Table of Contents for The Unsettled Plain
Introduction
Although its borders were contracting, the Ottoman Empire became a settler state over the course of the nineteenth century. The history of the late Ottoman settlement frontier illuminates many rural spaces that have been marginal within the historiography but have been central to the making of the post-Ottoman world. Çukurova, a fertile but sparsely populated littoral plain at the historical juncture of Anatolia and Syria, in many ways embodied the Ottoman frontier experience. Its history reveals the extent to which the societies of the modern Middle East were shaped by overlapping and intersecting stories of migration and displacement, as well as the political dimensions of environmental questions like malaria, an old disease with a distinctive modern history.
1.Upland Empire: The Indigenous Ecology of Ottoman Cilicia
From the vantage point of nineteenth-century empires, the Ottoman Empire included, Çukurova was an unsettled, unruly backwater defined more by what it lacked than what it contained. This narrow view rooted in a civilizational discourse obscured the complexity and richness of local life in the historical region of Cilicia. Over the course of centuries, local political actors achieved a high degree of autonomy from medieval and early modern empires. Armenian villagers and Turkic pastoralists alike developed intimate and complex relationships with the local environment and geography. Seasonal migration between the mountains and the lowlands allowed generations of Cilicians to enjoy good lives in what otherwise may have been a harsh, insalubrious environment. But their mobility also endowed the mountains with political significance, facilitating the rise of a local elite that in some ways held greater influence in the region than the Ottoman government itself.
2.The Stench of Progress: Ecology and Settlement on the Ottoman Frontier, 1856–78
During the high Tanzimat period (1856–78), the Ottoman state oversaw the settlement of tens of thousands of immigrants and pastoralists in Çukurova. The settlement policies were rooted in the discourse of a civilizing mission that would bring local prosperity while also strengthening the empire. However, this mission clashed with the longstanding ecology of seasonal migration in Cilicia. The subjects of Ottoman settlement policy suffered from inability to adjust to a new life, beleaguered by malaria epidemics that nearly wiped out an entire generation of their communities. As a result, they resisted the state, forcing a transformation of the environmental underpinnings of settlement policy to account for local conditions and acknowledge the rights of Çukurova's diverse communities of immigrants and pastoralists to enjoy a healthy life.
3.Second Nature in the Second Egypt: Capital, Ecology, and Intercommunality in Late Ottoman Cilicia, 1878–1914
A cotton boom in the 1860s coinciding with the US Civil War caused many foreign observers, local merchants, and Ottoman governors to imagine that Çukurova could become a "Second Egypt" of agricultural prosperity in the Eastern Mediterranean. Over subsequent decades, financiers, landowners, and officials invested in the transformation of the countryside, making Cilicia one of the most commercialized regions in the Ottoman Empire. This economic metamorphosis created a "second nature" of environmental conditions shaped by human activity. While cotton transformed swamps into plantations, it also engendered new rhythms that subjected Çukurova's tens of thousands of seasonal workers to acute malaria risk. The Ottoman state reacted with new environmental and medical interventions aimed at quelling the fever. But many socioeconomic dimensions of the new Çukurova were uneven, and communal rifts emerged in the spaces of the late Ottoman frontier that had been profoundly impacted by settlement and capital.
4.Fallowed Years: War, Environment, and the End of Empire, 1914–23
Çukurova's commercial economy had never been stronger, but the realities of World War I brought an abrupt collapse. The region transitioned to a new ecology dominated by the war. Labor effects of mobilization, loss of trade, and the mass deportation of Armenians derailed the economy, displacing and decimating the population. The region reached the brink of starvation, and the ecology of war produced a surprising malaria epidemic in the very highlands once believed to be impervious to the disease. The war also gave rise to new politics in which the state, military, and humanitarian actors played a role in dimensions of local life such as agriculture, public health, and mere sustenance.
5.A Modern Life of Transhumance: Change and Continuity in the Republic of Turkey, 1923–56
Despite the rupture of World War I, the dynamics of the Ottoman frontier endured into the early decades of the Republic of Turkey. The new government placed the village at the center of a nation-building project, deploying science to govern and transform rural society. Çukurova became a laboratory of experimentation with agricultural methods and solutions to old issues like malaria. Results were mixed. Meanwhile, the emergent elite developed an appreciation for the environment as an expression of the nation's beauty and a repository of authentic Turkish culture. Yet it coincided with the marginalization of the region's indigenous pastoralists, as the mountains became a space of bourgeois leisure.