Alan Mikhail’s research while affiliated with Yale University and other places

This article offers a chronology of climate events in Iran over the last millennium to challenge traditional chronologies of the Iranian past based on politics, war, and economics. Using insights gleaned from the historiography of climate in Iran, and from neighboring regions, especially the Ottoman Empire, four episodes of climate cooling show how climate-induced environmental processes affected more people for longer in Iran than did the policies of the empires ostensibly ruling over them. Thus, the article aims to put climate more squarely on the agenda of historians of Iran so that the conjectures advanced here can be confirmed, revised, or discarded through future empirical research. Moreover, the article seeks to bring Iran into wider conversations in environmental and global history.

In June 1783, the Laki volcanic fissure began erupting in Iceland. It would continue to do so for the next eight months. One of the largest volcanic discharges in recorded history, the ash it produced led to cold summers across Europe, the Mediterranean, the Americas, and parts of Central Asia. This article examines the impacts of the explosions on Ottoman Egypt and uses this climate history of Iceland and Egypt to analyze ways of doing global environmental history. By focusing on the directly linked climate history of Iceland’s environmental and political impacts on Ottoman Egypt, the article attempts to show the utility of analyzing small-scale instances of global climate change. It moreover argues for the importance of the history of Laki for Middle Eastern history and also shows how considering the history of the Middle East adds to our understanding of the global history of Laki.

Taking the long view, this article analyzes how the expanding power of Egyptian elites, and the emergent commercial agriculture they sponsored, forever changed the rural labor practices of peasant cultivators and their relationships to environmental resources. From the Ottoman conquest of Egypt in 1517 until the second half of the eighteenth century, Egyptian farmers initiated and oversaw the construction and repair of small-scale irrigation and other infrastructural works in their local environments. They controlled how and when their labor was used. At the end of the eighteenth century, rural labor in Egypt dramatically changed. It became coerced, required the large-scale movement of peasant laborers, resulted in enormous environmental manipulation, and was often deadly. This article thus explains how forced labor, deleterious environmental exploitation, extractive economics, and population movements emerged at the end of the eighteenth century and how they have come to characterize the relationship between work and the environment in rural Egypt from that period until today.

This book is a holistic environmental history of the Middle East and North Africa over the last half millennium. It shows how the intimate connections between peoples and environments shaped political, economic, and social history in startling and often unforeseen ways. Nearly all political powers in the region based their rule on the management and control of natural resources, and nearly all individuals were in constant communion with the natural world. To grasp how these multiple histories were central to the pasts of the Middle East and North Africa, the chapters in this book demonstrate the power of environmental history to open up new avenues of historical research and understanding. The book furthermore traces how the Middle East and North Africa deeply affected the global histories of climate, disease, trade, energy, environmental politics, ecological manipulation, and much more. At the intersection of three continents and as many seas, the Middle East and North Africa have been central to world history for millennia. Studying the ecological implications of these global connections, both for the region itself and for the rest of the world, helps bring the Middle East and North Africa into global history and shows how the region must be an essential part of any understanding of the environments of Eurasia over the last five hundred years.

As a polity that existed for over six centuries and that ruled on three continents, the Ottoman Empire is perhaps both the easiest and hardest empire to compare in world history. It is somewhat paradoxical then that the Ottoman Empire has only recently become a focus of students of empires as historical phenomena. This approach to the Ottoman Empire as an empire has succeeded in generating an impressive profusion of scholarship. This article critically assesses this literature within the larger context of what we term the Imperial Turn to explain how comparative perspectives have been used to analyze the empire. In doing so, it sheds new light on some older historiographical questions about the dynamics of imperial rule, periodization, and political transformation, while at the same time opening up new avenues of inquiry and analysis about the role of various actors in the empire, the recent emphasis on the empire's early modern history, and the scholarly literature of comparative empires itself. Throughout, the authors speak both to Ottoman specialists and others interested in comparative imperial histories to offer a holistic picture of recent Ottoman historiography and to suggest many possible directions for future scholarship. Instead of accepting comparison for comparison's sake, the article offers a bold new vocabulary for rigorous comparative work on the Ottoman Empire and beyond.

Sources for Middle East Environmental History: Seasons of Want or Plenty? Climate Energy Disease Culture Conclusion References

Through a discussion of the burgeoning literature related to environmental topics in the Middle East, this article explains what both environmental historians and historians of the Middle East stand to gain from a consideration of Middle East environmental history. After an examination of the limitations and possibilities of the available source base, the article addresses three main areas of research: climate, energy, and disease. It is meant to serve as an introduction to a new field and to suggest some possible avenues for future research.

In one of the first ever environmental histories of the Ottoman Empire, Alan Mikhail examines relations between the empire and its most lucrative province of Egypt. Based on both the local records of various towns and villages in rural Egypt and the imperial orders of the Ottoman state, this book charts how changes in the control of natural resources fundamentally altered the nature of Ottoman imperial sovereignty in Egypt and throughout the empire. In revealing how Egyptian peasants were able to use their knowledge and experience of local environments to force the hand of the imperial state, Nature and Empire in Ottoman Egypt tells a story of the connections of empire stretching from canals in the Egyptian countryside to the palace in Istanbul, from the forests of Anatolia to the shores of the Red Sea, and from a plague flea's bite to the fortunes of one of the most powerful states of the early modern world.