What might an animal history of the modern Eastern Mediterranean and North Africa look like? This essay begins to answer this question by considering the influences of more recent attention to the environment generally and animals specifically in regional historiography and its relationship to animal history more broadly. The essay explores the dimensions of these histories by synthesizing some of the research on a number of non-human animals, among them camels, mosquitoes, locusts, sheep (and a few goats), water buffalo (and a few cattle), and dogs amid capitalist and colonial transformations of the world. In different ways and in different places, these creatures helped shape the nature of Orientalism, racialization, and colonial hierarchies; they helped determine urban design, transport infrastructure, and commodity flows; and they helped influence the fate of the Zionist project, the nature of the Armenian genocide, and the reality of Ottoman legal reforms. In sum, the essay presents animals as both material forces acting beyond human control and as cultural objects onto and through whom humans articulated visions of order and difference.
One morning in 2014 a funny thing happened on the way to the archive. I was walking from my apartment in Istanbul’s Kurtuluş neighborhood past vacant lots and medical buildings before the perilous drop down to Kağithane and the Ottoman archives, where I had been reading about the history of rabies in the 1890s Ottoman Empire. Enamored with Louis Pasteur and his new treatment for the ailment, the empire paid for anyone suspected of rabies throughout the imperial domains to come to Istanbul and receive the required treatment. But before reaching the archive that morning, I took a turn and found myself cornered by three burly dogs. I had seen them before, but typically they slept on mattresses arranged by people in the neighborhood who cared for them with food, water, and attention. But on this morning, the dogs were awake. One growled. I was alone on the street. I looked for something I might use to distract or (I shudder to say as a dog lover) fight if the creatures chose to attack. This was, after all, one of those instances that reveal the ineluctable fact that our elaborate positions on agency matter little when we suddenly realize that, as Bénédicte Boisseron has put it, “the bite is real,” or that we might be, in Brett Walker’s words, “meaty prey species.”1 Probably, the dogs would have simply wagged their tails if I approached and let me pass. But I didn’t take the chance. I went back the way I came. My path to the archive to read about dogs, rabies, and urban space in the past had itself been shaped by dogs in the present. In response to the overly cultural directions of animal studies in the 1990s and 2000s, Sandra Swart pithily asked, “Where’s the bloody horse?”2 But we might also repurpose this query toward the modern history of Southwest Asia and North Africa that has only recently incorporated animals into history as part of an explicit frame of environmental history. There on that Kurtuluş sidestreet were the bloody dogs.
Far apart in some ways, Middle East history and environmental history and, with it, animal history have in other respects followed similar paths. Although rarely placed together, Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978) and William Cronon’s Changes in the Land (1983) offered important cultural readings of the process of empire and settler colonialism. They helped set in motion a wave of work in this vein that, among many other things, queried what law, nation, or a certain place meant just as much as what law, nation, or place did. Before the financial crisis of 2008 but with renewed vigor after, both Middle East history and animal history have been attempting to respond to the hegemonic position of cultural history and overly discursive analyses of animals (hence Swart’s retort).3 In the process, historians have attempted to avoid “the Scylla of anthropomorphism and the Charybdis of anthropocentrism.”4 To steer clear of both, they have relied on ethology (the science of animal behavior) and their own experiences in order to approach the material and, in some cases, social worlds of animals, to be apprehended through the underwater songs of whales or, perhaps, the “blood, feces, urine,” and other detritus at the scene of a wolfpack’s kill of an elk.5 In a distinct but nevertheless similar way, one turn of Middle East Studies over the last decade and a half has also involved grappling with the material world in new ways, whether of wetlands or an electrical grid.6 A turn to the non-human has undoubtedly aroused suspicions. Why so much concern for non-human agency at precisely the time of the Arab Spring, the Gezi Park protests, and other social movements? Some of that reluctance to incorporate animals, too, might stem from legacies of the colonial era, when animals merited more concern than certain humans; the racist Lord Cromer, British proconsul of Egypt, was famously an advocate of animal rights.7 But there is also an empirical dimension of this work. For all of my surprise about the nerve-racking encounter with the dogs of Kurtuluş, the historical actors I study would have had little confusion about the power of dogs or, for that matter, camels and locusts in their everyday lives. As Erica Fudge writes, “if the peasant laborers and smallholders of early modern England worried about their livestock—which they did—shouldn’t we, as historians, be concerned about them too?”8
Fudge’s provocation is not simply to catalogue human worries but to convey with precision and dynamism the way that animals’ lives shaped the cultural and material worlds of different humans. Integrating these two realms by grappling seriously with animals all around humans, this essay offers some possibilities on what animal histories of Southwest Asia and North Africa might be, and what kinds of questions they might answer.9 It does so by synthesizing existing research—no small portion of it scholarship on seemingly non-animal topics into which animals happened to wander, swarm, or bark—on camels, mosquitoes, locusts, sheep (and a few goats), water buffalo (and a few cattle), and dogs.10 In different ways and in different places, these creatures helped shape the nature of Orientalism, racialization, and colonial hierarchies; they helped determine urban design, transport infrastructure, and commodity flows; and they helped influence the fate of the Zionist project, the nature of the Armenian genocide, and the reality of Ottoman legal reforms. The division of scholarly labor according to the arbitrary boundaries of area studies might lead us to assume there is something specific about the relationship between people and animals within this space. On this question, I’m less convinced. Instead, I see animal histories of Southwest Asia and North Africa as much in line with and connected to broader capitalist and colonial transformations of the modern world. Rooted in the deserts, swamps, mountains, and farmlands of the modern Eastern Mediterranean and the Ottoman world, this essay is an invitation to notice the sleeping—and sometimes startlingly awake—dogs that have been alongside humans all along, and what cultural and material worlds they have created with humans.
Camels
Few animals exert a more lingering impact on the imagination of the Middle East than the camel. It makes sense that historians might want to do away with camels altogether, given how much these seemingly awkward, hump-backed creatures and their silhouette on the desert horizon have so often eclipsed clear-eyed analysis of history and people. No less a figure than George Perkins Marsh—from whom the American Society for Environmental History takes the name of its best book prize—decried the way that camels had destroyed the environment of the region, which in his view would have been covered in dense forests were it not for these creatures. As Diana Davis has argued, Marsh’s view was emblematic of an age when to call a place a desert was in fact an accusation that someone had improperly used the environment to make it so, and more often than not those people were local nomadic pastoralists.11 (Marsh viewed nomadic pastoralists and Native Americans as linked, even speculating what might happen if Native Americans gained access to the camel.)12 But these were not the only ways that the camel became a symbol of the region’s subordinate status. As On Barak has argued, the image of the dying camel attained prominence in paintings of Egypt in the 1880s as a symbol of backwardness.13 The Ottoman anarchist Pavel Shatev—exiled from Macedonia to Libya in the early 1900s—noticed camels themselves observing the skeletons of camels that had previously died on the same path. The sight prompted Shatev to reconsider the different power dynamics of humans and animals: “we [humans] were in the hands of the tyrant [Sultan Abdülhamid II], and only tyranny we experienced in this hot land, but at the same time we were tyrants ourselves.”14 If camels could be used to convey harsh landscapes, they were also employed in the realm of the exotic, such as in the use of a flying camel as the symbol of the Levant Fair in Tel Aviv in the 1930s.15 With this lineage, it is perhaps no surprise that a plodding and tortured camel appeared in the opening sequence of the 1992 Disney film Aladdin, bringing the viewer through a torrid desert to the fantastical city of Agrabah. The film’s producers amended certain aspects of the film and its opening sequence out of sensitivity to the ongoing Gulf War (the fantastical Agrabah had originally been called Baghdad), but the stuff of stereotypes remained, and the environment was a key part of it.
