Nomad's Land: Pastoralism and French Environmental Policy in the Nineteenth-Century Mediterranean World by Andrea E. Duffy

Author:Andrea E. Duffy [Duffy, Andrea E.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: France, nature, Ecosystems & Habitats, TEC003040 Technology & Engineering / Agriculture / Forestry, Forestry, Europe, history, Technology & Engineering, Agriculture, NAT014000 Nature / Ecosystems & Habitats / Forests & Rainforests, Forests & Rainforests, HIS013000 History / Europe / France
ISBN: 9780803290976
Google: 7wy1DwAAQBAJ
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
Published: 2019-12-01T00:12:36.699523+00:00

Natural Disasters in Anatolia

In the account of his mid-nineteenth-century journey through Anatolia, Baptistin Poujoulat recites a local proverb, joking that “the three great scourges of the Orient are the plague, fire, and dragomans.”102 Although southwestern Anatolia was as prone to wildfires as Provence and Algeria, official responses to them set this region starkly apart. Prior to the arrival of French forest experts in the mid-nineteenth century and the implementation of scientific forestry, the Ottoman state expressed little to no concern about the incidence of wildfires in its territories, unless they occurred in forests reserved for the imperial shipyard. In the mid- to late nineteenth century the Ottoman administration began efforts to better regulate activities that could lead to wildfires and to punish perpetrators. For example, it prohibited open fires in many contexts, and the Ottoman penal code of 1858 threatened arsonists with a life-long sentence of forced labor.103 In practice, however, fire remained relatively low on the nineteenth-century forest regime’s agenda in Anatolia, and such limited measures proved ineffective in checking the widespread incidence of fires. Indeed some historians of Ottoman forestry have suggested that the use of fire for forest clearing actually increased in the second half of the nineteenth century, as the population expanded and sought additional land for pasture, agriculture, and charcoal production.104 In any case, wildfires resulting from natural causes, imprudence, and arson continued unabated well into the twentieth century. In 1903 a British consul complained of “the havoc played by the frequent fires due to the ill-will of shepherds and woodcutters,” which he ascribed to the “negligence” of local authorities and the lax enforcement of forestry legislation.105

Meanwhile, the Ottoman administration was busy addressing a host of other environmental challenges plaguing Anatolia during the nineteenth century. Three major earthquakes shook the peninsula during the course of the century, with at least twenty tremors of an intensity of 5.0 or above in its Mediterranean coastlands alone. In 1831 an epidemic in Izmir marked the arrival of cholera in the Ottoman Empire. At the same time, urban centers throughout the empire continued to suffer from outbreaks of plague, even as it receded from western Europe.106 For the rural population, however, the impact of droughts, frosts, locusts, epidemics, and wildfires was undoubtedly worse. Locusts made a regular appearance in fields and pasturelands, with particularly devastating visitations in the 1850s, 1860s, and 1880s.107 In 1845 officials claimed to have exterminated two hundred thousand kıyya (okka), or nearly three hundred tons, of the insects.108 In 1880 the British consul in Antalya reported that locusts had destroyed harvests in the vilayet of Antalya for at least five years.109 The region, which had formerly exported grain, was forced to import it. When environmental factors such as pests, drought, flooding, frosts, and hailstorms appeared in rapid sequence, or when heavy snowfall hampered transportation, widespread famine could result. Famine often occurred in the wake of periodic droughts, and Ottoman reports documented droughts and famine in Anatolia in nearly every decade of the nineteenth century.110 In

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