Moral Hydrologies of the Late Ottoman Tigris and Euphrates Rivers

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

Abstract

In August of 1879 a “virtuous woman from Karbala” took it upon herself to “clean” the Husayniyya River which delivered water from the Euphrates to the shrine city. This paper attempts to understand her actions and those of other ordinary Ottoman subjects who attempted to influence the flows of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers during a period marked by increasingly intensive imperial and expert hydraulic interventions. In response to the incessant floods and droughts of the two rivers, those living on their banks protested, petitioned, and participated in engineering efforts, actions I survey through close readings of Ottoman administrative documents and contemporary periodicals. These engagements articulated to the late Ottoman state what I call a set of moral hydrologies. Drawing on studies of “moral economy” and recent scholarship in agrarian studies, I situate this popular claim-making within the commercialization of agrarian land and life in late Ottoman Iraq; the way in which flood and drought were experienced as disastrous was intensified by the period’s economic transformations. Finally, I attend to the temporal politics of moral hydrology, grounded in cultivators’ claims to the stability of a recent past in contrast to the engineers and administrators whose visions for the Tigris and Euphrates rivers moved between ancient glory and unbounded future accumulation.

Author

• Nathaniel Moses, PhD Candidate in History at Harvard University