Although sometimes obscured by their role as symbols, camels also did things, helped along by their famous ability to endure lack of water. Indeed, one of the lingering images of Orientalist racism is the idea of “the Islamic city,” a supposedly irrational den of alleys and irregular streets defying order and control. While some equated this urban form with what they viewed as the flaws of the Muslim mind, they ignored the logic at work in this design and its profound connections to camel commerce. As Richard Bulliet has observed, the demise of the wheel in Southwest Asia in favor of the camel was “a technological advance rather than a step backward.”16 After all, camels did not require roads to move. Moreover, accommodating camels in cities rather than wheeled vehicles allowed for “streets suited more closely to human needs.”17 Far from a symptom of the illogic of the Muslim mind, then, the camel for Bulliet underpinned a particular kind of urbanism, one in which “the street could become an open market or a narrow cul-de-sac giving access to residences.”18 Camels were not at odds with technological innovation, but rather were crucial forces in how people designed infrastructure and cities.
There are other examples of how alleged forces of modernity—far from supplanting camels—in fact relied on them. Whether in Egypt, Hijaz, or the fig-growing heartland of Aydın, railroads did not replace camels, but rather intensified their use.19 Moreover, the 19th-century Ottoman state deployed camels in desert regions to project its power, both to collect taxes and to manage nomadic pastoralists.20 The Egyptian navy had a camel corps.21 The US government even found the prospect of camels attractive enough that Secretary of War Jefferson Davis (later president of the Confederate States of America) imported dromedaries for use in the American Southwest in the mid-19th century.22 Thus, while Marsh saw camels as a destructive force used unwisely by people on a lower wrung of civilizational hierarchy, the United States and the Ottoman Empire saw them as allies in arid ecologies. As new mobile beekeeping techniques emerged in late-19th-century Palestine, bees traveled on camels from the orange blossoms of Jaffa to the bushes of za’atar in the hills.23 In the midst of World War I, the Ottoman publication Desert Illustrated even revealed a dromedary vision of control, with a masthead featuring camels next to soldiers, railroads, and the pyramids as well as photographs of hundreds of camels drinking from watering troughs on the southern frontier of Bir al-Saba’.24
At times, the camels were sacrificed as disposable bodies. Lack of provisioning on the Sinai front in World War I produced what one Ottoman officer called the “largest camel massacre in the history of warfare.”25 Elsewhere, two Ottoman officers (one of them, future prime minister of Turkey İsmet İnönü) discussed how to get more supplies to eastern Anatolia.26 To do so, camels were to be transported via train from the south to Resülayn, located today on the border between Syria and Turkey. They would then transport supplies north through the freezing winter. In response to fears that the animals could not handle the colder temperatures of the north, İnönü allegedly stated, “They’ll carry supplies from the train station to the front once, only once, and die,” an echo of Ottoman officer and later the first President of the Republic of Turkey Mustafa Kemal’s famous orders to humans that he was not ordering them “to attack but rather to die.”27 But camels could be useful even in death. As İnönü added, “We’ll make rawhide sandals out of their hides.”28
Mosquitoes
According to Faruk Tabak, the 17th century was a good time to be a mosquito in the Eastern Mediterranean. With the changes in precipitation during the Little Ice Age along with broader social crises, cultivation generally moved up the hillsides while many coastal plains were left to swamps and malaria.29 Humans at the time had little sense that the annoying insects might have been disease vectors, but people nevertheless had the empirical sense that staying in the lowlands during the summer meant sickness, often with some connection to miasmatic theories of disease (indeed, the miasma that is present in the roots of the word malaria itself—“bad air”). It was not only air but also earth. Proverbs—such as “he who plays with the soil digs his own grave” (toprakla oynayan mezarını kazar)—underscored this point.30 People responded to these conditions with patterns of transhumance that avoided disease through summers in mountain pastures. But increasingly in the late 19th century, various states across the Mediterranean wanted to take advantage of the fertile coastal plains. While lacking the specific knowledge of mosquitoes as vectors of malaria, solutions had to be crude: either leave the swamp, or turn the swamp into something else. To help coax subjects to enact the latter, the Ottoman Empire added a provision to its land law in 1882 to allow people to gain title to land if they “reclaimed” it.31 The large landholding class of the Eastern Mediterranean has loomed in regional historiography as political powerbrokers and, in several cases, those who sold lands to the emerging Zionist project.32 Rarely has this process been connected to the late Ottoman political ecology of swamp drainage.
The discovery of the malaria parasite and the theorization of mosquitoes as vectors—occurring, not coincidentally, in the colonial settings of French Algeria in 1880 and British India in 1901, respectively—allowed for more targeted interventions that altogether transformed the small insect’s stature.33 Mosquito control and swamp drainage were crucial to the Zionist project, particularly the second and third aliyot, in which prevailed the romantic notion of agrarian labor as a means of transcending European anti-Semitism.34 Concerns about mosquitoes stretched far beyond Palestine. Indeed, as Chris Gratien has shown, in the midst of World War I, Ottoman construction of rails through the Taurus Mountains and the movement of people—mobilized soldiers, fleeing refugees, deported Armenians—even allowed malaria to erase the previous relationship in which altitude “had served as the antidote to the malaria of the lowlands,” a striking reminder of the ways that creatures like mosquitoes dynamically took advantage of human infrastructures to expand their range.35 The Republic of Turkey took strident measures to respond to the lingering crisis in the wake of the Ottoman Empire. As Kyle and Emine Evered have documented, few sources make the case of the mounting significance of mosquitoes better than public health posters on which gigantic mosquitoes prepare to attack villages and bite embattled peasants themselves.36 If malaria had previously referred to an ailment linked to diffuse air, in these posters, the insects themselves appear to be equated with the condition. While swamp drainage remained common, new insecticides such as Paris green were sprayed in people’s homes as part of “a war against mosquitos.”37 As Linda Nash and many others have pointed out, these new understandings and interventions in the environment had enormous consequences on humans, as bodies themselves became archives of insecticides.38
The persistence of mosquitoes and malaria in historical records both calls to mind Erica Fudge’s previously mentioned rhetorical question, and offers perspective on one of the most widely cited pieces of scholarship on the Eastern Mediterranean, Timothy Mitchell’s Rule of Experts. For many scholars of the region, his essay “Can the Mosquito Speak?”—the title a play on Spivak’s famous “Can the Subaltern Speak?”—remains the epitome of what a non-human history might look like. Mitchell is concerned with how the legacies of 19th-century social sciences have simplified explanations and erased important non-human forces from histories. The essay traces the range of forces that brought a malaria epidemic upon Egypt during World War II, including “the hydraulic energy of the Nile River, the chemical properties of ammonia, the feeding patterns of the anopheles mosquito, the career making of a Rockefeller epidemiologist, the supply lines sustaining an army at war, the reproductive cycle of the plasmodium parasite, the anti-colonial struggle of Egyptian nationalism, the world’s increasing chemical addiction to sugar, and DDT’s preference for fatty tissue, to name a few.”39 In offering this critique of the compartmentalization of disciplinary knowledge, Mitchell also makes a compelling and lyrical case for the importance of understanding history as multicausal. Yet it is also noteworthy that at the time of the malaria epidemic that prompted Mitchell’s question, malaria and mosquitoes alike were the object of a political struggle between the leading Egyptian nationalist party the Wafd, the British, and the Egyptian palace.40 In fact, the Egyptian satirical press featured cartoons of the bugs, including one that presented a statue of the malaria-spreading female with a plaque sarcastically reading “the heroine of 1944.” Mitchell was right to call attention to the limits of non-human forces in standard histories, not least because people at the time had little doubt about these matters.
