The Transformation of the Middle Eastern Environment, 3000 B.C.E. – 2000 C.E.

By Edmund Burke III

In: E. Burke III and K. Pomeranz, eds.,The Environment and World History, 1500-2000

(Berkeley: University of California Press, In Press)

Part 1: The Deep History of the Middle Eastern Environment, 1500 B.C.E. – 1450 C.E.

The environment is rarely mentioned in most histories of the modern MiddleEast. Seldom addressed as a subject in its own right, the environment tends to hover onthe margins of histories with other presumably more important topics to discuss, suchas the onset of imperialism and nationalism in the region, and its political and economictransformation. Indeed, in most histories of the modern Middle East, the environmentitself is viewed as a source of backwardness, which only the application of modernscience and technology can overcome. Such modernist fables are of course uplifting to adegree. There is no denying that the introduction of modern technology (regardless ofthe auspices under which it took place) facilitated a major transformation of therelations between humans and the environment throughout the region. However, as weshall see, if we consider the deep history of the region, the ability of humans to alter theenvironment profoundly is hardly new, while the choices made by elites have alwayshad consequences (often unforeseen) further down the line.

As used here, the term Middle East includes all of Southwest Asia and NorthernAfrica, from Morocco to Iran, while our chronological scope is from 1500 B.C.E. to thepresent. The Middle Eastern region is vast (more than 6000 kilometers across) andecologically diverse (although predominantly arid and semi-arid). Located in the centerof the Great Arid zone, it extends from the Sahara in the west to the deserts of Chinaand Central Asia in the east. By focusing upon the environment, we can see the basis fora new comparative history of the Middle Eastern region along ecological lines: theMiddle East of river valleys, the Mediterranean Middle East of dry-farming and theMiddle East of the deserts, oases and waste lands where pastoralism was predominant.Each of these three Middle Easts had its own prevailing types of flora and fauna,patterns of agriculture and forms of social and political organization.

Due to its location at the juncture of Africa, Europe, and Asia, the Middle Easternclimate is shaped by the complex interaction of four different wind systems. These are(1) the seasonal monsoons that govern the climate of the Indian Ocean region includingsouthern Arabia, East Africa, and southern Iran; (2) the Inner Asian wind system thatbrings snow and bitter cold from the steppe in winter; (3) the summer thermals thatarise in the deserts of Arabia and the Sahara; and (4) the Atlantic system that bringseasonal rains in the fall and winter. Rainfall is a function both of altitude (the higher,the more rain) and location (either facing the prevailing winds, or in the “rain shadow”on the lee side of the mountain where rainfall amounts are much less). Climatologicalrecords reveal an enormous variability in the timing and amounts of rainfall from year

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to year, as well as within a given year from one locale to another. While annual rainfallaverages 30 inches (250 mm) across the region, there is remarkable local variation. (Thusfor example, there is virtually no rainfall in the Empty Quarter of southeastern Arabia,but in excess of 60 inches a year on the area between the southern coast of the CaspianSea and the Alburz Mountains of Iran.)

Most Middle Eastern people have always lived in the first Middle East, that ofthe river valleys (from West to East: the Nile, the Tigris-Euphrates-Karun, the AmuDarya, and the Hilmand).1 The river valleys have always been central to the fate ofancient Middle Eastern empires, this in contrast to the woodlands of Western Europe orin the rice growing areas of East Asia where agriculture operated under differentconstraints. It was in the river valleys of the Middle East that the first cities and the firstagrarian empires developed. The second Middle East, in which dry-farming was thepredominant culture, has also been well studied. It embraces most of the Mediterraneanzone and adjacent steppes. Its history has been shaped by the actions of states andempires deriving from the river valleys, as well as by longer time climatic cycles (suchas El Niño and the so-called Little Ice Age). The third Middle East—that of the deserts,wastelands and oases—was primarily inhabited by pastoral nomadic groups.Pastoralism emerged in the first millennium B.C.E. as a distinct adaptation to the harshconditions of the desert steppe. Pastoralists played a disproportionate role in the historyof the region, repeatedly conquering the agrarian empires in the river valleys.Historically, pastoralists have also played a central role in facilitating exchanges(material, but also cultural) between the societies and civilizations that surround them.The Silk Road that connected China and the West via the Middle East is but the mostvivid example. The relationship between the agrarian world of the river valleys, themerchants of the urban centers, and the pastoral nomads of the steppe has constituted aleitmotif in the history of the region.2

By inserting the history of the Middle Eastern region into a global eco-historicalcontext, I seek to uncover its participation in larger processes of interaction betweenhumans and the environment. The specific features of the Middle Eastern environmentdistinguish it from other world regions. They have in turn prompted distinctive (ifvaried) solutions to its environmental problems. Here a world historical perspective hasmuch to offer. While operating on such a large scale has some evidentdisadvantages—details tend to blur into the background—it has compensations as well.We are able to perceive larger patterns, the existence of which we might otherwise havemissed.

Archeologists and ancient historians have long been aware of the greatenvironmental change brought about by ancient water management projects. However,they have failed for the most part to accord the Middle Eastern environment theattention it deserves in their effort to record the achievements of ancient empires. Asignificant exception is Robert McC. Adams’ classic survey The Land Behind Baghdad onthe successive transformations of the Diyala plain of southern Iraq over the very longterm. 3 Adams argued that it is only over the very long-term scale that the creation ofterritorially defined states in the ancient Middle East and the subsequent transformationof the physical environment become legible to the archeologist.

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In this perspective, one can observe a family resemblance among the states andempires of the pre-modern period across Eurasia from China to the Mediterranean. Allwere based upon the elaboration of irrigation, intense cropping, and the organization oflarge flood control schemes. All sought to displace the “externalities” (negativeconsequences) onto those “outside” the society. The drive to make nature predictableand controllable has a very deep history indeed, going back to the origins of civilizationitself. In this perspective the modern world was not simply born in Europe, but wasresult of long-term processes of accumulation, organization, and control of people andof the environment. World historians are beginning to speak of a Developmental Projectas a kind of shorthand for the slow genesis of what would become the modern state (onthe Developmental Project see Chapter 1 to this volume by Kenneth Pomeranz).

I begin with a brief review the legacy of Middle Eastern watermanagement—clearly one of the centerpieces of any environmental history. Next, Iexplore the remarkable transformations brought about following the rise of Islam,which culminated in what one scholar has called a “medieval Islamic greenrevolution.”4 I conclude this section with a review of current scholarly opinion on thecauses of the decline of the region.

The Legacy of Middle Eastern Water Management

Archeologists inform us that already by 5000 B.C.E. water managementtechnologies were being utilized by the early states in the Fertile Crescent. Distinctivelydifferent approaches to managing water developed in the Nile valley and the Tigris-Euphrates valley, shaped by the rather different characteristics of the two floodplains.In Egypt a state based upon agricultural production first emerged in the Nile valley inthe fifth millennium B.C.E. The Nile flood is especially propitious to agriculture. Itoriginates in the Ethiopian highlands with the onset of the monsoon rains in East Africa.In early summer its major tributaries—the White Nile and the Blue Nile—reach floodstage. Until the construction of the Aswan High Dam disrupted this millennial pattern,it arrived in Egypt in early August where it inundates the valley floor. By the end of themonth it retreats just in time for the fall planting, leaving a deposit of silt coating thefield. The early Egyptian dynasties learned to harness the Nile flood and to time theplanting of crops to its rhythms. Under the pharaohs a system of basin irrigation wasdeveloped which insured a regular grain crop. It was adapted to the circumstances ofthe Nile and involved creating openings in the banks to permit the flood to cover theadjacent agricultural areas. After the retreat of the flood, water was obtained from theNile by a variety of water lifting devices. These included the shaduf, a device for dippingwater, the Archimidian screw, and the noria, a kind of water wheel.5 These might bepowered either by humans or by harnessed animals. These micro-technological deviceswere well adapted to the specific characteristics of the Nile River.

The Tigris-Euphrates context was significantly different from the Nile. Instead ofcoming to flood stage in the late summer, the Tigris flood arrives in April, when itjeopardizes the spring harvest. The steep banks and fast rushing waters of the TigrisRiver posed a constant challenge to hydraulic engineers. By contrast, the Euphratestrickles slowly through an arid floodplain and looses much of its water to evaporation.There is evidence of irrigation works in the valley of the Tigris-Euphrates as early as5000 B.C.E. Already by 1500 B.C.E. the ability of humans to redirect the flow of waters

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in the floodplain had reached impressive levels. Through a systematic, politicallydirected process over the course of millennium, five major transverse canals wereconstructed that diverted the waters of the Euphrates across the floodplain to theTigris.6 A second major engineering feat that greatly extended the zone of irrigation wasthe construction by the first millennium of two huge interconnected parallel diversioncanals (artificial rivers really) off the Tigris, the Nahrawan, and the Katul al-Kisrawi,which were among the greatest engineering projects of their time. To slow and divertfast-moving streams like the Tigris, weirs were constructed. Finally, reservoirs werebuilt throughout the region making possible such major works as the royal gardens ofthe Assyrians and the Sasanids.7 As a result of more than a millennium of warringagainst the rivers, the Mesopotamian floodplain was substantially transformed. Underthe Sasanians (234-634 C.E.) an extensive canal complex including five large dams wasconstructed on the Karun river and its tributaries in Kuhzistan to the northeast of theTigris-Euphrates delta. At the height of the Sasanian Empire, it is estimated that thefloodplain contributed almost 50 percent of the land tax revenues.8 The huge increase inthe area under irrigation made it possible to cultivate a summer crop as well, which inturn led to a large increase in the food supply. As a result, the human population ofMesopotamia reached an all-time high under the Sasanians.9 Already in ancient times,the Mesopotamian floodplain was no longer a natural environment.10

Despite the impressive engineering works of successive Persian dynasties, itproved impossible to sustain high levels of agricultural productivity. As Adams hasshown, the Euphrates shifted its course several hundred miles in the first millenniumB.C.E., leaving much of the central floodplain high and dry, the beginning of what wasto become a recurrent pattern.11 Persistent flooding and hydrological changes in thesixth and seventh centuries further undermined the Tigris-Euphrates delta region. TheTigris shifted dramatically again in the early seventh century (ca. 628 C.E.), turningsections of the Diyala floodplain from prime agricultural land to desert and weakeningthe Sasanians at a critical phase in their struggle with the Byzantines.12 To the north,siltation and salination gradually choked the transverse canals, weirs, and floodgates.Although the Arab conquerors made heroic efforts to restore and revive the systemfrom the mid-seventh century onward, and achieved some significant progress inreviving agriculture for a time, in the end it was to no avail. On the eve of the Mongolconquest, the Nahrawan and Katul al-Kisrawi complexes were no longer functional.13

If we turn our attention from Mesopotamia to the Iranian plateau we discover avery different environment. Extending more than 1,000 miles from the borders ofgeographical Iraq in the west to Afghanistan and India in the east and surrounded bymountains, this vast semi-arid upland plateau initially appears scarcely propitious foragriculture. Because farming normally requires 400 millimeters of rainfall per year andthe Iranian plateau receives barely 350 millimeters per year (with important local andannual variations, of course), irrigation was a necessity. However, with irrigation, areasreceiving as little as 150 millimeters per year were rendered arable.14 On the easternedges of the Iranian plateau, the Amu Darya basin to the north and to the Hilmandriver valley to the south, one encounters environmental conditions resembling theTigris-Euphrates river valleys. By 500 B.C.E. the Mesopotamian irrigation toolkit ofdams, canals and weirs had been deployed in both river valleys leading to theemergence of vast agricultural estates.

