ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Bedouin Knowledge and the Foundations of Imperial Extraction in the Late Ottoman Arab Frontiers (1900-1918)

• In Event: Resource Management, Defined and Redefined

English Abstract

Before the outbreak of World War I, the Arabian Peninsula’s arid regions beyond urban centers were almost unmapped; their interior was legible only to insiders, the nomadic Arab tribes called the Bedouins. The war made what was unintelligible newly legible. As Ottoman, German, and British strategic ambitions in the region expanded, the ability to traverse, supply, and militarize these spaces became an urgent requirement. Drawing on Ottoman state archives alongside British and German military intelligence records, this project demonstrates that imperial mobility and communication in the Hijaz, Palestine, Sinai, and the Syrian steppe were fundamentally dependent on Bedouin environmental expertise: desert navigation, topography, hydrological knowledge, camel breeding and transport, climatic literacy, and the material technologies of endurance such as tents and protective clothing. Without these, imperial powers could neither move, communicate, nor survive in the desert. Bedouin communities became primary knowledge producers for Ottoman, British, and American expeditions; however, their expertise was systematically extracted and obscured. Indigenous knowledge was transformed into maps, charts, and military intelligence that rarely carried the imprint of its original producers. Crucially, navigational knowledge enabled the exploitation of natural resources for imperial projects. Germans extracted bituminous shale, long used by Bedouins, to fuel the Hijaz Railway; Ottoman and British armies requisitioned Bedouin camels and guides. Water sources sustaining pastoral communities for generations now competed with thirsty locomotives and armies. By examining this weaponization of knowledge before the rise of oil, the project shows how extractive imperial logics in the region were already underway and were rooted not only in territorial control but in the systematic appropriation and repurposing of indigenous knowledge itself.

Author

• Zeynep Ecem Pulas, The Max Planck Institute for the History of Science