Locusts
If the place of mosquitoes changed over time in relation to understandings of their role in malaria, locusts required no such path. No understanding of parasites was necessary to see what locusts were up to. “A cloud of locusts five hours wide and two hours deep” was no “secret issue,” one Ottoman parliamentarian commented.41 As Semih Çelik has noted, scholarship on locusts—and creatures deemed vermin or pests in general—has tended to accept without question state discourse about the relationship between these creatures and humans, often in the form of militarized or medicalized language of “invasions” and “outbreaks” (fewer have taken the language of vampirism, which Çelik observes was also applied to locusts).42 If scholars have been more reluctant to take up these views, historical actors have been less so. Indeed, the Moroccan locust—whose range extended from the place its name suggests all the way to Central Asia—was, for example, sometimes referred to in Arabic as “the human locust” because of the way it seemed to follow human agriculture into arid regions.43 The role of the locust in the Jazira region underscores this point, as the region’s transformation through the expansion of cultivation made locusts into a distinct if not altogether new problem.44
Whether locusts were entering human landscapes or humans were entering, as Çelik puts it, animalscapes, there is little dispute about their association with devastating consequences. Their impact was not simply a reflection of humans against nature, but was rather refracted through colonial hierarchies. In French Algeria (conquest hastened, in part, by the French consul’s use of a fly whisk against the Ottoman ruler of Algiers), the 1860s witnessed multiple crises revealing the nature of the French colonial project. In 1866, locusts struck. In response, state officials did not reveal a “sense of mastery over the environment” but rather “an awed recognition of the helplessness of human agency in the face of nature and god.”45 As many scholars have observed and Yan Slobodkin describes in relation to the locusts in Algeria, the decision of how to define the natural disaster was a deeply political one. For the French, the main victims of the locusts were settlers with their export-oriented crops.46 If the French were, as Diana Davis has suggested, resurrecting the granary of Rome in Algeria, there was a locust corollary: they, just like Roman soldiers, fought the locusts.47 Little empathy extended to indigenous Algerians, who also suffered from the locusts but whom the French blamed for their alleged inaction in relation to the swarms, which they facilely attributed to Muslim fatalism. With little French concern or material support, the subsequent famine and cholera epidemic killed somewhere between a quarter and a third of the indigenous population.48 Moreover, the famine—in part induced by locusts—became a justification for expanding settler land claims.49 In a similar way, scholars have observed the political value of the “natural” cause of locusts in the famine in Mount Lebanon during World War I. Attributing the staggering death toll to winged insects conveniently obscured the role that humans—whether in the form of the Allied blockade or local profiteers—played in mass death.50 In other words, locusts were the perfect scapegoats.51 If attention to what locusts are blamed for is revealing, so too is the question of who is compared to locusts. As Nevcihan Özbilge has described, in the 1930s in the Republic of Turkey, Kurds were compared to locusts at precisely the time that state forces unleashed new forms of violence against them.52 As Claire Jean Kim has argued, “the more economically threatening a species is perceived to be, the more deeply it is racialized,” and the image of locust swarms has bolstered many of these representations.53
As with all animals, the material and cultural aspects of locusts did not remain apart. One of the clearest examples of these dynamics occurred in the Ottoman Jazira. Small hills dotted the region, yet they were not naturally-occurring geological formations, but rather the accumulation of dirt on ancient cities.54 When Ottoman officials or European travelers looked on these protuberances, they dreamed of restoring the desert landscape, wasted, they believed, by locust-like nomadic pastoralists who—like the region’s winged marauders—periodically appeared on the horizon to feast on the fruits of settled agriculture. But outsiders did not realize that as they expanded farming into the pasture lands of the region’s nomadic pastoralists, locusts were using those same hills for mating and egg laying while feasting on the new cereal bounty being offered to them. The material and the cultural became further entangled in the early 20th century. As state officials deployed arsenic compounds in the 1920s and ’30s to poison locusts, they also poisoned pastures, the flocks who fed on them, and, in some cases, nomadic pastoralists themselves. The people compared to locusts suffered some of the same consequences of the chemicals aimed at the insects.55
Sheep (and a Few Goats)
Like camels, sheep have sometimes been blamed for the environmental demise of the region, rather than recognized as sensible means of transforming sunlight into any number of other commodities in an arid landscape. Indeed, far from revealing a timeless practice lost deep in the desert, a look at sheep (and a few goats) offers insights into commodity chains, legal reforms, and some of the central categories of social life. At the center of these relations was the fact that Southwest Asia and North Africa are unique in the extent to which “grasslands and arable lands exist in mosaic,” as J. R. McNeill has suggested.56 And as Faisal Husain has observed, “no mammalian herbivore was as effective as sheep” in transforming these grasslands into energy.57 As much sheep-raising took place in deserts under the stewardship of nomadic pastoralists, there has long been a popular association between the institution of the tribe and sheep (often with an evolutionist aspect, depicting people who cared for animals at a lower level of civilization than those who cultivated). Some scholars have insisted that the term “tribe” carries all kinds of denigrating associations and obscures the extent to which this category emerges out of an interaction between state and society.58 One of the bolder claims in this regard comes from Husain, whose research on early modern Ottoman Iraq demonstrates not only that most people preferred to diversify their resource gathering strategies by both cultivating the land and raising animals.59 He also shows how tribal confederations may approximate European guilds.60 Following sheep in the 19th century points toward interesting paths. They—or at least their wool—moved as commodities to France and Britain.61 Their meat found its way to Egypt.62 As for the sheep themselves, they certainly wandered across vast distances on the ecological margins, transforming seasonal grasses and water into money and, conversely, suffering along with their human people in times of drought and cold.63 Sheep did not remain far off in the distance; indeed, questions of animals as property even led to sheep and other creatures being tied up outside courtrooms so as to make their identification easier for claimants in disputes over animal theft.64
Sheep also provide perspectives on space and sometimes fleeting efforts of states to control it. In the midst of the Armenian genocide, many Armenian boys survived by working as shepherds for nomadic pastoralists in the arid Jazira region and beyond; one even recalled speaking Armenian with his sheep so as not to forget.65 When the British created a camp for Assyrian refugees in interwar Iraq, they also explicitly created an “animal camp” in which Assyrians could raise their animals.66 The presence of shepherding pastoralists in the arid borderlands of various post-Ottoman states forced colonial states into managing flows far more than protecting borders.67 The newly national landscape retained its difficult-to-police migratory currents. “It is rather difficult…to tell an Iraqi camel from a Syrian camel,” one French colonial official dryly noted.68 The same was true of sheep. To resolve the issue, French authorities charged Bedouin authorities with verifying the provenance of sheep. What this meant in practice was that a Bedouin authority near the border would provide a certificate verifying that sheep were, for example, Syrian, even though they had spent considerable time in Iraq, and thus not subject to taxes. Another dimension of these dynamics was the differential trade regimes existing between the mandate territories and the Republic of Turkey, which secured handsome profits for sheep smugglers.69 In fact, it was smuggling more than a military threat that prompted the laying of land mines along the border between Turkey and Syria.70 Many sheep died in these fields, immortalized by the explosive sequence in Yılmaz Güney’s 1966 Hudutların Kanunu. These questions remain present even as shepherding methods changed in the late 20th century, with sheep and forage alike transported by truck.71