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The most important irrigation technology that facilitated the extension ofagriculture in the Iranian plateau was the qanat (Arabic) system. Qanats (known inPersian as kariz) were gravity-flow tunnel wells of great antiquity (also known asfiltration galleries). They first appeared more or less simultaneously about 2500 B.C.E.in eastern Turkey, Kurdistan (northwestern Iran), and Sistan (southeastern Iran). It hasbeen suggested that qanats emerged as an off-shoot of the ancient mining industry inthe region. Expertise in tunneling was readily transferable, and miners oftenunintentionally tapped into underground streams.15 By the sixth century B.C.E., qanatswere found throughout the Iranian plateau. Their diffusion facilitated the consolidationof Persian authority and the establishment of cities and towns. Under the Achaemenids(550-331 B.C.E.), whose empire at its zenith encompassed the land from the Nile to theIndus, qanat technology spread throughout the Middle Eastern core area. Qanats had anumber of singular features: they used only local materials; they employed no power totap underground aquifers; and they transported water great distances (up to 50kilometers) with little loss from evaporation. While qanats were expensive to build andmaintain, they were a sustainable technology well adapted to the semi-aridenvironment of the Iranian plateau.16 Under the Sasanians, agriculture reached itsheight in the Iranian plateau, and human populations rose largely as a result of thediffusion of qanat technology. Qanats were widely employed in Afghanistan, SouthAsia, Central Asia, and as we’ll see even around the Saharan fringes of Africa. As late asthe 1960s, qanats supplied 50 percent of the irrigation water used in Iran.

An Islamic Green Revolution?

The rise of Islam appears to have facilitated a great expansion of agriculturethroughout the Middle Eastern region. Andrew Watson has called this phenomenon themedieval Islamic green revolution.17 With the coming of Islam, the ancient world wasunited for the first time under one government with one religion, Islam, and one majorwritten language, Arabic. As a result, Watson contends, the establishment of theAbbasid empire in 750 C.E. greatly increased the movement and interaction of peoples(and the spread of ideas) throughout Islamdom. The emergence of a vast Islamictrading zone facilitated the spread of new crops throughout the Islamic macro-region,most of which originated outside of the Middle East. Most were food crops (Watsonlists rice, sorghum, watermelon, lemon, lime, orange, artichoke, plantain, spinach, sugarcane, eggplant, mango, coconut palm, hard wheat, watermelon and the banana), thoughcotton, an important fiber crop, was also included. Although Watson’s argument hasbeen subjected to criticism, his basic instincts have proven to be largely correct.

Central to Watson’s argument is the emergence of an identifiable watermanagement toolkit under the aegis of Islam. It incorporated the previous regionally-based macro-hydraulic technologies (including dams, canals, weirs, reservoirs,aqueducts and qanats, and micro-technologies (water lifting devices such as the noria,the shaduf, the Archimedian screw, the cistern, and the horizontal windmill). Thediffusion of the water management toolkit together with a suite of new crops andtechniques throughout Dar al-Islam was encouraged both by the deliberate policy ofIslamic governments and by private landowners by such means as the establishment ofroyal gardens and the diffusion of agricultural manuals and seed stock. Perennialirrigation cumulatively led to increased yields, new crop rotations, the expansion of thearea under cultivation, and especially the emergence of a new agricultural growing

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season (summer) for irrigated crops. (Previously agriculture had been limited to thewinter growing season.) Moreover, since the labor requirements of irrigation land weregreater then dry-farming, the demand for labor expanded with the increase in the areaunder cultivation. Watson argues plausibly that this facilitated population increase, theconstruction of new cities, and the rebuilding of old ones as previously regionally basedtechnologies and techniques spread throughout the lands of Islam.

Although many, if not all of the crops and the irrigation technologies mentionedby Watson were already present in the Iranian plateau prior to the rise of Islam, if welook at the wider world to which Islam spread, the idea of an Islamic green revolutionstill seems essentially correct.18 Solid evidence for the deliberate adoption of newirrigation technologies and crops from the Iranian plateau by the peoples of the Saharanfringes of southeast Morocco and the Iberian peninsula has been provided by ThomasGlick. He has traced the diffusion of the qanat system and other irrigation technologiesfrom the Middle Eastern core areas to the Spain of the Umayyads.19 This was one of themost important technology transfers in pre-modern times. Basic to an understanding ofwhat transpired, Glick notes, is that

The Arabs and Berbers did not bring canals, qanats, dams or norias with them;they only brought ideas. In assessing the hydraulic technologies of al-Andalus[Iberia], therefore, the physical origin of canals is irrelevant: whatever theMuslims found they integrated into a quite different social, cultural andeconomic system than that prevailing before, according to norms they broughtwith them.20

Glick usefully distinguishes between the regional macro-irrigation systems ofSpain (where the Muslims built upon a Roman exoskeleton), the mesosystems (whichoperated at the village level), and microsystems (tank, cistern, or noria irrigation of thefamily parcel) that operated at local levels. The latter two were profoundly shaped bythe water management toolkit that debarked in Spain with the Muslims in 711. In thefourteenth century the construction of qanat in southeastern Morocco tapped intounderground aquifers in the Sahara. The khattara (as qanats are called in the Maghrib)facilitated the expansion of the existing date palm oasis of Sijilmasa (present dayTafilalt) and facilitated its emergence as the northern entrepot for the trans-Saharangold trade.21

I have argued elsewhere that under the aegis of Islam the diverse regionalirrigation traditions of ancient Persia, India and the Mediterranean came together as asuite of water management technologies, or what I have been calling here a watermanagement toolkit.22 The case of China is instructive. While the prevailinghistoriography emphasizes China’s uniqueness, a historian who is acquainted withPersian hydraulic engineering and irrigation accomplishments can infer that the causalarrows may have gone from west to east.23 We can note, for example, that theconstruction of the Grand Canal post-dates by some two millennia the hydraulicengineering projects that transformed the Mesopotamian floodplain.24 Historian oftechnology Arnold Pacey has suggested a “dialogue of Asia” whereby Mesopotamiancanalling expertise diffused eastward to China.25 It is also likely that Chinese irrigationdevices such as norias and horizontal windmills first developed in the Iranian plateauand subsequently diffused to East Asia, since the sources date from the twelfth century

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and later.26 Less clear is the situation of South and Southeast Asia where irrigationsystems appear to have emerged autonomously as adaptations to local ecologies. Forexample in the Deccan plateau in southern India, an indigenous system of man-madereservoirs (locally referred to as tanks), well adapted to the monsoons and regionalconditions, is of great antiquity. This South Asian tank system subsequently diffusedwith Hinduism to Southeast Asia.27 Was it also the model for the royal gardens of theAssyrians and Sasanids? Since northern India and the Indus/Gangeatic plain had longbeen in contact with Mesopotamian civilizations there seems no need to force ananswer. With the rise of Islam the tank system of reservoirs was widely adopted outsideof the Middle Eastern core region. For example, the Ghuta of Damascus, the largereservoirs of Kairouan (Tunisia), and the sahrijayn of fourteenth century AlmohadMarrakech all show the influence of the tank system.28

The diffusion of the water management toolkit did not stop with the lands ofIslam. A few examples will suffice. Following the Reconquista (1492), Iberian hydraulicsystems and irrigation technologies were transplanted to the Spanish colonial Americas(via the Canary Islands) where they have left an enduring legacy in the water systemsof Mexico and the southwestern United States.29 Iberian hydraulic technology alsospread to Holland after its incorporation into the Spanish Hapsburg empire, where itinformed Dutch land reclamation projects.30 Caesare Maffioli suggest that MiddleEastern hydraulic technologies were also incorporated in Venetian strategies of copingwith the marshlands of the Po estuary.31 Finally, there is evidence that Iberiancommunal irrigation technologies were transferred to colonial British India in thenineteenth century.32

Rethinking the Decline of Middle Eastern Agriculture to 1500 C.E.

Until recently scholars have agreed that the environment of the Middle Easternregion suffered an irreversible decline in the pre-modern past, even while they differedover its timing and its causes. Indeed, this narrative of decline has constituted theorthodox scholarly view since the time of the ancient Greeks. At different times MiddleEastern backwardness has been attributed to the activities of specific agents—earlymetallurgists, the omnivorous Mediterranean goat, nomadic invasions (the Arabs, theMongols), or (especially for colonial authors) the baleful influence of Islam. Indeed, totake up the history of the Middle Eastern environment is to confront a host ofstereotypes and biases, both indigenous and Western, which have systematicallyobscured the larger story from view.

One of the best-known theories of decline is found in Karl Wittvogel’s book,Oriental Despotism.33 First put forward in 1957, Wittvogel’s theory asserted the allegedlydespotic nature of the government of hydraulic civilizations. He claimed that theconstruction and maintenance of an extensive irrigation system fostered the emergenceof states that exercised complete control over society. Without government control,complicated irrigation systems were fated to break down and the empires theysustained to disappear. Wittvogel’s examples of hydraulic societies included ancient(and modern) China, ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, and more improbably, the SovietUnion. His theory no longer carries much weight, both because of its conflation ofinherently dissimilar societies, as well as its blatant ideological loading (it wasformulated during the Cold War). More fundamentally, as scholars have come to

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recognize the crucial importance of local political networks in maintaining large-scaleirrigation systems, the inherent implausibility of Wittvogel’s ideas has becomeincreasingly evident.

A second explanation of the environmental decline is deforestation and relatedland degradation. Most authorities agree that although significant deforestation of theMiddle Eastern forests occurred in the modern era, it was already well under way inancient times. In his survey of the environmental practices of the ancient Greece andRome, Donald Hughes concludes that neither Greeks nor Romans were the responsiblestewards of nature they have been painted.34 Rather, their economic and military needsled ineluctably to deforestation and landscape degradation.

Theodore Wertime has suggested that deforestation was caused by the woodenergy (biomass) demands of ancient metallurgy.35 Iron smelting required vastquantities of wood fuel. Wertime has speculated that the production of the 70-90 milliontons of Iron Age slag found around the Mediterranean would have required the fellingof 50-70 million acres of trees.36 Wertime’s argument does not stop with metallurgy buttakes in the larger pyrotechnological context including the biomass fuel required for thefabrication of bricks, the production of quicklime from limestone, the making of potteryand household cooking fires. (By one estimate, each new household in the ancientMediterranean required one to two tons of firewood per year.)37 Taking the subjectfurther, John Perlin has proposed that as the demands of inefficient bronze age (andiron age) furnaces denuded first one hinterland and then another of its forest cover,patterns of deforestation in the Middle East tended to chart the rise and decline ofancient civilizations,38 but this view is contested.

A third theory has sought to locate the source of the decline in the depredationsof pastoral nomads, especially the Arabs. J.V. Thirgood has argued that while theGreeks and Romans restrained the grazing activities of their sheep and goats, thingschanged after the Arab conquests of the seventh century when pastoralist herdersdominated the Middle Eastern region.39 Thirgood’s views echo those of French colonialauthors about the Maghreb (as well as some post-colonial range management experts).40

However, while archeological excavations in Mesopotamia do indeed substantiate thatthe recession of agriculture roughly coincided with the Arab conquests, in fact thespecific timing of the Arab invasions does not match the process of decline. Finally,those who seek to blame the nomads fail to recognize that the process of decline wasnot irreversible—irrigation systems could be restored to their former productivity bysustained investment of political will, labor and money (e.g., the Sawad region insouthern Iraq which was revived under the Abbasids).41

A final theory blames the depredations of the Mongols for the decline ofagriculture in the Middle East. Although there is evidence of decline in the periodfollowing the Mongol conquest, when the case is examined more closely, the Mongolimpact appears to have been localized and of relatively limited duration.42 Petruchevskyhas argued that fiscal policy of the Mongols, which favored pastoral production at theexpense of agriculture led Khurasan and Transoxiana to suffer a sharp populationdecline as seen in census counts and tax records.43 Yet other studies have shown that theIranian plateau and Mesopotamia, which were also governed by the Ilkhan Mongolrulers, were not permanently affected.44 Indeed under the Ilkhans (1256-1336 C.E.) trade

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expanded, local economic activity increased, and there was renewed investment inagriculture.45 Moreover, a new determination can be noted among the post-Mongolelites of the region to re-establish agrarian bureaucratic states from the late fifteenthcentury.

