ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Producing and Circulating Botanical Knowledge in the Late Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century Eastern Mediterranean (Ottoman Syria and Lebanon)

• In Event: Plant Humanities 3 - Case Study: The Eastern Mediterranean Plants

English Abstract

This project analyzes the production of botanical knowledge in Ottoman Syria and Lebanon in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. It examines the ways in which ancient and medieval botanical works were interwoven with contemporary botanical studies, the circulation of botanical knowledge, and the impact of its dissemination to a wide readership through the first Arabic Encyclopedia (Da’irat al-Ma’arif, 1876-1900), as well as through non-specialized popular periodicals and medical journals. The paper also links botanical knowledge to the proliferation of botanical experimentations across Ottoman Lebanon and Syria that sought to acclimatize new or modified crops while optimizing the cultivation of existing ones, and situates it within a broader didactic and developmentalist project aimed at managing nature and society while intensifying capitalist resource exploitation through the “improvement” of land, crops and cultivation techniques. The paper traces how botanical knowledge circulated between Ottoman medical schools, learned societies, botanical gardens, agricultural schools, and Arabic periodicals and reveals a deeply ecological and scientific moment—one in which intellectuals, scientists, merchants and cultivators alike played a role, and occasionally held competing ideas. It also examines the global circulation of botanical knowledge, bioprospecting, and seed exchange between the Eastern Mediterranean and other parts of the world, and in particular regions deemed to have similar Mediterranean climates—California, Australia and Algeria. It argues that the botanical world and the botanical knowledge and expertise of the Syrian provinces profoundly shaped botanical experimentations globally, and was, wittingly or unwittingly, intimately connected to colonial expansion and settler colonialism.

Author

• Ilham Khuri-Makdisi, Northeastern University