As with so many other creatures, sheep and goats helped to bolster notions of human difference. While much has been written about denigration of nomadic pastoralists in the Ottoman Empire, little has attended carefully to the implications of people who raise animals being often referred to as “wild” or “savage” (vahşi).72 The case of the goat and Mandatory Palestine offers an especially clear example of this dynamic. Building on British ideas of animal order, goats were so hated that they were likened by one observer to “a black locust with poisonous saliva.”73 Goats also had human associations. In an example of what Tamar Novick calls the “racialization and ethnicization of goat management,” one mid-20th-century Israeli agriculture official remarked that “the country is desolate because of the Arabs and because of the goats. We got rid of the Arabs.”74
Water Buffalo (and Some Cattle)
The role of ungulates in settler colonialism looms large, whether in the destruction wrought by roaming cows or the destruction of the bison.75 Although histories of conquest in the Americas have long shaped the field of environmental history, the place of water buffalo in the Ottoman Empire seems to encompass different aspects of these patterns. A peasant song in Egypt even declared “you shine, o Nile, like the eyes of a female water buffalo.”76 But buffalo inspired more than lyricism. They underpinned the economic exploitation of watery ecologies that were decidedly not the fenced fields of New England in Cronon’s Changes in the Land. Sometimes the water buffalo incubated rebellion against the state.77 Their hooves could be used to trample lions hunted along the Euphrates, and their dung could be used as a fly repellent or as mortar in structures.78 They could also be mobilized in the service of the state. The Ottoman army occasionally conscripted the creatures to haul cannons.79 When they were returned to their familiar mountain climes, they carried brands to denote their time in the army. In 1848, men in Kocaeli, to the immediate east of Istanbul, placed their kin and animals in a similar position as they complained that they could not undertake agriculture. Their sons had departed for cities, and their water buffalo had been requisitioned to drag timber down from the mountains.80 Of course, water buffalo did not always follow directions. One traveler noted that newly placed telegraph poles in late-19th-century Ottoman Iraq carried the communications traffic of the empire, and also proved popular among the water buffalo for scratching hard-to-reach places. Officials dug trenches around the poles to try to prevent the practice, but water buffalo insisted: “that contented look on the faces of the beasts, as they rubbed their itching backs, could almost make one fancy that they were ejaculating, ‘God bless the Duke of Argyle!’”81 Or at least so imagined one American observer.
Beyond water buffalo, cows and oxen were far more present across the Ottoman Empire. Like sheep and camels, the reliance on these creatures could sometimes be used to denigrate.82 Like sheep and camels, they were also useful. Before mechanization, cows and oxen provided muscle to plow soils and turn water wheels while their bodies provided warmth, their excrement provided fertilizer or fuel, and the milk of females provided nutrition.83 To help refugees fleeing the Balkans and the Russian Empire in the 19th century, the Ottoman Empire issued oxen to them for free.84 This reliance made the animals’ suffering all the more devastating for the people who relied on them. Perhaps no one has situated their work into animal history more squarely than Alan Mikhail, who has suggested that epizootics in late-18th-century Ottoman Egypt wiped out the animal labor force and transformed humans into beasts of burden under Mehmet ‘Ali in the early 19th century.85 Indeed, the Ottoman Empire occupied a geographically significant place in relation to the global spread of ailments like the virus rinderpest, and scholarship is just beginning to spell out what kinds of consequences these disease outbreaks had in the countryside.86 The empire may have lost as much as 86.5% of its cattle to disease and the hardship of mobilization during World War I, by some estimates, a statistic that must have had tremendous consequences for rural workers and their energy regimes reliant on both animal power and fossil fuels.87 It was around this same time that steam-powered transport and refrigeration, meanwhile, enabled consumption of meat in unprecedented ways. As On Barak has observed, meat-centered intercommunal tensions overlapped with the infrastructure of coal stations and colonialism and were indeed in many ways fueled by these relationships.88
Tractors may well have taken the place of some of this animal labor, but it was likely not as stark as the changes for water buffalo.89 As swamps were drained across the region, it was not only the habitat for mosquitoes that dried up but also that of water buffalo. Indeed, as Tamar Novick has detailed, in some cases opposition to water buffalo was driven by how they interfered with water management practices, ruining carefully crafted drainage canals.90 The buffalo population of Palestine, for example, plummeted from its heights in the Ottoman period.91 If water buffalo went away with the draining of the Huleh Swamp, they began to occupy a different place in the Kızılırmak Delta near the Black Sea Coast of Turkey. The region is a protected wetland under the Ramsar Convention, but the form of conservation allows for water buffalo to winter in their owners’ villages on the outskirts of the reserve and summer in the delta’s waters.92 Their yogurt is sold at local farmers’ markets; in one case, university students, exhorted by their professor to take off their shoes and walk through the mud of the delta, were even told, “Now you have all learned to be water buffaloes—to feel the wetland.”93
Dogs
And what of the forebears of the dogs who turned me away in Kurtuluş a decade ago? There is a long history of canine-human relations in Istanbul and the region more broadly. As Alan Mikhail has argued, the notion of unchanging Muslim antipathy toward dogs is misguided.94 As in most places in the world, street dogs served a utility for many centuries as urban scavengers who, in lieu of a Department of Sanitation, kept the streets clean while also providing some sense of companionship held in common rather than privately.95 They also had the added benefit, one observer wrote, that “they never go on strike.” In the premodern and early modern world dogs also occasionally aroused the ire of authorities, resulting in killing campaigns. As in the case of camels, the dogs of Istanbul, too, became an object of Orientalist fascination. As the middle classes of cities like Paris, London, and New York constructed a regime of public health, private property, and spatial control, each city became what Chris Pearson has called “dogopolis.”96 In this process, they frequently defined themselves in relation to—which is to say against—Istanbul and its canine culture.97 Mark Twain notably spoke up in defense of Istanbul’s dogs; he had heard that they “moved about in organized companies, platoons, and regiments” and attacked anyone without “a red fez on their heads.”98 But in his experience, they mostly slept. “The dogs I see here,” he concluded, “can not be those I have read of.”99
If some people saw dogs as constituting the difference between the Ottoman Empire and the rest of Europe, the ruling Committee of Union and Progress infamously took measures to close this gap. In the span of a few days in August of 1910, authorities gathered up the street dogs and deported them to a small island in the Sea of Marmara. The dogs were to be supplied with food and water there, a sort of permanent exile. But no rationing occurred. The creatures slowly starved to death, although many were forced to eat each other before they succumbed. The howls haunted the city of Istanbul. The actions also did little to convince Europeans that Istanbul belonged within the realm of civilization. If Istanbul had been backward because of the presence of dogs, the deportation of the dogs proved Ottoman backwardness yet again for its brutality.100 Political exiles ruefully noted that the regime was treating dogs the way it did political opponents but Europe’s sympathy only extended to Ottoman dogs, not Ottoman humans.101