For a more satisfactory explanation of the decline of Middle Eastern agriculture,a more complex causality is required. It is widely agreed that Middle Easternagriculture suffered from inherent environmental constraints, including the long-termconjunctural vulnerability of the Middle Eastern environment to infra-historical change(in this case, tectonic activity and severe flooding) and political disarray (whichundermined the capacity of elites to carry out long-term agricultural policies).46 Finally,there is the role of endemic disease. Christensen has suggested that from a Eurasianperspective, Mesopotamia was a massive disease pool, the focus of chronic and acuteinfections that periodically spread throughout the Mediterranean world. On eachvisitation of plague, tax revenues plunged, and the work force was depleted. As thepopulation declined, it became increasingly difficult to maintain the intricate system ofdikes, weirs, and canals. The plague of 749 C.E., which struck on the eve of the Abbasidrevolution, may have killed as much as 40 percent of the population in theMesopotamian floodplain.47 Plague is also the likely culprit for the progressiveabandonment of the transverse canals from 1350 to 1550. Steven Borsch’s recent studyof the impact of plague on the Nile irrigation system reinforces this line of argument. Aspopulation levels plummeted, the state became less and less able to maintain thesystem, and production declined sharply. Unlike England, which Borsch also considers,where sharp population declines from plague created opportunity spaces for newgrowth, complex irrigation systems like those of the Middle East failed to recoverrapidly.48 Nonetheless, it is important to note that agriculture was more resilient in theIranian plateau where endemic diseases were much less of a factor.49

Although the Middle Eastern environment had been profoundly transformed bythe action of humans from the earliest times, against the grain of the declensionists,these consequences were neither irreversible, nor were they inevitable. The decline ofthe Middle Eastern agriculture was not the unavoidable result of environmentalconditions. Though its fate emphasizes that nature and society are one system, there'sno need for ecological reductionism. The environment itself was shaped by long-termhistorical processes. Neither the huge canal systems in the Tigris/Euphrates valley northe artificial oases in the deserts and plateaus were necessary for human survival.Rulers made choices. The environmental costs, as always, were borne by latergenerations.

Part 2: The Middle East Environmental Crisis in Historical Perspective, 1450-2000

In order to understand why the Middle East as a world region was economicallymarginalized during the long sixteenth century relative to Europe and China, we needto view it in its global context. In the period 1450-1750 with the incorporation of theAmericas, human populations began to expand all across Eurasia at a faster rate, statesdeveloped new military and organizational capabilities, a truly global world economyemerged for the first time and communications capabilities (printing as well as

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transportation) developed in unprecedented ways. As the changes pyramided, statesthat were able to adapt to the new conditions of warfare, commerce andcommunications achieved unprecedented power. Although these changes werehemisphere-wide, they were particularly important in China, where the Ming dynasty(1367-1644) had just replaced the Mongol Yuan (1280-1367) and in Western Europe (justemerging from the Black Death). In the new increasingly global context, the Middle Eastwas unable to keep up. To fully comprehend “what went wrong,” it is useful tocompare the ecohistorical predicament and specific strategies of Middle Eastern stateswith those of China and Europe.50 Here is where a global and environmentalperspective has much to offer.

By 1450 all across Eurasia states had begun to experience significant economiccontractions as ecological limitations made it increasingly difficult to maintain highlevels of growth. As Kenneth L. Pomeranz has argued, China and Western Europepursued contrasting approaches to the growing ecological constraints. Europe’ssolution to the contradictions of population increase and ecological over-shoot was toexploit its maritime advantage through overseas expansion, as a result of which itachieved levels of wealth and power well beyond Agrarian Age norms.51 Europe’soverseas colonies provided a strategic advantage in the new global struggle for empireand resources and the availability of colonial raw materials (above all the silver of theAmericas) allowed it to participate in the new global market from a position of strength.First Europe muscled in on the Asian spice trade, then as the sugar revolution (1650-1800) transformed the Atlantic economy by linking Africa, the Americas and Europe, itwas able to channel profits from the slave trade and sugar production in the Caribbeaninto an unprecedented source of economic growth. The emergence of a truly globalmarket in spices, sugar and other commodities did not lead to a definitive break withthe material limitations on growth that had characterized the agrarian age, however;but it did allow Europe to transcend at least some of the limitations of its ecologicalsituation, although not its growing biomass (wood) energy shortage.

Faced with a similar population crunch, ecological constraints and increasingdeforestation in its old core zone, China devised a different strategy. Under the Mingdynasty, the Chinese economy became increasingly marketized and switched frompaper money to a silver based currency propelled by its dynamic agricultural sector andgrowing population. However, since China lacked significant deposits of silver in itsnational territory, it was compelled to enter the intra-Asian trade to acquire silver in thevast quantities required. Chinese porcelains, silks and other manufactured productsdeveloped ready markets with maritime Asia and Mediterranean Europe. Instead ofpursuing an overseas empire, however, China under the Qing (1644-1911) chose to dealwith its environmental constraints by encouraging expansion into southern and westernChina.52 For a time it was able to achieve levels of growth and per capita consumptionthat rivaled if not exceeded those of Western Europe by pursuing an inverse strategy toEurope, via internal colonial expansion. Although Europe and China pursueddistinctive civilizational and ecohistorical paths to modernity in response to similardemographic and ecological constraints—Europe through overseas empire, and Chinathrough the colonization of its internal frontiers—until 1750 both strategies wereequally successful in terms of high per capita standard of living and growth rates. Thiswas because both were able to dodge basic contradictions by externalizing their

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environmental problem. But as its internal frontiers became built out, Chinese rates ofgrowth gradually declined and its basic ecological contradictions reasserted themselves.

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In the light of this comparison, the Middle East case may be of some interest. Thediscovery of the Americas and the emergence of a truly global world market in thesixteenth century transformed the topology of global networks of the Middle East inthree major ways. First, from a central role in the exchange of goods, ideas, and peoplewithin Afroeurasia, the Middle East became increasingly marginal to the new globalcommunications network. Its land transport advantages became redundant, while itsfading dominance of the internal seas of Eurasia made it increasingly irrelevant in thenew age of oceanic transport. Second, when Europeans acquired direct access toAmerican silver and West African gold as a result of the voyages of discovery, theymarginalized the Muslim-dominated trans-Saharan routes that had previously been animportant source of gold for Europe. American silver and West African gold allowedEuropeans to participate in the global market. Finally, in a period of sharpenedcompetition between Europeans (especially the Hapsburgs) and the Ottomans, thediscovery of the Americas provided Europeans with untrammeled access to itsresources including mining resources, timber, and vast agricultural lands. As aMediterranean but not an oceanic power, the Middle East was precluded from seekingto externalize its environmental contradictions through the establishment of an overseasempire. At the same time, as the legatee of ancient empires that had exploited the sameresource base for millennia with diminishing returns, it could not pursue the Chineseoption of intensive colonization of a resource rich and demographically weak regionalhinterland.

During the period 1450-1750, the Middle Eastern (Nile to Oxus) core areas weremarked by a renewed commitment to the agrarian bureaucratic state under theOttomans (1280-1922) and Safavids (1501-1722), this time in the context of thegunpowder age and that of a global economy. While we have no information on theenvironmental consequences of these projects, a brief review is in order. Under ShahAbbas (1588-1629) Persia sought to revive the agricultural potential of Iraq through thereconstruction of irrigation canals and associated infrastructure. Isfahan was endowedwith gardens and vast royal irrigation tanks and made a center of carpet production,and its hinterlands received significant investment in an effort to revivify agriculturalproduction.54 Ottoman military/political policies are better known (even if theirenvironmental consequences have been but little explored). Certainly Ottoman strategicambitions were on a par with other major Asian land empires of the period. In the earlysixteenth century, Ottoman engineers embarked upon the construction of two majorcanals that sought (respectively) to link the Volga and Don rivers, and the Nile andMediterranean.55 In the end neither was completed, although work was advanced onboth before they were abandoned. Ottoman needs for raw materials for themanufacture of swords, cannons, and other gunpowder weapons must have stimulatedthe mining industry of Anatolia and the Balkans. Similarly the environmental impact ofthe Ottoman army and navy on the forests of Black Sea and Caucasus must have beenconsiderable.56 However, neither has so far attracted the attention of Ottomanhistorians. Clearly, there is much to do before an adequate environmental history of theMiddle East takes shape.

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The vulnerability of Middle Eastern “gunpowder empires” (the term is MarshallHodgson’s) was not initially apparent.57 Militarily, Europeans did not decisively gainthe upper hand over the Ottomans and other West Asian powers until after 1750. (Untilthen the European empire in maritime Asia was mostly based in enclaves and islands.)In 1500, the Ottoman empire controlled European access to Asian commodities likespices, sugar, coffee, tea and cotton and Ottoman luxury goods like silk carpets,porcelains, Damascus steel and other manufactures were still competitive in Eurasianmarkets.58 Gradually, despite major Ottoman efforts to preserve their monopoly of thespice trade (on which see the recent dissertation of Giancarlo Casale) the initiativepassed increasingly to the Europeans.59 Demand for commodities like coffee andtobacco for a time picked up where the lucrative spice trade had left off. By 1800 MiddleEastern manufactured products were under greatly increased competition as well.60

Central to the economic strategy of both the Ottomans and Safavids was the expansionof silk production. Silk carpets and clothing were produced for both the luxury anddomestic markets and provided the fortune of many entrepreneurs as well as the royalhouseholds that patronized them.61 Bursa, Tabriz, Isfahan, and Shiraz became major silkproducing centers with large artisan populations and a network of provincial supplierswith important investments in mulberry trees (on which the silk worms fed). Theecological impact of the silk industry was significant, although little studied. Two canbe mentioned here: the land use implications of mulberry tree monoculture, and theconsiderable wood fuel requirements for processing the cocoons.62 The recent historicalliterature on the Ottoman empire makes it clear that there are no grounds for viewingthe period as a dark age.63 Ottoman and (to a lesser extent) Safavid state elites were asdeeply committed to the developmental project as the elites of any other Eurasianempire in the period, even if the results were not always up to expectations.

Both the Ottoman and the Safavid empires originally drew support frompredominantly Turkish-speaking pastoralist groups whose presence in eastern Anatoliaand the Iranian plateau had significant environmental consequences. One the one hand,they maintained vast flocks of sheep, the wool of which was used to produce carpets aswell as an array of woolen items for domestic use, including clothing, embroideredsaddle bags, blankets, and tents. Much as in Spain, where the guild of wool producerswas organized as the Mesta and sheep migration routes were sanctioned by the state,wool producers had an important role in the Ottoman economy.64 On the other hand,the Middle East (and especially the Ottoman empire) was a center for horse breedingfor the European and Indian markets.65 Horse culture was of course integral to thelifestyle of Eurasian elites until modern times. The commercial breeding of horses forelite and cavalry stables across western Eurasia was therefore a lucrative affair. Both theOttomans and the Safavids adopted policies by which vast areas were preserved forhorse pasturage and sheltered from taxation. The political and economic clout ofpastoralists durably affected the balance between agrarian, mercantile, and pastoralistpower well into the twentieth century throughout the Middle Eastern region. Byinhibiting the expansion of agriculture and preserving large areas for the pastoralistlifestyle, it also weakened the ability of Middle Eastern states to exploit their agrarianresources.

