Placing the Tigris and Euphrates in Global Environmental History

Session Submission Type: Complete Panel

Abstract

This panel brings together new historical work on the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, from their headwaters in northeastern Asia Minor to the deltaic marshlands of the Persian Gulf, between the sixteenth and twentieth centuries. Whereas the Nile River has long held pride of place in histories of the Middle East and global histories of capitalism, historians have only recently turned their attention to the Tigris and Euphrates. Focusing on this region that stands between the eastern Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean presents an opportunity to rethink the early modern and modern spaces of state formation and capitalism. Doing so from the perspective of western Asia’s two longest rivers allows a better understanding of how fluvial geographies shaped and were shaped by subsistence strategies, extractive industries, commercial agriculture, and mass engineering projects. The river system emerges as both an integrated whole and the site of divergent local practices of modification and use, mediated by the variegated hydrologies of the two rivers. Larger-scale projects to manipulate the waterways come into focus as sites of contestation and cooperation between riverine communities, capital, and state authorities.

In pursuing these inquiries, the papers in this panel converse with recent environmental histories of rivers while pursuing methodological approaches that develop out of the Middle East and have wide-ranging applicability for historians of other regions. Focusing on the early modern period, Faisal Husain’s research points to diverse forms of subsistence in upper and lower river basins while Deren Ertas’s paper details the Euphrates River’s use as a “fluvial highway” for the extractive nexus in the Ottoman East. Drawing on more recent histories, Nathaniel Moses examines the formation of a “moral hydrology” in central Iraq in the late nineteenth century and Dale Stahl connects science fiction and engineering projects in the context of 20th-century Turkey.

Sub Unit

• ASEH Annual Conference

Individual Presentations

• Sixteenth-Century Subsistence Strategies in the Tigris-Euphrates Basin: Case Studies from Diyarbakır and Erbil - Faisal Husain, Penn State University

• The Euphrates as a Fluvial Highway: Uniting the Keban-Ergani Mining Nexus in the 18th Century - Deren Ertas, Harvard University

• Moral Hydrologies of the Late Ottoman Tigris and Euphrates Rivers - Nathaniel Moses, PhD Candidate in History at Harvard University

• The (Non-)Fictions of Extraction: Connecting Linguistic and Material Constructions in the Tigris-Euphrates River Basin - Dale Stahl, University of Colorado Denver

Chair

• Andrea Duffy, Colorado State University