Yet, for as gruesome as the scene was, the city’s dogs nevertheless lived on both in memory and in the flesh. They were, in Cihangir Gündoğdu’s words, “among the first victims of the modern Ottoman state,” emblematic of the way that the empire treated certain humans.102 Serge Avédikian’s animated short Chienne d’Histoire presented a similar correlation between treatment of humans and people. Reminiscent of what Bénédicte Boisseron has insisted about the “mutual” nature of “racialization and animalization,” the language of dogs even extended to the question of what to do with Armenian genocide survivors in the wake of World War I.103 On the desire of some to return to the Republic of Turkey, one remarked, “even a dog, after you have beaten him ten times over, goes back to his kennel.”104 As Jonathan Saha has observed in a review of numerous pieces of scholarship offering a variation on Robert Darnton’s The Great Cat Massacre, “the mass killing of animals” often stands as “synecdoche for some larger historical process,” rather than an event in and of itself.105 But dogs survived in the flesh, too, thanks to their ability to flee the dog catchers and to humans who helped to hide them. Others became accepted as indoor pets in conjunction with broader shifts in economy and class.106 A more gruesome likelihood connects memory and flesh, as well. Some dogs also lived on during the lean years of World War I by consuming the many corpses produced by genocide, famine, and war. The glowing nighttime eyes of canines (including dogs but also wolves and jackals as well) and their depredations haunt many survivor accounts.107 Street dogs periodically received attention as objects of extermination in the 1920s and ’30s, with poisons distributed on city streets, tails redeemable for bounties, and lively comics attesting to the entire process.108 But dogs and people together resisted the efforts at depopulation. Some reports suggested that rural-to-urban dog migration replenished the city’s streets.109 Human interventions, meanwhile, diluted the potency of authorities’ attacks on the creatures, feeding, for example, yogurt to dogs to help neutralize poisons. As with the case of mosquitoes and malaria, the case of dogs and rabies also transformed human relationships with the creatures. Whereas with mosquitoes the new understanding of disease prompted a clear-cut campaign of annihilation, the new understandings of rabies initiated treatment of humans and the vaccination of dogs. Indeed, as disconcerted as I was that morning in Kurtuluş on the way to the archive, I also knew that the dogs were vaccinated against rabies by the municipality.
“There Is No Political Substance”
In the fallout from the Gezi Park protests of 2013, courts handed a life sentence in prison to the Turkish businessman, philanthropist, and civil society activist Osman Kavala, a move widely criticized as violating human rights and democratic norms. Among the evidence presented against him was a map found on his cell phone, which prosecutors described as violating the country’s “territorial integrity” by redrawing the borders of the Republic of Turkey.110 With a shaded zone in southeastern Turkey stretching across the border south into Syria, one might have seen designs of a Kurdish state on the map. Yet in reality the map in question depicted the range of particular species of honeybee drawn from Friedrich Ruttner’s Biogeography and Taxonomy of Honeybees. “The region’s native (endemik) plant and animal species caught my attention,” Kavala explained. “There is no political substance.”111 Kavala was of course right in the sense that the state was going to absurd lengths to prosecute (and persecute) him. But as this episode and this broader account of animals in human history ought to suggest, it is actually quite difficult to disentangle the animal from the political and the social. This is so not only in a crude material sense, in terms of asking how certain ecologies—and their creatures—might structure certain politics, extraction regimes, or kinds of identity. The latter example is perhaps especially relevant in the case of Kurdistan, because in an effort to deny Kurdishness as an identity attached to political claims in this zone, the Republic of Turkey brought together environment and nation. In these accounts, there was no such thing as Kurds so much as “Mountain Turks.”112 One can deploy the environment to deny difference yet at the same time to construct a resonant marker of difference. It is also difficult to disentangle the human and the non-human on a more abstract level, which relates to how humans regularly project the political onto the natural and vice versa. Indeed, if the map showed “bee species” (arı ırkları)—ırk being the same word for race—it seems relevant that the study of various species itself was not an apolitical endeavor, but instead one co-constituted with thinking about human notions of race.113
And for all I have said about bees, camels, mosquitoes, locusts, buffalo, sheep, and dogs, I have left most animals out. What of the trafficked geckos of Ottoman Libya?114 The ostriches of the Sahara?115 The hyena monster of Sinop?116 Storks nesting in the courtyards of mosques? The last crocodile of Palestine?117 Dancing bears of Istanbul?118 The rhinoceros of Sudan?119 The disappearing wolf of Anatolia and the emergent far-right Grey Wolves? The pigs formerly kept by Christians that turned into wild boars?120 The sea monster in Terkos Lake outside of Istanbul?121 The French colonial equation of the anti-colonial Front de libération nationale with a tapeworm in the film The Battle of Algiers (1966) and Jalal Al-e Ahmad’s likening of colonialism to an “infestation of weevils”?122 And how dare I get this far in the essay and not mention horses?123 Clearly much remains to be done. I started this essay by taking a different path to the archive. Answering some of these questions will also rely on taking different paths to the archive and different ways of noticing the creatures that have been there all along. The last time I visited the Ottoman archives in Kağithane, along the way I didn’t come across the city’s many dogs, who had become subject to renewed controversy as President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan threatened legislation that would cull street dogs through mass euthanasia. Activists charged that Erdoğan was seeking a wedge issue to make up for election losses in many municipalities, and criticized the measure as a “massacre law.”124 However, outside the archives, I looked down on the sidewalk and found a concrete archive of these creatures’ traces.125
Dog footprints in the sidewalk outside of the Devlet Arşivleri Bakanlığı Osmanlı Arşivi, Istanbul. Photo by author, 2024.
Dog footprints in the sidewalk outside of the Devlet Arşivleri Bakanlığı Osmanlı Arşivi, Istanbul. Photo by author, 2024.
Published online: December 11, 2024
Notes
Brett Walker, “Animals and the Intimacy of History,” History and Theory 52 (December 2013): 48; Bénédicte Boisseron, Afro-Dog: Blackness and the Animal Question (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018), 69.
Sandra Swart, “‘But Where’s the Bloody Horse?’: Textuality and Corporeality in the ‘Animal Turn,’” Journal of Literary Studies 23.3 (2007): 271–292.
Boisseron, Afro-Dog, 67–68.
Susan J. Pearson and Mary Weismantel, “Does ‘The Animal’ Exist?: Toward a Theory of Social Life with Animals,” in Beastly Natures: Animals, Humans, and the Study of History, ed. Dorothee Brantz (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2010), 17.
Brett Walker, The Lost Wolves of Japan (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2005), 134; Bathsheba Demuth, The Floating Coast: An Environmental History of the Bering Strait (New York: Norton, 2019), 272–273.
Aaron Jakes, “A New Materialism? Globalization and Technology in the Age of Empire,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 47.2 (2015): 369–381; Fredrik Meiton, Electrical Palestine: Capital and Technology from Empire to Nation (Oakland: University of California Press, 2019); Caterina Scaramelli, How to Make a Wetland: Water and Moral Ecology in Turkey (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2021).
Alan Mikhail, The Animal in Ottoman Egypt (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 179; Samera Esmeir, Juridical Humanity: A Colonial History (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012), 124–132.
Erica Fudge, “Milking Other Men’s Beasts,” History and Theory 52.4 (2013): 21. See also Onur İnal, “One-Humped History: The Camel as Historical Actor in the Late Ottoman Empire,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 53.1 (2021): 71.