Finally, a general feature of the period 1450-1750 all across Eurasia was the rise ofhuge “primate” cities. The largest city in Europe was Istanbul, which at its height in theseventeenth century had a population of 750,000. While the system for provisioning

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Istanbul that required the close organization of the grain trade of the Danube basinundoubtedly had environmental consequences (though these have been little studied).66

The same is true of the substantial urban construction boom that affected most of theprovincial capitals of the empire. The expansion of Isfahan under the Safavidsrepresented a parallel initiative, with clear if largely unstudied environmentalconsequences. The expansion of cities and the general quickening of the economy alsolead to enormous new demands for wood, both as a building material and as a sourceof energy. In 1750 the Middle East (especially the Ottoman empire) was not clearlyinferior militarily to its nearest European rivals. However, an economic gap with bothWestern Europe and China had already begun to appear.

By 1700, Western Europe faced a looming energy crisis caused by rapidlyincreasing deforestation. The crisis threatened to jeopardize the remarkable economicgrowth that had accompanied the establishment of the colonial empires in theAmericas, maritime Asia and Africa. Just at this point the fortuitous discovery ofabundant deposits of coal near Europe’s water transport network sparked the transitionfrom biomass energy to fossil fuels. As a result, the previous environmental limits oneconomic growth were burst asunder and an unprecedented new relationship ofhumans to the environment was forged. In retrospect, we can see that the new globalenergy regime was as significant for humanity as the mastery of fire, the discovery offarming and the emergence of a truly global market around 1500.67 Access to fossil fuels(in the first instance coal) became critical to the industrial revolution (without whichindeed it is unimaginable). No longer limited to the availability of biomass energy,states and economies acquired vast new capabilities never known before. As importantas the new conditions of globality were for sparking the world economy and theemergence of overseas empires in the period 1450-1750, without recourse to fossil fuelsthe material limits to growth of the previous energy regime would inevitably haveasserted themselves, and the industrial revolution would have had a difficult time ofemerging, or after having emerged, of sustaining itself. Europe’s unique access to coal(conveniently located near its water transport network) shaped global ecohistoricalconditions in the long nineteenth century (1750-1918), and thereafter.

The age of fossil fuels (initially coal, only later oil and natural gas) opened up afundamental new era in the relations of humans and the environment, and brought toan end Braudel’s biological Old Regime and the limits to growth that had characterizedit. The new energy regime proved crucial for the subsequent course of development,taking humanity into an altogether different relationship with the environment. Europehad coal and thus was able to take advantage of the first phase of the fossil fuel era. Butwhat about China? Here, we note a crucial difference. While China had abundant coaldeposits, they were not located near its water transport network (as they were inWestern Europe). Not until the 1880s and the dawn of the railroad age in China couldits coal resources be put into play, thus delaying its transition to industrialization. In thetwentieth century the absence of appreciable quantities of petroleum and natural gashave continued to undermine China’s ability to participate in the second phase of thefossil fuel revolution.

The ecohistorical situation of the Middle East resembles that of China, only moreso. Already poorly endowed in wood, the Middle East’s transition to industrializationin the long nineteenth century was greatly handicapped by the absence of significant

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deposits of coal. Only in the twentieth century did the Middle East become a majorenergy player as the fossil fuel revolution moved on from Phase I (coal) to Phase II(petroleum and natural gas). But by this time, Europeans controlled the region andMiddle Easterners were unable to use “their” oil as they pleased. After World War IMiddle Eastern oil belonged to multi-national corporations, backed up by Westernmilitary might. In a nutshell, the Middle East was one of the major regional loserswithin Eurasia as a result of the emergence of a truly global world economy after 1500C.E. It lacked both the ecological resources and the strategic position to make thetransition to the new ecohistorical context of the age of fossil fuels.

Coal and colonies thus provided Europe with an ecohistorical strategic edge thatenabled to hoist itself to the dominance of the globe after 1750. No longer limited by theconditions of the solar energy regime, states and economies (initially primarilyEuropean) were able to move beyond the material circumstances of the agrarian age(1500 B.C.E. – 1750 C.E.). The increased consumption of energy resources led to amutation of the Development Project. The first phase of the Modern DevelopmentProject (1750-1918), as we may call it, led to the advent of steam power and the spreadof European imperialism, and the increased expansion of the world market drasticallytransformed the context of human action. While Western Europe went from strength tostrength, most of the rest of Eurasia (including the Middle East) experienced growingdifficulties. By 1918 the Ottoman Empire was no more, and European imperialistscontrolled the region and its resources. A brief summary of how this came about willserve to sharpen the paradoxes of the Modern Development Project for the ecohistoricalcontext of the Middle East.

The Ottoman adoption of the Modern Development Project dates from thenineteenth century, although its roots go back into the end of the eighteenth century,when Russian expansionism into the Black Sea region under Catherine and hersuccessors directly threatened the territorial integrity of the empire. In response,Ottoman elites sought to adopt a broad range of reforms, just as Peter the Great haddone earlier in Tsarist Russia. After several false starts, under Sultan Mahmud II (1807-1839) the reform process finally took hold in the Ottoman Empire. European militaryadvisors were hired and advanced military technologies imported: the result was thecreation of a modern army, the nizam jedid.68 The tanzimat reforms mark a new mutationof the Development Project into a modularized kit of political and economic policychoices, now for the first time separable from religion due to Enlightenment thought. Inthe course of the long nineteenth century this mutation was to spread throughout theworld. The tanzimat reforms provided a vision of how the Ottoman state and itseconomy might be transformed and how its enemies at home and abroad might bevanquished.

In the Ottoman Empire the Modern Development Project had two main aspects.In its military/fiscal aspect, it took the form of the military reforms and associatedadministrative and fiscal changes.69 Politically, the tanzimat reforms increased statepower and thereby enabled the forced sedentarization of pastoralists (Turkomen,Bedouin, Kurds). At a stroke, age-old land use patterns as well as relationships betweenpastoral nomadic peoples and sedentary populations were transformed. Thedisplacement of pastoralists from marginal lands also favored the expansion ofcommercial agriculture. This was to become a key theme in the modernization of

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Middle Eastern societies. Finally, the reform process manifested itself in ambitiousengineering projects, including the Suez Canal (1867) and the construction of majordams on the Tigris and Nile, permitting the state to mould nature to its will. Insummary, the tanzimat era reforms had a far-reaching if little understood impact uponthe environment of the Middle East and North Africa.

In its economic guise, the tanzimat focused on economically retrofitting theOttoman legal and administrative system (crucially including the adoption of a modernland code) so as to attract foreign trade and investment. The modernization of internalcommunications (including port facilities, urban infrastructure, railways and telegraph)was a related aspect of the reform process. Under Muhammad Ali Pasha (1807-1849),Egypt vigorously pursued a parallel self-strengthening program. The nineteenthcentury phase of the Modern Development Project soon transformed the rest of theregion. In Arabia, Iran, Afghanistan, and Morocco the reform impulse was weaker, andits implementation had for the most part to await the twentieth century. The adoptionof the state-strengthening reforms of the tanzimat and of the related economic policychoices had important environmental consequences in the long nineteenth century,even if little is known about them in detail.

The incorporation of the Middle East into the world market after 1750 hadimportant consequences for the environment. In general, it accelerated millennial trendsof deforestation (as a result of greater needs for timber for ships, houses, improvementsand fortifications, and an upsurge in mining) and land degradation. The adoption ofmodern systems of communications (railroads, road, modern port facilities andtelegraph in the nineteenth century, airports and information technologies in thetwentieth century) had evident long-term environmental impacts as well. While thenew technologies and forms of organization were perfected and systematized inWestern Europe, there was little that was culturally specific about the forms they took,which made them eminently available for adoption. Taken together, the economicreforms worked in contradictory ways and unevenly benefited different social groups.Over time they undermined the old society without fully bringing the new one intobeing. Here the Ottoman experience essentially replicates that of the rest of the worldoutside Western Europe.

The concept of the Modern Development Project enables us to see thecontinuities in its environmental history. For the Modern Development Project was notjust imposed from without. Middle Eastern governing elites took an active handshaping the forms modernity has taken in the region, in the process incorporating it totheir historical experiences. Whether initiated by indigenous or colonial elites, liberalreform policies and post-colonial development initiatives have drawn from essentiallythe same sources and thus tended to resemble one another despite variants in a state'sspecific path to modernity. The essential similarity of the modernizing policies thatshaped each country's path is striking. Consider for example the modern historicalexperiences of Turkey and Algeria. Although Turkey pursued a route of self-initiatedreform and Algeria was colonized by France in 1830, Turkish reformers and Frenchcolonial officials adopted broadly similar policies. These included the establishment of amodern bureaucracy, a legal system based upon French code law, modern systems ofcommunications and administrative policies that favored commercial agriculture at theexpense of pastoralists. While European imperialists pursued their goals without regard

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for indigenous interests and concerns to the detriment to their moral authority, it isimportant to note that state-builders and economic actors (indigenous and colonialalike) pursued similar policies.

Despite these continuities, however, the long nineteenth century was also afundamental rupture in the relations of humans and the environment in the MiddleEast. Previously limited by the material ceiling imposed by the energy regime of theagrarian age, based upon biomass energy, the transition to fossil fuels constituted amajor threshold for far more energy intensive, technologically advanced manipulationsof the natural environment. During its first phase, 1750-1918, the transformation of theMiddle Eastern environment in the age of coal (whether under colonial or indigenousauspices) reached new levels of intrusiveness. Symbolic of the new era were suchmassive engineering projects as the construction of the Suez Canal and the first AswanDam. Steamships and railroads knit the region closer together as well as moreintimately tying it to the global market. Agricultural commercialization greatlyencouraged mono-cropping of export crops. The new capabilities of the state (colonialor pre-colonial, depending upon the histories of specific sub-regions) facilitated thesedentarization of pastoral peoples, and the extension of new legal categories—such asprivate property—deep into the countryside. As a result, historic patterns of land usewere changed over night and urban landowners were able for the first time to extendtheir control well beyond the city limits.70 In the rest of this chapter I will examine firsthow the changes of the long nineteenth century affected the first Middle East, that ofthe river valleys. In the next two sections I examine the role of engineers in thetransformation of the Middle Eastern environment, before going on to survey the role ofhydraulic engineering in the transformation of the Middle East of the river valleys inthe fossil fuel era. Finally, I survey its consequences for rural populations andenvironments in both the Mediterranean Middle East as well as the Middle East ofdeserts and oases. In a brief conclusion, I seek to draw some lessons from the history ofthe Middle Eastern environment for the rest of the world.

Engineers and the Middle Eastern Environment

The long nineteenth century (1800-1918) was marked by the fossil fuel revolutionand the industrial revolution. It therefore had cumulatively important environmentalconsequences for humans. However, it was also the century of engineers. MiddleEastern engineering projects (including the Suez canal, and ambitious railroad andtelegraph lines) were major emblems of global modernity. They also demonstrated theability of humans to tame nature through the application of steam power andelectricity. Environmental historians have not paid much attention to the role ofengineers in this period. Yet the role of the engineering profession was crucial to thetransformations of the world environment that ensued after 1750. Nowhere was thismore the case than in the Middle East, where the French model of engineering in theservice of the state was particularly influential. French graduates of the EcolePolytechnique, the Ecole des Ponts et Chaussées, and the Ecole des Mines played acentral role in the modernization of French infrastructure in the nineteenth century.71

The Ecole Polytechnique, an elite school that selected only the most brilliant studentsand produced a highly versatile corps of trained professionals, was of particularimportance.72 In the nineteenth century the Ecole Polytechnique provided an appealingmodel for the recently independent American republics. For example, the U.S. Military

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Academy at West Point was originally modeled on the Ecole Polytechnique.73 Theprestige of French engineering prowess even extended to British colonial India whereirrigation officers were trained according to French standards.74

In the first half of the nineteenth century, the Ecole Polytechniqe was heavilyinfluenced by an ideology of social progress connected to the thought of Henri de Saint-Simon (1760-1825). Under the influence of Saint-Simon’s leading disciple, BarthelemyProsper Enfantin (1796-1864), a faculty member at the Ecole Polytechniqe, many EcolePolytechniqe students were attracted to Saint-Simonism. In his hands, Saint-Simonismevolved into a cult of progress adapted to the needs of an industrial age. In an 1832article, “Le Système de la Méditérrannée,” Michel Chevalier (1806-1879), a leadingSaint-Simonian theorist, developed a vision of the Mediterranean as an economic andpolitical hub.75 The goal of French industrial policy, he proposed, should be theunification of the Mediterranean under French leadership into the new global politicaleconomy. Chevalier called for the construction of a large network of railroads andcanals under the leadership of French technocrats and capitalists. Saint-Simonians wereamong the founders of leading French banks of the period, including the CreditMobilier, the Credit Foncier, and the Credit Lyonnais. Saint-Simonian ideas about theFrench path to development emphasized the construction of a modern railroad grid thatwould link the Atlantic and Mediterranean worlds.

