The Euphrates as a Fluvial Highway: Uniting the Keban-Ergani Mining Nexus in the 18th Century

• In Event: Placing the Tigris and Euphrates in Global Environmental History

Abstract

In the summer of 1740, heavy spring rains caused the Euphrates River to overflow, diverting rafts carrying a substantial amount of wood fuel intended for the smelting furnaces at the Keban Mine, a major site of copper, gold, and silver extraction in what is southeastern Turkey today. Despite its periodic unreliability, the Euphrates River and its tributaries became the preferred means of shipping logs and charcoal downstream from northern forests in the 1730s and 1740s. This replaced overland transportation that relied on beasts of burden, the cost of which increased as logs and charcoal had to be procured from more distant woodlands due to deforestation. This shift to waterways was driven by the need to balance the mines’ increasing fuel requirements with the demands of loggers and charcoal burners to reduce transportation costs. The treacherous waters around the headwaters of the Euphrates River required specific technologies like keleks, rafts made of sheepskin that flowed downstream without human direction, and a system of docks and storage units along the riverbanks. Despite efforts to preserve the wood flowing downstream, the volatile waters could also do significant damage to production in the mines when resources got lost on their way downstream. Drawing on a range of sources in the Ottoman state archives — accounting registers, petitions, and decrees — this paper argues that the Upper Euphrates River and its tributaries formed a “fluvial highway” that transformed the local economy and unified the extractive geography of the Keban-Ergani mining nexus. Conversant with recent approaches in political ecology and new materialism, it shows how nature and economy were co-constitutive in the context of the Ottoman Empire.

Author

• Deren Ertas, Harvard University