In bringing together the cultural and the material, I find Bello and Burton-Rose’s formulation to be useful, in which they describe their work as “constructivist in historicization and contextualization of all systems created by humans that claim objectivity, and…materialist in insisting on a concrete reality underlying potentially infinite representational regimes.” David Bello and Daniel Burton-Rose, “Introduction,” in Insect Histories of East Asia (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2023), xvii. See also Pearson and Weismantel, “Does ‘The Animal’ Exist?”
Although the works of self-defined animal history are few in this field, this is changing, as suggested by a glance at the robust lineup at the May 2024 “Animals in the Anatolian and Turkish History Conference” put together by Penn State University’s History Department and Koç University’s Research Center for Anatolian Civilizations. See also Deniz Dölek-Sever, “Hayvan Tarihi: Osmanlı-Türkiye Geçmişine Türlerarası Perspektifle Bakmak,” Reflektif: Sosyal Bilimler Dergisi 5.2 (2024): 241–260.
Diana Davis, The Arid Lands: History, Power, Knowledge (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2016), 93.
George Perkins Marsh, The Camel: His Organization, Habits and Uses Considered with Reference to His Introduction into the United States (Boston: Gould and Lincoln, 1856), 189.
On Barak, On Time: Technology and Temporality in Modern Egypt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013), 37.
Aleksandar Shopov, “‘Fezan Is the Siberia of Africa’: Desert and Society in the Prison Memoir of Pavel Shatev (1882–1951), An Anarchist from Ottoman Macedonia,” Global Environment: A Journal of Transdisciplinary History 12.1 (2019): 244–245.
Yael Zerubavel, Desert in the Promised Land (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2019), 53.
Richard Bulliet, The Camel and the Wheel (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), 217. See also Suraiya Faroqhi, “Camels, Wagons, and the Ottoman State,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 14 (1982): 523–539.
Bulliet, The Camel and the Wheel, 226.
Bulliet, The Camel and the Wheel, 226.
Barak, On Time, 37; Cyrus Schayegh, The Middle East and the Making of the Modern World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017), 71; Onur İnal, “Fruits of Empire: Figs, Raisins, and Transformation of Western Anatolia in the Late Nineteenth Century,” Environment and History 25.4 (2019): 562.
Talha Çiçek, Negotiating Empire in the Middle East: Ottomans and Nomads in the Modern Era, 1840–1914 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2021), 93, 215.
Matthew Ellis, Desert Borderland: The Making of Modern Egypt and Libya (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2018), 1.
Natalie Koch, Arid Empire: The Entangled Fates of Arizona and Arabia (New York: Verso, 2022), 13–14. See also Alfred Crosby, Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900–1900 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015, first published 1986), 95, 274, 278; Gary Paul Nabhan, Arab/American: Landscape, Culture, and Cuisine in Two Great Deserts (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2008), 20–28.
Tamar Novick, Milk and Honey: Technologies of Plenty in the Making of a Holy Land (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2023), 34–35.
Musavver Çöl, 15 Mart 1333 (15 March 1917).
In this regard they would have to compete with the staggering camel losses in the Second Anglo-Afghan War (1878–1880), which amounted to somewhere near 65,000. Elephants commissioned to drag dead camel carcasses themselves died. Önder Eren Akgül, “War on the Desert: The Militarization of the Sinai and Its Greater Syrian Sacrificial Frontier during World War I,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 56 (2024), 96; James Hevia, Animal Labor and Colonial Warfare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018), 33, 42.
Yiğit Akın, When the War Came Home: The Ottomans’ Great War and the Devastation of an Empire (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2018), 111.
Akın, When the War Came Home, 112.
Akın, When the War Came Home, 112.
Faruk Tabak, The Waning of the Mediterranean, 1550–1870: A Geohistorical Approach (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008), 199.
Chris Gratien, “The Ottoman Quagmire: Malaria, Swamps, and Settlement in the Late Ottoman Mediterranean,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 49.4 (2017): 589.
Gratien, “The Ottoman Quagmire,” 593.
Rashid Khalidi, Palestinian Identity: The Construction of Modern National Consciousness (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 106–114.
James Webb, Humanity’s Burden: A Global History of Malaria (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 128–129.
Sandra Sufian, Healing the Land and the Nation: Malaria and the Zionist Project in Palestine, 1920–1947 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007).
Chris Gratien, The Unsettled Plain: An Environmental History of the Late Ottoman Frontier (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2022), 158–164.
Kyle T. Evered and Emine Ö. Evered, “State, Peasant, Mosquito: The Biopolitics of Public Health Education and Malaria in Early Republican Turkey,” Political Geography 31.5 (2012): 311–323.
Gratien, The Unsettled Plain, 198, 207.
Linda Nash, Inescapable Ecologies: A History of Environment, Disease, and Knowledge (Oakland: University of California Press, 2007).
Timothy Mitchell, Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-Politics, Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 51.
Nancy Gallagher, Egypt’s Other Wars: Epidemics and the Politics of Public Health (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1990), 56–76.
Samuel Dolbee, Locusts of Power: Borders, Empire, and Environment in the Modern Middle East (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2023), 141.
Semih Çelik, “Humans in Animalscapes: Reconstructing Vermin-Human Interactions in Rural Anatolia and Mesopotamia (ca. 1600–1850),” Diyar 3.1 (2022): 51, 57. For more on metaphor and problem animals, see Lucinda Cole, Imperfect Creatures: Vermin, Literature, and the Sciences of Life (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2016); Colin Jerolmack, “How Pigeons Became Rats: The Cultural-Spatial Logic of Problem Animals,” Social Problems 55.1 (2008): 72–94; Lisa T. Sarasohn, Getting Under Our Skin: The Cultural and Social History of Vermin (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2021).
Alexandre, Latchininsky, “Moroccan Locust Dociostaurus maroccanus (Thunberg, 1815): A Faunistic Rarity or an Important Economic Pest?,” Journal of Insect Conservation 2 (1998): 171.
Dolbee, Locusts of Power.
Yan Slobodkin, The Starving Empire: A History of Famine in France’s Colonies (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2023), 20.
For more on North Africa, colonial agriculture, and animals, see Jackson Perry, “‘Conquered by Sparrows’: Avian Invasions in French North Africa, circa 1871–1920,” Environmental History 25.2 (2020): 310–334.
Slobodkin, The Starving Empire, 22.
Slobodkin, The Starving Empire, 15.
Slobodkin, The Starving Empire, 30–32.
Zachary J. Foster, “The 1915 Locust Attack in Syria and Palestine and Its Role in the Famine during the First World War,” Middle Eastern Studies 51.3 (2015): 370–394; Graham Auman Pitts, “‘Make Them Hated in All of the Arab Countries:’ France, Empire, and the Creation of Lebanon,” in Environmental Histories of the First World War, ed. Richard P. Tucker, J. R. McNeill, and Martin Schmid (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 175–190.
Of course, sometimes people were blamed for locusts as well. See Zeynep Akçakaya, “Resilient Locusts, Ignorant People, Modern State and Scientific Knowledge: A Late Ottoman Human-Animal-State History,” Middle Eastern Studies (2024): 1–9.
Nevcihan Özbilge, Çekirgeler, Kürtler ve Devlet: Erken Cumhuriyet Dönemine Yeniden Bakmak (Istanbul: Tarih Vakfı Yurt Yayınları, 2021).