Under the spell of the Saint-Simonians, the Middle East (and the entireMediterranean) came to modernity. Most of the prestige projects in the Middle East,including the two principle icons of Egyptian modernity—the Suez Canal (1867) and theAswan High Dam (1972)—were the result of French engineering prowess and Saint-Simonian inspiration. Ferdinand de Lesseps, the father of the Suez canal, was adissident Saint-Simonian. There was also a Saint-Simonian proposal for the constructionof a major dam across the Nile, though it was never constructed.76 Saint-Simonians werealso involved in all aspects of the conquest of Algeria (1830-1848), where they providedthe only coherent vision of how the colonization of it might be linked to a largerstrategic vision.77 The radiating influence of the Saint-Simonian technocratic vision, likethe light of a dying star, continued to shape the transformation of the Mediterraneanenvironment long after it had run its course in France.

In Egypt, engineering schools have an almost unbroken history dating from theearly Muhammad Ali period, when an Ecole Polytechniqe was established in Cairo byCharles Lambert, a Saint-Simonian graduate of the Ecole.78 So great was the number ofEgyptian engineering graduates that by 1882 most irrigation engineers in Egypt wereEgyptian nationals. As elsewhere in the Mediterranean and Latin America, the title ofEngineer (Arabic, muhandis) became a much-coveted honorific. So numerous wereengineers that in the 1920s a quarter of modern Cairo—Muhandisin—was constructedaccording to then modern urban planning standards to house engineers and theirfamilies. By the inter-war period, Egyptian engineering schools were producing morethan one hundred graduates a year in the interwar period. By 1945, modern universityengineering schools were almost entirely Egyptianized.79 Under Nasser, engineersprovided a large, prestigious and strategically located component of the politicaladministrative elite.80 Indeed, Egypt alone among the countries in the region producedengineers far in excess of the ability of the local job market to absorb them. By the 1970s,Egyptian engineering schools were producing more than 5,000 engineering graduates a

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year. In the post-World War II era, Egypt’s nearest rival in the production ofprofessional engineers among Third World countries was Mexico.81

By 1918 there were several hundred European-trained engineers in the Ottomandomains (including Egypt). They were the leading purveyors of the idea of progressand mastery over nature central to the developmental project. Colonial Tunisia andMorocco were also the direct if unwilling recipients of French engineering expertise,although it was not until after World War I that the Ecole Polytechniqe was opened toforeign and colonial applicants (previously they had been admitted only as externalstudents). Not until after 1945 were they able to secure adequate employment as a resultof colonial employment policies.82 In Iran following the advent of Reza Shah (1925-1941), a series of student missions were sent to Paris to study at the Ecole Polytechniqe.More than 640 Iranian engineers were trained over the course of the program. Upontheir return to Iran they played an important role in devising and implementing themodernization policies of the Pahlavi regime. In 1945 French-trained engineers took thelead in establishing the Association of Iranian Engineers, which later played a role inthe politics of the post-war era, notably under Mohamed Mossadegh.83 After World WarII, graduates of the Ecole Polytechniqe and the Ecole des Mines helped found theprofessional association of engineers in Lebanon, Tunisia, and Morocco. Onceindependence was achieved, French-trained engineers took the lead in establishingnational engineering schools in the newly independent states.84 A more completehistory of the engineering profession in the Middle East might shed much light on thedevelopment policies of post-1945 states and thereby enable us better to understand theconnections between colonial and post-colonial policies and their impacts upon theenvironment.

The Middle East of the River Valleys: The Role of Hydraulic Engineering

The Egyptian case is central to a study of irrigation and water managementregimes in the Middle East. The continuity of water management in the Nile valley overmore than five millennia is unmatched anywhere. Large-scale irrigation projects did notbegin with the Modern Development Project but with the pharaohs. Since 1750, Egypthas been the best example of successful agricultural modernization in the regionstarting with Muhammad Ali (1805-1841), under whose rule the plan to construct a damon the Nile at Aswan (1834) was developed with French assistance but notimplemented.85 The Suez Canal (1867) remains a showcase of the progress-orientedideology of the Modern Development Project. Since the 1980s the stagnation ofEgyptian agriculture has exposed the limits of this particular development strategy, aswe will see below.

A pioneer ruler in the image of the Modern Development Project, MuhammadAli (also known as Mehmet Ali) adopted policies that dramatically transformed Egyptin the nineteenth century.86 Under his rule the Egyptian economy was opened towardthe world market and converted to the production of cotton for export.87 In the first halfof the nineteenth century, the mechanized production of cotton textiles was the leadingindustry in the world economy and cotton supplies were inadequate. Egypt was wellpositioned to take advantage of the situation because of its convenient location and thefact that it possessed abundant fertile land and an industrious peasantry. At the outset,however, there were a number of important bottlenecks in the traditional agricultural

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economy of Egypt. These included problems with the existing irrigation system, thevariable quality and the numerous varieties of cotton produced, and the socialorganization of labor. Under Muhammad Ali, efforts were made to address each ofthese bottlenecks.

The discovery of long staple cotton by a French technical advisor, Louis AlexisJumel (1785-1823), was crucial to what came next.88 The fibers of the Jumel variety ofcotton were longer and stronger than other common varieties. More importantly, theycould be readily processed by machine. By standardizing the production of Jumelcotton, Egypt became the leading producer of premium cotton for the mills ofManchester and Liverpool.89 Egyptian cotton soon set the world standard. Frenchexperts laid down strict rules on how to grow Jumel cotton and devised a hierarchicallabor organization to enforce its cultivation. Egypt was turned to a vast cottonplantation for the world market, and peasants were not permitted to grow subsistencecrops on land allocated to cotton production.90 In order to maximize production, it wasnecessary to end the millennial basin system of irrigation with its reliance on the annualfloods, and move to a system of perennial irrigation. Perennial irrigation, by adding asummer growing season, enabled cotton production to continue year-round. Newcanals were constructed (240 miles by 1833), notably the Mahmudiya canal in the Delta(1817), while other canals were deepened so that they would be below the level of theriver even in the dry season. Barrages were built on the main Nile Delta canals to retainwater and facilitate the provision of water to secondary and tertiary irrigationnetworks.91

Under the British the Muhammad Ali water management system was upgradedseveral times. In the 1880s, three major off-take canals were built in the Delta, and in1902 the first Aswan dam was constructed under the direction of Sir Colin Montcrieff.The height of the dam was raised several times by the British and by 1933 the storagecapacity had reached 5.7 billion cubic feet.92 To facilitate the movement of cotton to theworld market, railroads were constructed along the Nile corridor (1519 kilometers by1877). As a result of perennial irrigation, the area devoted to cotton production wasgreatly expanded. From 3 million qantars in 1880, production rose in 1914 to 7.3 millionqantars (one qantar is approximately 99.05 pounds, or 44.93 kilograms). Land useintensified greatly under the regime of perennial irrigation and led to new cultivationpractices, notably the widespread plowing of fields (not practiced under the basinsystem, in which the silt laid down by the annual flood fertilized the fields). Theconfirmation of the state’s responsibility for the development of the irrigationinfrastructure was perhaps the most important consequence of the widespreadadoption of perennial irrigation.

The Egyptian environment was affected in important ways by these innovations.To begin with, the advent of perennial irrigation was accompanied by human healthproblems, notably an increase in schistosomiasis and other water-borne diseases. Morecrucial was the inadequate investment in drainage. Water laden with mineral salts if notregularly flushed and drained away, tended to accumulate in the soil. Over time this ledto the cumulative loss of much productive land to agriculture. As we’ve seen above, theproblem of lack of drainage is as old as the pharaohs. Prior to the beginning of theMuslim era, more than 1.5 million feddans of cultivated land (one feddan is equal toapproximately one acre or 0.4 hectare) in the northern Delta are estimated to have been

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lost to cultivation due to salt intrusion.93 However, perennial cultivation (especiallyafter the construction of the 1902 Aswan dam) lessened a second age-old problem, theirregularities of the Nile flood, which had caused important shortfalls in cerealproduction and induced periodic famines. The British approach to irrigation also hadregressive social consequences. The consolidation of private property rights in land andlabor together with the transformation to perennial irrigation worked to the advantageof wealthy landowners. Together with greatly increasing the area of cultivated land, itintensified pressures on landless peasants, igniting the endemic peasant land hungerthat is featured in Sharkawi’s classic 1930s novel of social protest, Egyptian Earth.94 Bythe inter-war period, the stark contrast between the small class of wealthy landowners(known as umdahs) and the vast numbers of landless peasants had begun to havepolitical consequences. At the risk of being overly schematic, the adoption of perennialirrigation under the British eventually generated the social tinder that led to the FreeOfficers coup in 1952.

In Phase Two of the fossil fuel era (1918-present), petroleum and natural gassupplanted coal as the primary energy source for most societies, and the humancapacity to manipulate the environment accelerated dramatically. While the stateacquired far-reaching new powers of intervention, the entire region became moreclosely linked to the world economy, even as the latter came to depend heavily uponMiddle Eastern oil and gas. Secular trends of deforestation, land degradation andanthropogenic pollution have reached new levels, without provoking thus far thesignificant popular environmentalist responses we have seen in the United States,Europe, India and parts of Africa. The advent of petroleum and natural gas providedhumans with unprecedented capacities to manipulate the environment. New mega-engineering projects such as the Aswan High Dam, while entirely within the logic of thenineteenth century hydrological engineering, greatly surpassed it in their bold reach.The High Dam made two major contributions. First it provided cheap and abundantsupplies of electrical power to a state not otherwise well endowed with petroleumresources. Second, the adoption of perennial irrigation increased the cultivated landarea, and greatly reduced Egypt’s exposure to El Niño-intensified famines, like the 1877famine witnessed by Ulysses S. Grant.95 Without the Aswan High Dam, there is littledoubt that 1980s Sahel famine that devastated the Saharan fringes from West Africa tonorthern Africa would have hit Egypt hard as well. Given the relentless demographicpressures to which Egypt is exposed, this is no small achievement. Only in the past fewyears has Egypt once again had to turn to the international grain market to supplementits need for food. In this sense, it can be said that the High Dam bought Egypt thirtyyears of respite from the relentless population pressures.

