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Water Without Borders: Tribes and Water Rights along the Ottoman-Qajar Frontier

Thu, March 15, 8:30 to 10:00am, Riverside Convention Center, MR 8

Abstract

For much of its history, the Ottoman Empire controlled the vast majority of the Tigris river. Ottoman control over the Tigris’ various tributaries, however, was always incomplete, as several of these tributaries originated in the territory of the Ottoman Empire’s Persian neighbors before flowing into Ottoman territory and connecting with the Tigris. During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, this reality assumed greater importance in the context of international efforts to demarcate the Ottoman Empire’s porous frontier with the Qajar state – the Persian state that neighbored the Ottoman Empire for most of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries – and establish a fixed border. In this context, disputes over water rights garnered unprecedented attention.

Drawing on British and Ottoman archival sources, this paper focuses on one manifestation of this broader phenomenon: a dispute in 1900 between Arab tribes under Ottoman rule and Persian tribes under Qajar rule over the right to draw water from a tributary that was experiencing low water levels on both the Ottoman and Qajar sides of the tributary. This episode is worth discussing because it highlights issues that are of interest to environmental historians and Ottomanists alike. First, it reminds us that “[e]cological processes unfold with no regard for borders” (McNeill, 2003) – in this case unexpected low water levels. Second, it reveals the extent to which the otherwise contentious relationship between the Ottoman government and tribal populations in the empire’s Arab lands could turn into one of cooperation when state and tribal interests aligned – in this case the Arab tribes’ desire to defend their water rights and the Ottoman government’s desire to assert the empire’s sovereignty, territorial integrity, and dominion over nature.

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