Claire Jean Kim, Dangerous Crossings: Race, Species, and Nature in a Multicultural Age (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015): 57–58, 155. See also Jeannie Shinozuka, Biotic Borders: Transpacific Plant and Insect Migration and the Rise of Anti-Asian Racism in America, 1890–1950 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2022), 163.
Dolbee, Locusts of Power, 18–19.
Dolbee, Locusts of Power, 216–232.
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, 2012), 34.
Faisal Husain, Rivers of the Sultan: The Tigris and the Euphrates in the Ottoman Empire (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021), 89.
Nora Barakat, “Making ‘Tribes’ in the Late Ottoman Empire,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 53.3 (2021): 482–487.
Husain, Rivers of the Sultan, 92.
Husain, Rivers of the Sultan, 89–91.
Sarah Shields, “Sheep, Nomads, and Merchants in Nineteenth-Century Mosul,” Journal of Social History 25.4 (1992): 773–789.
See Yonca Köksal Özyaşar and Can Nacar, Anatolian Livestock Trade in the Late Ottoman Empire (Leiden: Leiden University Press, 2024).
Zozan Pehlivan, “El Niño and the Nomads: Global Climate, Local Environment, and the Crisis of Pastoralism in Late Ottoman Kurdistan,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 63 (2020): 316–356.
Nora Barakat, “Marginal Actors? The Role of Bedouin in the Ottoman Administration of Animals,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 58 (2015): 125.
Dolbee, Locusts of Power, 210.
Benjamin Thomas White, “Humans and Animals in a Refugee Camp: Baquba, Iraq, 1918–20,” Journal of Refugee Studies 32.2 (2018): 221.
R. S. G. Fletcher, “Running the Corridor: Nomadic Societies and Imperial Rule in the Inter-war Syrian Desert,” Past & Present 220 (2013): 185–215.
Centre des Archives diplomatiques de Nantes, 1SL/1/V/553, Hode to Le Comte de Martel, 1 February 1935.
Ramazan Hakkı Öztan, “The Great Depression and the Making of Turkish-Syrian Border, 1921–1939,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 52.2 (2020): 311–326.
Jordi Tejel, Syria’s Kurds: History, Politics and Society, trans. Emily Welle and Jane Welle (London: Routledge, 2009), 67–68.
Dawn Chatty, Camel to Truck: The Bedouin in the Modern World (New York: Vantage Press, 1986), 107, 121, 139.
Selim Deringil, “‘They Live in a State of Nomadism and Savagery’: The Late Ottoman Empire and the Post-Colonial Debate,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 45.2 (2003): 311–342.
Novick, Milk and Honey, 58.
Novick, Milk and Honey, 62, 73. Violence against donkeys has also occupied a place of prominence alongside violence against humans in representations of the nakba. Emile Habiby, The Secret Life of Saeed, the Pessoptimist, trans. Salma K. Jayyusi and Trevor LeGassick (Northampton, MA: Interlink Books, 2001), 6; S. Yizhar, Khirbet Khizeh, trans. Nicholas de Lange and Yaacob Dweck (Jerusalem: Ibis Editions, 2008), 19–20.
Virginia Anderson, Creatures of Empire: How Domestic Animals Transformed Early America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004); Andrew Isenberg, The Destruction of the Bison: An Environmental History, 1750–1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
Jennifer Derr, The Lived Nile: Environment, Disease, and Material Colonial Economy in Egypt (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2019): 25.
Faisal Husain, “In the Bellies of the Marshes: Water and Power in the Countryside of Ottoman Baghdad,” Environmental History 19.4 (2014): 647.
Lady Anne Blunt, Bedouin Tribes of the Euphrates (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1879), 79; Husain, Rivers of the Sultan, 105.
Ali Yaycıoğlu, “Ottoman Montology: Hazardous Resourcefulness and Uneasy Symbiosis in a Mountain Empire” in Crafting History: Essays on the Ottoman World and Beyond in Honor of Cemal Kafadar, ed. Rachel Goshgarian, Ilham Khuri-Makdisi, and Ali Yaycıoğlu (Brookline, MA: Academic Studies Press, 2023), 363.
Semih Çelik, “‘It’s a Bad Fate to Be Born Near a Forest’: Forest, People and Buffaloes in Mid-Nineteenth Century North-Western Anatolia,” in Seeds of Power: Explorations in Ottoman Environmental History, ed. Onur İnal and Yavuz Köse (Cambridgeshire, UK: Whitehorse Press, 2019), 122–123.
John Punnett Peters, Nippur, vol. 1 (New York: Putnam’s Sons, 1898), 170.
Camille Lyans Cole, “The Ottoman Model: Basra and the Making of Qajar Reform, 1881–1889,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 64.4 (2022): 1024.
On the gendered dimensions of both human labor and animal production of milk, see Novick, Milk and Honey, 2–4, 99–123. Another overlap of gender and animal history would be the concept of tarbiyya, referring both to the raising of humans and animal husbandry. See Susanna Ferguson, Labors of Love: Gender, Capitalism, and Democracy in Modern Arab Thought (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2024).
Ella Fratantuono, Governing Migration in the Late Ottoman Empire (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2024), 165.
Mikhail, The Animal in Ottoman Egypt, 38.
Mehmet Ak, “Osmanlı Devleti’nde Veba-i Bakari (Sığır Vebası),” Ankara Üniversitesi Osmanlı Tarihi Araştırma ve Uygulama Merkezi Dergisi 39 (2016): 215–240; Matthew Ghazarian, “A Climate of Confessionalization: Famine and Difference in the Late Ottoman Empire,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 54 (2022): 492; Pehlivan, “El Niño and the Nomads.”
Akın, When the War Came Home, 140. On energy regimes and animals, see On Barak, Powering Empire: How Coal Made the Middle East and Sparked Global Carbonization (Oakland: University of California Press, 2020): 53–82.
Barak, Powering Empire, 80–81.
Much to the consternation of bureaucrats in the Republic of Turkey, tractors might be commandeered to go to a wedding, the movies, or, in one potentially apocryphal story, to take relatives to Germany. Begüm Adalet, Hotels and Highways: The Construction of Modernization Theory in Cold War Turkey (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2020), 154.
Novick, Milk and Honey, 20.
Novick, Milk and Honey, 19.
Scaramelli, How to Make a Wetland, 139–140.
Scaramelli, How to Make a Wetland, 107.
Mikhail, The Animal in Ottoman Egypt, 69–83.
J.P.B., “The Capitals of Eastern Europe. Constantinople: 1.” 26 May 1904, The Times of India, 4. On the worlds of another scavenging species, see Thom van Dooren, Flight Ways: Life and Loss at the Edge of Extinction (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014): 58.
Chris Pearson, Dogopolis: How Dogs and Humans Made Modern New York, London, and Paris (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021).
Pearson, Dogopolis, 29, 36.
Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad, or the New Pilgrims’ Progress (Hartford, CT: American Publishing Company, 1869), 373.
Twain, The Innocents Abroad, 370.
İrvin Cemil Schick, “İstanbul’da 1910’da Gerçekleşen Büyük Köpek İtlafı: Bir Mekan Üzerinde Çekişme Vakası,” Toplumsal Tarih 200 (August 2010): 22–33; Cihangir Gündoğdu, “The State and the Stray Dogs in Late Ottoman Istanbul: From Unruly Subjects to Servile Friends,” Middle Eastern Studies 54.4 (2018): 555–574; Efe Khayyat, “The Turk That Therefore I Follow,” in Postcolonial Animalities, ed. Suvadip Sinha (New York: Routledge, 2019), 73–88; Catherine Pinguet, Les chiens d’Istanbul: des rapports entre l’homme et l’ animal de l’Antiquité (Saint-Pourçain-sur- Sioule, France: Bleu, 2008).