However, the High Dam has also had important negative environmentalimpacts. The continued lack of investment in drainage has led to land being taken outof production due to salination, with a further decline in productivity. Then there wasthe major problem with siltation: no longer deposited along the Nile flood plain, silt hasaccumulated in the vast man-made lake (Lake Nasser) up-stream of the dam, where ithas threatened to obstruct the outlets of the dam and to compromise the lake itself. Inthe absence of the annual deposit of silt on their fields, Egyptian farmers have becomedependent upon commercial fertilizers. The gains from productivity stem primarilyfrom increases in the area under cultivation, since yields per hectare have remainedsubstantially constant. Finally, the fisheries of the eastern Mediterranean have been

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deprived of their principle source of nutrients found in the silt, and as a result fishstocks have declined precipitously (over-fishing no doubt has also been a majorfactor).96 Against this record of environmental costs must be balanced against the gainsin food security the High Dam has afforded. It also needs to be set in the long-termhistorical context of human intervention in the environment of the Nile valley over thepast five millennia.

The post-1918 history of the Middle East contains a rich but mostly untoldhistory of ambitious water management schemes. One that can be briefly evoked hereinvolves the attempts of the three riparian states (Turkey, Syria, and Iraq) to erect damsacross the Euphrates River. The absence of coordination between the three states(despite international agreements) has thus far not led to conflict, but the high politicalstatus of the dam projects in each state does not augur well for future cooperation. InTurkey, The Turkish Southeast Anatolia Project (SEAP) led to the construction of overeighty dams and sixty-six hydroelectric power stations and costs in excess of 20 billiondollars, with part of the cost borne by the World Bank.97 The project’s centerpiece, theAtaturk dam on the Euphrates was completed in 1992. It is intended to jump-start theeconomic development of eastern Anatolia as well as facilitating government controlover separatists in Turkish Kurdistan. The ambitious Turkish plans for the headwatersof the Euphrates and its tributaries are squarely within the developmentalist logic of theModern Development Project. But they are not the only ones for this major river system.

Syria’s dependence upon the Euphrates is equally crucial to nationaldevelopment objectives since the Euphrates is by far the largest river in Syria. TheTabqa dam, construction on which began in 1974, was conceived by Soviet engineersand built as a kind of Syrian counterpart to the Aswan dam. It has a planned storagecapacity of 12 billion cubic meters but has been plagued by numerous technicalproblems (land subsidence, seepage and evaporation). In the droughts of the 1980s,Syrian insistence on taking their full water rights provoked major conflicts with bothIraq and Turkey, the other riparian states. Conflicts are expected only to increase as theTurkish Southeast Anatolia Project is completed. Already there have been difficultiescaused by the excessive (to Syrian eyes) levels of waters impounded by Turkish dams.Unless there is a negotiated solution, the reduction in the Euphrates flow is likely tocompromise the Syrian irrigation projects.98

The attempt to restore Iraqi irrigation to the level of ancient Persia has gonethrough numerous phases since the period of the Ottoman tanzimat.99 The constructionof the Hindiyah barrage prior to World War I was followed by the building ofnumerous dams, canals, and artificial lakes under the British and Iraqi governments inthe years that followed. As in Egypt, the modernization of Iraqi irrigation wasundermined by insufficient investment in drainage (which led to the loss of land toagriculture from salination). For this reason a major project under Saddam Hussein(1979-2003) was the “Third River”—an attempt to open a vast drainage canal to collectand drain saline waters from irrigation canals fed by the Tigris and Euphrates. Itoriginated in studies conducted in the 1950s by American engineers and was completedby the Iraqi government in 1994. The Third River project represents a classic form ofdevelopmentalist thinking about rivers as drains (see Cioc’s study of the Rhine in thisvolume). Since the downfall of the regime, plans for the Tigris/Euphrates remain inlimbo, pending the resolution of the current situation (2005). In general, the attempts at

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international management of the Euphrates remind one of the struggles among riparianstates along the Nile.100 The lack of cooperation is likely to have similar consequences.

The Middle Easts of Dry-Farming and Pastoralism since 1918

In contrast to the Middle East of river valleys, where the environment has beenshaped by major engineering projects in the post-1918 period, the Middle East of dry-farming and pastoralism (our second and third major ecological divisions of the region)have had divergent histories in the modern period. Here, for lack of space I confine mydiscussion to the North African case. A more complete development of this surveywould address in greater detail the situations of the Iranian plateau, geographic Syria,and the Arabian peninsula. Like other parts of the Middle Eastern region dependentupon rain-fed agriculture, the Maghrib (Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco) has a rainfall regimethat averages 250 millimeters per year or less (much less in the case of Libya). There isalso considerable annual local variability depending upon the relief and the season. Inpre-colonial times water management schemes focused upon smaller-scaleinterventions rather than ambitious hydrological engineering projects.101 Examplesdiscussed above include the qanat-style irrigation tunnels in the Tafilalt oasis area andthe diffusion of the tank system of irrigated gardens to Umayyad Syria, FatimidTunisia, and Almohad Marrakech. The pre-colonial North African economy focusedupon cereal production (barley and wheat) and cultivation with the archeo-technological scratch plow. This style of agriculture was relatively drought tolerant. Atpre-colonial population levels, it was largely in balance with the environment.

All this changed in the nineteenth century, as France progressively established itscontrol over the Maghrib. French colonial rule in North Africa began in 1830 in Algeria,1881 in Tunisia, and 1912 in Morocco. Haunted by the legacy of Rome, when NorthAfrica was allegedly the granary of Rome, the French fashioned for themselves aprogressive narrative in which it would restore the Maghrib to its former agriculturalwealth through its enlightened colonial rule. The coming of the French marked a majorchange in the agrarian economy of the Maghrib and brought about a gradual shift toforms of high-input agriculture based upon production for an export market rather thanself-sufficiency. Fixated upon the myth of North Africa as the granary of Rome, theFrench sought to “make the desert bloom” by fostering the dry-farming of grain in thecentral regions. By the 1880s the high plateaux of the Algerian interior, long a zone ofpastoral transhumance, had been opened to grain farmers using tractors and combine-harvesters to dry-farm wheat and barley for the French market. Mechanized productionwas encouraged by a program of subsidies and bonuses and high crop prices in theFrench metropole. Europeans occupied roughly 30 percent of Algeria’s arable land andlesser percentages of arable land in Tunisia (20 percent) and Morocco (13 percent).Throughout colonial North Africa, environmentally anomalous modern high-inputagriculture was accompanied by extreme concentration of land ownership. This shiftdevastated the flocks and herds of the pastoralists while exposing the thin soils of theTellian Atlas to erosion.102

In Morocco, French protectorate authorities were similarly enamored of thegranary of Rome myth and encouraged wheat farming by a select group of wealthyFrench and Moroccan farmers in the central coastal plains known as “le Maroc utile.” Asa result there were significant gains in cereal production. Harvests increased from 1.9

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million hectares in 1918 to nearly 3 million hectares in 1929. While cereal productionincreased, so did vulnerability to drought. The favoring of wheat over barley (the latteris more drought tolerant) further exacerbated the effects of drought. A major crisis in1929-1933 coincided with the great depression to economically devastate French cerealfarmers in Morocco and Algeria. It was only later that agronomists came to recognizethat the granary of Rome ideology had blinded the French to the environmental realitiesof the Maghrib: rain-fed agriculture was an environmentally perilous undertaking.According to one recent study, serious droughts have been recorded in twenty-five ofthe last hundred years.103

After the failure of the granary of Rome experiment in Morocco, Frenchprotectorate authorities sought to tap the hydrological resources of the Atlas mountains,the westward slopes of which received seasonal rainfall averaging 30 inches annually.Through the ambitious Beni Amir plan (and related other projects) a series of damswere constructed which aimed at boosting Morocco’s irrigated land to one millionhectares. In the exalted language of the moment: not a single drop of water to the sea!By 1949, the irrigated area in the Kasba Tadla/Beni Amir area had expanded from 2,000to 13,000 hectares. By the 1950s the French had completely reorganized production inthe modern sector of the Moroccan agricultural economy and devised a new strategy: toproduce fruits and early vegetables for the European market. In this, they were heavilyinfluenced by the California model of agriculture: the inter-linking of irrigation,pesticides, and scientific agricultural methods. The Organisation Cherifien de controleet d’exportation was modeled on the California Fruit Growers Exchange. It was chargedwith setting quality standards, researching new varieties, analyzing market conditions,and establishing the Moroccan brand name in the European market.104 The Frenchdecision to modernize Moroccan agriculture in the 1940s and 1950s left a permanentlegacy for post-colonial Moroccan agriculture. Since the 1960s the independent NorthAfrican states have continued to push cereal production into increasingly marginalagricultural lands despite the evident folly of such a strategy.

In the third of our ecological zones, the world of pastoralist stock raising, thecoming of the French represented a major transformation as well. Whereascontemporary range ecologists are apt to see a fluctuating balance between pastoralism,agriculture and forest ecology, French colonial attitudes reflected environmentalistconcerns with deforestation and conservation that viewed pastoralists as a balefulinfluence. George Perkins Marsh’s forest-centrism echoed French scientific concern withthe environment of the Middle East and North Africa.105 An early expression of thelatter was the French Forest Code of 1827.106 A product of research on tropical islandsand on the French Alps, it was exported unchanged to the very different environmentof North Africa.107 Arid environments, unlike tropical ones, are well adapted to droughtand disturbance and recover well from dramatic vegetation changes. Whereas theNorth African environment was well adapted to fire and grazing, the Forest Codeimposed strong limits on both. In general French colonial authorities regardedpastoralists as suspect and tended to criminalize pastoralists in the forests and saw thesource of land degradation in over-grazing. The attitudes of contemporary Magribistates toward their pastoralists populations have regrettably tended to replicate Frenchcolonial views, and ascribe land degradation to over-grazing. By contrast, recent workon range ecology in Africa has sharply challenged these negative views of pastoralistbehavior. They have seen pastoralism as having a viable way of life with historical

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sustainability. Instead of an equilibrium, range ecologists view the arid and semi-aridrangelands of the Maghrib as being in permanent disequilibrium due to the harshnature of the climate, population increase and the over-drafting of aquifers due to theproliferation of tube wells.108

Influenced by French colonial visions of agricultural plenty, post- independenceMorocco launched a major development project that sought to increase the reach ofmodern agriculture via the creation of tractor cooperatives and the establishment ofmodel farms. Drawing upon French colonial plans, it aimed at irrigating one millionhectares of land. That there have been some successes is evident from the record. By1986 Morocco was the second exporter of oranges in the world (13 percent of worldmarket) and 80 percent of all its agricultural exports were fruits and vegetables.However, only a portion of Moroccan agricultural land is susceptible to California-styleagriculture. The Moroccan state (both colonial and post-colonial) has lacked the meansto fully implement the California model. (More recently the California model has cometo look increasingly like a Faustian bargain even in the southwest of the United States,as siltation and salination have led to a secular pattern of decreased yields in largesections of the Colorado river basin.)109 Neither the French nor the independentMoroccan state were able to counter the influence of the vested interests that are alegacy of the colonial land system. Crucially, the strategy of concentrating on modernirrigated agriculture has failed to address the dramatic demographic increase (morethan 3 percent per annum). Instead of fostering the emergence of a self-sufficientpeasantry, the adoption of the California model has worsened existing inequalities.Most of the investment has gone to enrich the already wealthy, while poor peasantshave continued to lag. In the opinion of some experts, the California model has been asbig a failure as the granary of Rome experiment.110 It has failed to provide food security,to raise rural standards of living, or to provide adequate foreign exchange earnings.While land under cultivation increased considerably, yields per hectare have not doneso. Given the environmental realities, the new goal of food security is in the opinion ofmany agronomists equally mythical. Only the driving myth has changed. Yetparadoxically, faith in modern high-input agriculture continues unabatedly.

