The landscapes of the Middle East have captured our imaginations throughout history. Images of endless golden dunes, camel caravans, isolated desert oases, and rivers lined with palm trees have often framed written and visual representations of the region. Embedded in these portrayals is the common belief that the environment, in most places, has been deforested and desertified by centuries of misuse. It is precisely such orientalist environmental imaginaries, increasingly undermined by contemporary ecological data, that the eleven authors in this volume question. This is the first volume to critically examine culturally constructed views of the environmental history of the Middle East and suggest that they have often benefitted elites at the expense of the ecologies and the peoples of the region. The contributors expose many of the questionable policies and practices born of these environmental imaginaries and related histories that have been utilized in the region since the colonial period. They further reveal how power, in the form of development programs, notions of nationalism, and hydrological maps, for instance, relates to environmental knowledge production.
Contributors: Samer Alatout, Edmund Burke III, Shaul Cohen, Diana K. Davis, Jennifer L. Derr, Leila M. Harris, Alan Mikhail, Timothy Mitchell, Priya Satia, Jeannie Sowers, and George R. Trumbull IV
Tabella dei contenuti
- List of Illustrations
- Preface by Edmund Burke III
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction. Imperialism, Orientalism, and the Environment in the Middle East
History, Policy, Power, and Practice
Diana K. Davis - 1. “A Rebellion of Technology”
Development, Policing, and the British Arabian Imaginary
Priya Satia - 2. Restoring Roman Nature
French Identity and North African Environmental History
Diana K. Davis - 3. Body of Work
Water and Reimagining the Sahara in the Era of Decolonization
George R. Trumbull IV - 4. From the Bottom Up
The Nile, Silt, and Humans in Ottoman Egypt
Alan Mikhail - 5. Drafting a Map of Colonial Egypt
The 1902 Aswan Dam, Historical Imagination, and the Production of Agricultural Geography
Jennifer L. Derr - 6. Remapping the Nation, Critiquing the State
Environmental Narratives and Desert Land Reclamation in Egypt
Jeannie Sowers - 7. Salts, Soils, and (Un)Sustainabilities?
Analyzing Narratives of Environmental Change in Southeastern Turkey
Leila M. Harris - 8. Hydro-Imaginaries and the Construction of the Political Geography of the Jordan River
The Johnston Mission, 1953–56
Samer Alatout - 9. Environmentalism Deferred
Nationalisms and Israeli/Palestinian Imaginaries
Shaul Cohen - Afterword
Timothy Mitchell - Contributors
- Index
Circa l’autore
Edmund (“Terry”) Burke III is a research professor of history at the University of California at Santa Cruz. He is the author of numerous books, including Genealogies of Orientalism: History, Theory, Politics, edited with David Prochaska.
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