“Les chiens de Constantinople,” Mecheroutiette, 1 August 1910.
Gündoğdu, “The State and the Stray Dogs in Late Ottoman Istanbul,” 555.
Boisseron, Afro-Dog, 2.
Lerna Ekmekçioğlu, “Debates Over an Armenian National Home at the Lausanne Conference and the Limits of Post-Genocide Co-Existence,” in They All Made Peace—What Is Peace? The 1923 Treaty of Lausanne and the New Imperial Order, ed. Jonathan Conlin and Ozan Ozavcı (Chicago: Gingko Library, 2023), 127.
Jonathan Saha, “A Historiography of Great Animal Massacres,” in Animals as Experiencing Entities: Theories and Historical Narratives, ed. Michael Glover and Les Mitchell (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2024), 172. On the employment of street dogs in novels treating violence and the Kurdish question, see Hande Gürses, “Soundscapes of the Nation: Silenced Others and Animal Languages in Haw and Oko,” Diyar 3.1 (2022): 116–130.
Cihangir Gündoğdu, “Dogs Feared and Dogs Loved: Human-Dog Relations in the Late Ottoman Empire,” Society & Animals 31 (2023): 25–46.
Samuel Dolbee, “The Desert at the End of Empire: An Environmental History of the Armenian Genocide,” Past & Present 247 (2020), 216; Tylor Brand, Famine Worlds: Life at the Edge of Suffering in Lebanon’s Great War (Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press, 2023), 51, 53.
Ömer Obuz, Osmanlı’dan Erken Cumhuriyet’e Hayvan Katliamları ve Himaye: Kediler, Köpekler, Kargalar (Istanbul: İletişim Yayınları, 2022).
“Serseri Köpekler,” Akşam, 2 January 1934.
“Gezi Parkı iddianamesinde ‘Türkiye’nin toprak bütünlüğünün bozularak sınırların yeniden çiziliyor’ denilen harita arıcılık haritası çıktı!” T24, 5 March 2019. https://t24.com.tr/haber/gezi-parki-iddianamesinde-turkiye-nin-toprak-butunlugunun-bozularak-sinirlarin-yeniden-ciziliyor-denilen-harita-aricilik-haritasi-cikti,810986
“Mahkeme, Osman Kavala’nın Tutukluluk Halinin Devamına Karar Verdi,” Bianet, 8 October 2019. https://bianet.org/haber/mahkeme-osman-kavala-nin-tutukluluk-halinin-devamina-karar-verdi-214109
Salih Can Açıksöz, Sacrificial Limbs: Masculinity, Disability, and Political Violence in Turkey (Oakland: University of California Press, 2020), 15–44. See also Deniz Duruiz, “‘I Would Have Recognized You from Your Smell’: Racialization of Kurdish Migrant Farmworkers in Western Turkey,” in Kurds in Dark Times: New Perspectives on Violence and Resistance in Western Turkey, ed. Ayça Alemdaroğlu and Fatma Müge Göçek (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2023), 164–191.
Peter Coates, American Perceptions of Immigrant and Invasive Species (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007); Harriet Ritvo, The Animal Estate: The English and Other Creatures in the Victorian Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), 93–98; Jeannie Shinozuka, Biotic Borders: Transpacific Plant and Insect Migration and the Rise of Anti-Asian Racism in America, 1890–1950 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2022).
Türkiye Cumhuriyeti Cumhurbaşkanlığı Devlet Arşivleri Başkanlığı Osmanlı Arşivi (BOA), DH.MKT 1074/14.
Sarah Abrevaya Stein, Plumes: Ostrich Feathers, Jews, and a Lost World of Global Commerce (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010).
BOA, ŞD 1641/4.
Elizabeth Bentley, “Between Extinction and Dispossession: A Rhetorical Historiography of the Last Palestinian Crocodile (1870–1935),” Jerusalem Quarterly 88 (Winter 2021), 9–29. The language of animals in Palestine has accompanied the genocidal assault on Gaza in the present. Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian has discussed the video clip of a Palestinian girl in Gaza asking her cats not to eat her if she were killed. There is also, of course, Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant’s declaration shortly after October 7 that “we are fighting human animals and we are acting accordingly.” Omer Bartov, “As a former IDF solider and historian of genocide, I was deeply disturbed by my recent visit to Israel,” The Guardian, August 13, 2024, https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/aug/13/israel-gaza-historian-omer-bartov; Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, “Ashlaa’ and the Genocide in Gaza: Livability against Fragmented Flesh,” Hot Spots, Fieldsights, October 31, 2024. https://culanth.org/fieldsights/ashlaa-and-the-genocide-in-gaza
Deniz Dölek-Sever, “Captive Wild Animals as Visual Commodities in the Ottoman Empire: A Historical Review,” Middle Eastern Studies 60.3 (2024): 374–376.
Taylor M. Moore, “An (Un)Natural History: Tracing the Magical Rhinoceros Horn in Egypt,” Isis 114.3 (2023): 469–489.
For a related case, see Thomas Fleischman, Communist Pigs: An Animal History of East Germany’s Rise and Fall (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2020), 145–166.
Kate Fleet, “The Provision of Water to Istanbul from Terkos: Continuities and Change from Empire to Republic,” in Middle Eastern and North African Societies in the Interwar Period, ed. Kate Fleet and Ebru Boyar (Leiden: Brill, 2018), 212–213. On less fantastical creatures in the Terkos watershed, see K. Mehmet Kentel, “Nature’s ‘Cosmopolis’: Villagers, Engineers, and Animals along Terkos Waterworks in Late Nineteenth-Century Istanbul,” in Seeds of Power: Explorations in Ottoman Environmental History, ed. Onur İnal and Yavuz Köse (Cambridgeshire, UK: Whitehorse Press, 2019), 155–183.
Jalal Al-i Ahmad, Occidentosis: A Plague from the West, trans. R. Campbell, ed. Hamid Algar (Berkeley, CA: Mizan Press, 1984), 27.
Suraiya Faroqhi, “Means of Transportation and Sources of Pride and Joy: Horses in the Hands of Officials and Notables,” in Animals and People in the Ottoman Empire, ed. Suraiya Faroqhi (Istanbul: Eren, 2010), 293–312; Choon Hwee Koh, “The Mystery of the Missing Horses: How to Uncover an Ottoman Shadow Economy,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 64.3 (2022): 576–610; Donna Landry, Noble Brutes: How Eastern Horses Transformed English Culture (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009).
“Turkey Approves ‘Massacre Law’ to Remove Millions of Stray Dogs,” The Guardian, 30 July 2024.
Acknowledgments: Thanks to Deanna Cachoian-Schanz, Deren Ertaş, Matthew Ghazarian, Faisal Husain, Nancy Jacobs, Alan Mikhail, Helen Pfeifer, Serkan Taycan, and Arianne Sedef Urus for helpful conversations and careful readings that greatly improved this piece. Thanks, too, to Daniel Vandersommers, Ted Geier, and Margaret Moore for their patient shepherding during the editorial process.
University of California Press