In the nineteenth century, farmers on the central plains of the United Statesbelieved that “rain follows the plow.” Family farms were planted on the prairie and fora time the bumper crops rolled in. It seemed like the American Dream come true.Farmers were only disabused of this notion by the devastating droughts of the 1920sthat created the Dust Bowl. Nothing daunted, a generation of developmentaleconomists and agronomists exported the rain-follows-the-plow ideology to the ThirdWorld after World War II. For a time, it seemed as though the strategy was working, ashigh-input agriculture, dependent upon pesticides, fertilizers, and hybrid seeds led torecord harvests and soaring hopes of food security throughout the Third World. But adarker side soon became evident. Because much of the gains came from the extension ofagriculture into marginal land in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, it took some timebefore agronomists paid much attention to the depleted ground water, pesticide-fouledaquifers, and socially skewed gains for the some at the expense of ruin for the many.But by the 1970s, record famines (sometimes intensified by El Niño events) broughtdisaster to the West African Sahel, northeast Brazil, East Africa, and a host of otherplaces. This prompted a major reassessment. The new mantra from agronomists was“drought follows the plow.”111

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Because of the failure of high-input agriculture, those charged with planning thedevelopment strategies of Third World countries have been left in a quandary.Confronted by unrelenting demographic pressures, some believe that they have littleoption but to persist with the new ways. These questions are especially acute for MiddleEastern states lacking major river systems, such as the North African cases we’ve justexplored. Even Egypt and states along the riparian corridor of the Euphrates likeTurkey, Syria, and Iraq, although they are more fortunately situated, are already facingthe same pressures. Egypt is no longer self sufficient in food production. Most of therest of the region has not been for some time, and the food deficits get bigger with eachpassing year even as populations continue to rise. By the turn of the twenty-firstcentury the over-stressed Middle Eastern ecology is showing signs of over-shooting thecarrying capacity of the land. Large-scale engineering solutions seem unlikely toprovide the way forward. Once again the long-term view is telling. Here the words ofPeter Christensen referring to Iran can be applied to the Middle East region as a whole:

[I]n spite of considerable investments and the transfer of modern, westernagrarian technology, [Iran] has not increased productivity–rather the opposite, ifwe look at productivity per unit area. The point is that resource scarcity,primarily lack of water, has imposed fundamental limits on production, limitswhich until now neither more capital nor improved technology nor alternativeforms of social organization have been able to transcend. In this sense Iran differsfrom both pre-industrial Europe and the wet-rice societies of Asia.112

This long-term perspective is radically subversive of cherished developmentalistbeliefs. If output per hectare has not increased over the very long run, then something iswrong with the equation. Heroic efforts like the Aswan High Dam have added to thetotal area under the plow throughout the region (and in the process expanded the firstof our ecological Middle Easts at the expense of the others), but they can no longerforestall the inevitable coming decline. It is probably time to question the pre-modern/modern dichotomy as well. Especially so, when despite ever-increasing energyinputs in the form of fertilizers and other additives, agricultural outputs in the U.S.relative to energy inputs have stagnated or event regressed over the past fifty years.113

Environmental catastrophe looms throughout the Middle Eastern region as aquifershave become over-tapped, rivers and seas are increasingly polluted, and landdegradation due to many causes accelerates.114

Conclusion

From the perspective of the deep history of the Middle Eastern environment themodern history of the region looks substantially different. Middle Eastern states andpeoples have been transforming the regional environment for millennia, not just sincethe onset of modern times. Already by the first millennium B.C.E., if not before, humanactions had substantially remolded the Mesopotamian environment by a series of majorhydraulic engineering projects, including massive dams, canals and artificial rivers. Inthis context modern engineering marvels like the Aswan High Dam no longer seem sooriginal and the assumption that modern people are alone in their capacity to adverselyaffect the environment seems questionable. The graph of environmental decline needsto be redrawn. Instead of a curve rising sharply only to mark the onset of the modern

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era, the new shape would show important up-ticks in environmental degradation withthe origins of civilization, the age of metallurgy, and then a sharp upswing startingaround 1450. Starting around 1750, as the fossil fuel revolutions completely altered thegame, the curve would mount steeply. Perhaps not surprisingly, the graph ofenvironmental degradation closely conforms to that of human demographic trends.

Second, if we pay attention to the deep history of the Middle Easternenvironment, we can see that modernity is not just Western. Rather, its roots lie deep inthe common past of Afroeurasia as a whole. As the Middle East example demonstrates,not only have humans been altering the environment in which they live for millennia,but states and economies have been patiently knitting webs of connection betweenhumans for at least this long.115 From a world historical perspective, a central element ofthe modern of the state, the military/fiscal revolution was already in place in East Asia.It subsequently diffused across Afroeurasia, and in the process transformed warfareand the organization of the state through the introduction of gunpowder weapons, newforms of organization, tactics and strategy. Muslim rulers were quick to see theadvantages of gunpowder weapons and were among the first to deploy them on a largescale.116 The military/fiscal revolution was but the most recent mutation of thedevelopmentalist project we can track all across Eurasia from the beginnings of complexsocieties. The same can be said of the Industrial Revolution. Only when linked to theinflux of the silver of the Americas, and (especially) the fossil fuel revolution did theseinter-connected global processes provide Europe with a decisive upper hand over otherworld regions (including the Middle East). However, the Ottomans did not need to waitthe authorization of the West to adopt the fruits of this phase of the DevelopmentalProject. They had already adopted it from the start.

The Modern Development Project was not just imposed from without. MiddleEastern governing elites took an active hand shaping the forms modernity has taken inthe region, drawing upon their own histories. Moreover, putting the Middle Easternenvironment at the center of the frame allows us to notice that the policies pursued byindigenous as well as colonial rulers since 1750 have been essentially similar. Both havepaved roads, built railroads, dams, canals, and modern irrigation schemes. Both haveinvested in capital (and technology) intensive mining; both have greatly increased theirconsumption of wood (both as a construction material and as biomass energy) andfossil fuels. There is more than a family resemblance between the ways colonial andpost-colonial states conceived of the environment. The fossil fuel revolution has onlydeepened these attitudes. Following the overthrow of colonialism, no Third World statehas elected to forego the benefits of modern medicine, military weapons, orcommunications technologies. In this sense, we are all modern.

The Modern Development Project has short-circuited social processes bypursuing macro-level policies and procedures without linking them to meso- andmicro-level processes. The result has been mixed. On the plus side, the Middle East isable to provide food for a significant proportion of its citizens, despite dramaticallyhigher populations (food security remains an important issue), to provide greatquantities of relatively cheap petroleum and natural gas to the world market (with one-time revenue gains for the producing states and state elites, and economic benefits formany), and to bring about greater economic integration of the region into the worldmarket as a result of the Suez Canal (with incidental advantages for the region). On the

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negative side, there has been dramatically increased environmental degradation. Thisincludes higher levels of deforestation, irreversible land degradation, spoilage offisheries, overdraft of aquifers, and pollution of water resources. Given the fragility ofthe Middle Eastern environment, the cumulative irreversible impacts of these vectorspose a significant challenge to the future.

As a consequence of its fragile and over-burdened environment and its longhistory of human intervention, today the Middle East finds itself confrontingunprecedented challenges. Because the legacy of squandered water resources,deforestation and pollution of all kinds is far longer in the Middle Eastern region, andbecause the vulnerability of Middle Eastern semi-arid and arid landscapes is moreevident, their cumulative consequences are perhaps also particularly visible. The flayedMiddle Eastern environment is a distilled essence of the rest of the world as it will be, ifnot as it is at present. For this reason, the Middle Eastern case is of particular relevanceto all those who are concerned about the global environment. Like the proverbial canaryin the miner’s cage, the Middle East provides a warning for the rest of the planet. Willthe future bring a struggle over water and other basic resources? Or will humaningenuity once again find a way out of the mess it has created?

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Endnotes

1 Peter Christensen, The Decline of Iranshahr: Irrigation and Environments in the History of theMiddle East, 500 B.C. to A.D. 1500 (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 1993).2 Marshall Hodgson, The Venture of Islam, Vol. 2 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press,1974), 62-151.3 Robert McC. Adams, The Land Behind Baghdad: A History of Settlement on the Diyala Plains(Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1965).4 Andrew Watson, Agricultural Innovation in the Early Islamic World (Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 1983).5 On Islamic water lifting devices, see Ahmad Y. Hassan and Donald J. Hill, IslamicTechnology: An Illustrated History (Cambridge and Paris: Cambridge University Press andUNESCO, 1986), 37-55.6 J. M. Wagstaff, The Evolution of Middle Eastern Landscapes An Outline to A.D. 1840(London: Croom Helm, 1985), 93-97 and 148-151.7 Attilio Petruccioli, “Rethinking the Islamic Garden,” in Jane Coppock and Joseph A. Miller,eds., Transformations of Middle Eastern Natural Environments: Legacies and Lessons (NewHaven: Yale University Press, 1998): 349-363. Also Karen Foster Pollinger, “Gardens of Eden:Exotic Flora and Fauna in the Ancient Near East,” in Coppock and Miller, Transformations, 320-329.8 Peter Christensen, “Middle Eastern Irrigation: Legacies and Lessons,” in Jane Coppock andJoseph A. Miller, eds., Transformations of Middle Eastern Natural Environments: Legacies andLessons (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 15-30.9 Christensen, Decline of Iranshahr, 73.10 On early Islamic irrigation techniques see Hassan and Hill, Islamic Technology, 80-91.11 Christensen, Decline of Iranshahr, 72.12 Adams, Land Behind Baghdad..13 Christensen, “Middle Eastern Irrigation”: 19.14 Christensen, The Decline of Iranshahr, 19.15 Paul Ward English, “Qanats and Lifeworlds in Iranian Plateau Villages,” in Jane Coppock andJoseph A. Miller, eds., Transformations of Middle Eastern Natural Environments: Legacies andLessons (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 187-205.16 English, “Qanats and Lifeworlds,” 194.17 Watson, Agricultural Innovation. See also his “The Arab Agricultural Revolution, 700-1100,”The Journal of Economic History 34, no. 4 (1974): 8-35.18 Eliahu Ashtor, The Social and Economic History of the Near East in the Middle Ages(London: Collins, 1976); Christensen, Decline of Iranshahr and “Middle Eastern Irrigation,”19.19 Thomas Glick, “Hydraulic Technology in al-Andalus,” in The Legacy of Muslim Spain(Leiden: Brill, 1992), 974-986. For a more complete discussion, see Glick, Irrigation and Societyin Medieval Valencia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1973).20 Thomas Glick, “The Attempt to Adopt the Valencian Communal System in British India,” inIrrigation and Hydraulic Technology: Medieval Spain and Its Legacy (Aldershot, Great Britain:Variorum, 1996), Ch. IX, 978.21 Ronald A. Messier and Neil D. MacKenzie, Archaeological Survey of Sijilmasa, 1988 (Rabat,Morocco: Institut National des Sciences de l’Archéologie et du Patrimoine, and Murfreesboro:Middle Tennessee State University, 1989); James A. Miller, “Sustained Past and Risky Present:

