention,