In the Bellies of the Marshes: Water and Power in the Countryside of Ottoman Baghdad

The Delta is Dead: Moral Ecologies of Infrastructure in Turkey

“…Hoping to understand the Gediz Delta from Barbaros's boat, I had envisioned writing about a delta animated by the movement of fish, technology, sediments, boats, birds, plants, capital, bacteria, currents, and multiple waters (Barnes and Alatout ; Richardson ; Yates, Harris, and Wilson ). This delta, like other watery environments in Turkey and beyond, had also been shaped by nineteenth‐ and twentieth‐century state‐led marsh reclamation projects to obtain new land for agriculture, industry, and cities, to create new populations of national subjects, and to displace nomadic marsh dwellers (Özesmi ; Biggs ; Evered ; Husain ; Guarasci ; Gruppuso ). But in proclaiming the death of the delta from his hillside concrete apartment block, Captain Barbaros emphasized why, and to whom, these changes mattered.…”

The Ottomans During the Global Crises of Cholera and Plague: The View From Iraq and the Gulf

“…4 Moreover, the region's unique ecological challenges often threatened to unravel the stability of Ottoman rule, especially during times of scarcity and state-tribal conflicts featuring ill-conceived tactics of hydraulic warfare. 5 The combination of these factors also played a role in making the region particularly susceptible to epidemics, whether these were caused by geographically specific reasons or the regular movement of goods and people across vast distances. And by the 19th century, when the consequences of such epidemics were exacerbated both by the increased speed of human mobility and the region's fragile hydraulic infrastructure, this reality incentivized the Ottoman state's increased intervention in the matter of disease prevention, often building on previous efforts and shaping Ottoman rule and understandings of sanitation in the Iraqi provinces and surrounding Gulf region in significant and previously unexplored ways.…”