Nature, Power and the Ottoman Empire The Ottoman Empire was one of the greatest early modern world empires, stretching from the outskirts of Vienna in the west to the Caucasus Mountains in the east and from the tip of Arabian Peninsula in the south to the Ukrainian steppes in the north, covering an area of 3.81 million square kilometres. The Ottomans were remarkable not just for their political and military success but also for their desire and ability to understand, adapt, modify and manage different environments. This edited volume is the first collective effort to take an original look at the Ottomans through the lens of environmental history. In its wide-ranging essays, environmental perspectives illuminate diverse historical processes and events in the long history of the Ottoman Empire. The essays thus offer new answers to old questions - but also ask new questions - about the ways the Ottomans related to, depended on, thought about and interacted with the natural environment. It will appeal to anyone interested in the environmental history of one of the world's largest and most durable empires, the longest-lasting in the history of the Muslim world.

This book is an exploration of the environmental makings and contested historical trajectories of environmental change in Turkey. Despite the recent proliferation of studies on the political economy of environmental change and urban transformation, until now there has not been a sufficiently complete treatment of Turkey's troubled environments, which live on the edge both geographically (between Europe and Middle East) and politically (between democracy and totalitarianism). The contributors to Transforming Socio-Natures in Turkey use the toolbox of environmental humanities to explore the main political, cultural and historical factors relating to the country's socio-environmental problems. This leads not only to a better grounding of some of the historical and contemporary debates on the environment in Turkey, but also a deeper understanding of the multiplicity of framings around more-than-human interactions in the country in a time of authoritarian populism. This book will be of interest not only to students of Turkey from a variety of social science and humanities disciplines but also contribute to the larger debates on environmental change and developmentalism in the context of a global populist turn.

This book is an exploration of the environmental makings and contested historical trajectories of environmental change in Turkey. Despite the recent proliferation of studies on the political economy of environmental change and urban transformation, until now there has not been a sufficiently complete treatment of Turkey's troubled environments, which live on the edge both geographically (between Europe and Middle East) and politically (between democracy and totalitarianism). The contributors to Transforming Socio-Natures in Turkey use the toolbox of environmental humanities to explore the main political, cultural and historical factors relating to the country's socio-environmental problems. This leads not only to a better grounding of some of the historical and contemporary debates on the environment in Turkey, but also a deeper understanding of the multiplicity of framings around more-than-human interactions in the country in a time of authoritarian populism. This book will be of interest not only to students of Turkey from a variety of social science and humanities disciplines but also contribute to the larger debates on environmental change and developmentalism in the context of a global populist turn.