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The Tafilalt Oasis of Southeastern Morocco,” in Swearingen, Will D. and Abdellatif Bencherifa,eds., The North African Environment at Risk (Boulder: Westview, 1996), 55-69; E. W. Bovill,The Golden Trade of the Moors (London: Oxford University Press, 1958); Mohammed El Faiz,Jardins de Marrakech (Arles: Actes Sud, 2002).22 Edmund Burke III, “The Middle East at the Center,” keynote address to World HistoryAssociation annual meeting (June 2003).23 See Joseph Needham, with the collaboration of Wang Ling and Lu Gwei-Djen, Physics andPhysical Technology, Science and Civilization in China, Vol. IV (Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 1971), especially Part 3, “Civil Engineering and Nautics.” Also Mark Elvin,The Pattern of the Chinese Past: A Social and Economic Interpretation (Stanford, CA: StanfordUniversity Press, 1973).24 Needham, Physics, 282, dates the Grand Canal from the Sui dynasty (580-618 CE).25 Arnold Pacey, Technology In World Civilization: A Thousand-Year History (Oxford: B.Blackwell, 1990), 8. On the development of lateral derivate irrigation canals in China from thefifth century BCE, Needham, Physics, 374 comments: “Thus was the Babylonian patterntransplanted to Chinese soil.”26 Elvin, The Pattern of the Chinese Past, 126-128.27 Madhav Gadgil and Ramachandra Guha, This Fissured Land: An Ecological History of India(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993). Also David Ludden, An Agrarian History ofSouth Asia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).28 El Faiz, Jardins de Marrakech, 30-42.29 Thomas Glick, The Old World Background of the Irrigation System of San Antonio, Texas,Southwestern Studies Monograph No. 35. (San Antonio: Texas Western Press, 1972), 3-67.30 H.F.M van de Ven, ed., Hydrology for the Water Management of Large River Basins(Wallingford, United Kingdom: International Association of Hydrological Sciences, 1991);Johan Van Veen, Drain, Dredge, Reclaim: The Art of a Nation (The Hague: Martinus Nijoff,1962).31 Caesare. S. Maffioli, Out of Galileo: The Science of Waters 1628-1718 (Rotterdam: ErasmusPublishing, 1994).32 Glick, “Valencian Communal System.” In Irrigation and Hydraulic Technology: MedievalSpain and Its Legacy (Aldershot, Great Britain: Variorum, 1996), Ch. XVII.33 Karl Wittvogel, Oriental Despotism: a Comparative Study of Total Power (New Haven: YaleUniversity Press, 1957).34 Donald Hughes, Pan’s Travails: Environmental Problems of the Ancient Greeks and Romans(Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994).35 Theodore A. Wertime, “The Furnace versus the Goat? Pyrotechnologic Industries andMediterranean Deforestation,” Journal of Field Archeology 10 (1983): 445-452. Theodore A.Wertime, and James D. Muhly, eds., The Coming of the Age of Iron (New Haven and London:Yale University Press, 1980).36 Wertime, “The Furnace versus the Goat?”37 Koster and Forbes 1978 cited in Wertime, “The Furnace versus the Goat?”38 John Perlin, A Forest Journey: The Role of Wood in the Development of Civilization (NewYork: Norton, 1989).39 J. V. Thirgood, Man and the Mediterranean Forest (New York: Academic Press, 1981), 67-69and 74.

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40 Jean Despois, L’Afrique du nord (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1949) and AugustinBernard, Afrique septentrionale et occidentale (Paris: Armand Colin, 1937).41 Christensen, Decline of Iranshahr.42 Oleg Petruchevsky, “Iran Under the Il-Khans.” In J. A. Boyle, ed., The Cambridge History ofIslam, Vol. 5 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).43 Petruschevsky, “Iran Under the Il-Khans.”44 Christensen, Decline of Iranshahr.45 Christensen, Decline of Iranshahr.46 Adams, Land Behind Baghdad.47 Christensen, Decline of Iranshahr, 75-8048 Stuart J. Borsch, “Environment and Population: The Decline of Large Irrigation SystemsReconsidered,” Comparative Studies in Society and History (2004): 451-468.49 Christensen, Decline of Iranshahr, 120-123.50 For Bernard Lewis the answer was Islam. What Went Wrong? The Clash Between Islam andModernity in the Middle East (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002).51 See Pomeranz, Chapter 5 in this volume. More generally, Andre Gunder Frank, Reorient:Global Economy in the Asian Age (Berkeley: California, 1998) and Kenneth Pomeranz, TheGreat Divergence: China, Europe and the Making of the Modern World Economy (Princeton:Princeton University Press, 2002).52 Pomeranz, Great Divergence and Frank, Reorient. Also Robert Marks, The Origins of theModern World (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002).53 Pomeranz, this volume.54 Christensen, The Decline of Iranshahr. Roger Savory, Iran under the Safavids (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980).55 W.E.D. Allen, Problems of Turkish Power in the Sixteenth Century (London: Central AsianResearch Centre, 1963).56 Bruce Macgowen, Economic Life in Ottoman Europe, Taxation, Trade and the Struggle forLand 1600-1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981).57 Marshall G. S. Hodgson, The Venture of Islam (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974),v. 3, 16-22.58 For an overview of the economic history of the Ottoman empire from 1500 to 1800, seeSuraiya Faroqhi, Bruce McGowan, Donald Quataert and Sevket Pamuk, An Economic and SocialHistory of the Ottoman Empire Vol. 1 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1994).59 Giancarlo Casale, “The Ottoman Age of Exploration: Spices, Maps and Conquest in theSixteenth-century Indian Ocean” (Ph.D. dissertation, Harvard University, 2004).60 For an overview of the eighteenth century, see Bruce McGowan, Part II: “The Age of theAyans,” in Suraiya Foroqhi, et al., An Economic and Social History of the Ottoman Empire(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 637-758.61 On Iran, Leonard Helfgott, Ties That Bind: A Social History of the Iranian Carpet(Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1994). On the Ottoman empire see Faroqhi, etal., Ottoman Empire, Vol. 1.62 On the Lebanese silk industry, see Boutros Labaki, La soie dans l’economie du Mont Liban,1840-1914 (Beirut: Publications de l’Université Libanaise, 1979).63 Huri Islamoghlu-Inan, The Ottoman Empire and the World Economy (Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 1987).

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64 On the mesta in Spain see David Ringrose, Spain, Europe, and the “Spanish Miracle,” 1700-1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). On Italy, see John Marino, PastoralEconomics the Kingdom of Naples (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988). For theOttoman case, see Soraiya Faroqhi, Towns and Townsmen of Ottoman Anatolia, Trade, Craftsand Food Production in an Urban Setting (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984).65 Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, 2vols. (New York: Harper and Row, 1973). French edition 1949.66 Halil Inalcik, The Ottoman Empire, The Classical Age, 1300-1600 (London: Weidenfeld &Nicolson, 1973). Robert Mantran, Istanbul dans la seconde moitié du XVIIe siècle: essaid'histoire institutionnelle, économique et sociale (Paris: A. Maisonneuve, 1962).67 The concept of energy regime is developed by Johan Goudsblom, Fire and Civilization(London: Allen Lane, 1992) and Fred Spier, The Structure of Big History (Amsterdam:Amsterdam University Press, 1996). Also David Christian, Maps of Time: An Introduction to BigHistory (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003).68 Bernard Lewis, The Emergence of Modern Turkey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961);Niyazi Berkes, The Rise of Secularism in Turkey (Montreal: McGill University Press, 1964);Donald Quataert, The Ottoman Empire to 1922 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).69 Specialists generally reserve the term tanzimat to denote the military reforms of the period1839-1856. Here I employ the term to refer more broadly to the long nineteenth century periodas a whole (see below).70 On the long nineteenth century, see Resat Kesaba, The Ottoman Empire and the WorldEconomy: The Nineteenth Century (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988); SevketPamuk, The Ottoman Empire and European Capitalism, 1820-1913 (Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 1987); Charles Issawi, An Economic History of the Middle East and NorthAfrica (N.Y.: Columbia University Press, 1982); and Roger Owen, The Middle East in the WorldEconomy (London: Methuen, 1981). Also William R. Polk and Richard Chambers, eds., TheBeginnings of Modernization in the Middle East (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968).71 Antoine Picon, L’Invention de l’ingénieur moderne: L’école des Ponts et Chaussées, 1747-1851 (Paris: Presses de l’Ecole des Ponts et Chaussées, 1992).72 On the Ecole Polytechnique, see Jean-Pierre Callot, Histoire de l’Ecole Polytechniqe (Paris:Charles Lavauzelle, 1982); and Terry Shinn, Savoir scientifique et pouvoir sociale. L’EcolePolytechniqe, 1794-1914 (Paris: Presses de la Fondation Nationale des Sciences politiques,1980).73 Robert Fox, “Les regards étrangers sur l’Ecole Polytechniqe, 1794-1850,” Revue de l’OccidentMusulman et de la Méditerraneée 73-74, (1994): 213-230.74 William Willcocks, Sixty Years in the East (Edinburgh & London: William Blackwood &Sons Ltd., 1935).75 Phillippe Régnier, Les Saint-Simoniens et Egypte, 1833-1851 (Cairo: Banque de l’UnionEuropéenne, 1989).76 Magali Morsy, Les Saint-Simoniens et l’Orient (Aix-en-Provence: Editions Edisud, 1989).77 Magali Morsy, ed., Les Saint-Simonians et l'Orient (Aix-en Provence: Edisud, 1990).78 On the history of the engineering profession in Egypt, see J. Heyworth-Dunne, AnIntroduction to the History of Education in Modern Egypt (London: Cass, 1968); Clement HenryMoore, Images of Development: Egyptian Engineers in Search of Industry (Cambridge, M.I.T.Press, 1980); Joseph Szyliowicz, Education and Modernization in the Middle East (Ithaca, NY

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and London: Cornell University Press, 1973); and Bill Williamson, Education and SocialChange in Egypt and Turkey (London: Macmillan, 1987). Ghislaine Alleaume, “Linant deBellefonds (1799-1883) et le Saint-Simonisme en Egypte,” in Magali Morsy, ed., Les Saint-Simoniens et l’Orient (Aix-en-Provence: Edisud, 1989), 113-132; and L’Ecole Polytechniqe duCaire et ses élèves. La formation d’une élite technique dans l’Egypte du XIXe siècle (Lyon, thèsede doctorat en histoire, 1993).79 Moore, Images of Development, 11.80 Moore, Images of Development, 4.81 Moore, Images of Development, 6.82 Karvar, “Les Polytechniciens étrangers,” 123.83 Anousheh Karvar, “Les Polytechniciens étrangers et les mouvements nationaux,” Revue del’Occident Musulman et de la Méditerrannée 73-74 (1994): 120-123.84 Karvar, “Les Polytechniciens étrangers,” 126.85 Gilbert Alleaume in Magali Morsy, ed., Les Saint-Simoniens et l’Orient (Aix-en-Provence:Edisud, 1989), 125-127.86 Afaf Lutfi al-Sayyid Marsot, Egypt in the Reign of Muhammad Ali (Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 1984).87 Roger Owen, Cotton and the Egyptian Economy, 1820-1914 (Oxford: Oxford UniversityPress, 1969) and Alan Richards, Egypt’s Agricultural Development, 1800-1980 (Boulder:Westview Press, 1982).88 Owen, Cotton and the Egyptian Economy, 28-57.89 On the restructuring of the global cotton market in the nineteenth century, see Sven Beckert,“Emancipation and Empire: Reconstructing the World Wide Web of Cotton Production in theAge of the American Civil War,” American Historical Review (Dec. 2004): 1405-1438.90 Richards, Egypt’s Agricultural Development. For an attempt to locate these changes in a globalperspective, see Sven Beckert, “Emancipation and Empire: Reconstructing the World Wide Webof Cotton Production in the Age of the American Civil War,” American Historical Review (Dec.2004): 1405-1438.91 Richards, Egypt’s Agricultural Development and John Waterbury, Hydropolitics of the NileValley (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1979), 31-33.92 Willcocks, Egyptian Irrigation.93 Waterbury, Hydropolitics, 35-37.94 Abdel Rahman Sharkawi, Egyptian Earth (Austin TX: University of Texas Press, 1990).95 Thousands of Egyptians perished in the 1877 drought. See Mike Davis, Late VictorianHolocausts: El Nino Famines and the Making of the Third World (London and New York:Verso, 2001), 103-105.96 On the impact of the Aswan dam, see J. Donald Hughes, "Ripples in Clio's Pond: The Dams atAswan: Does Environmental History Inform Decisions?" Capitalism, Nature, Socialism 11(December, 2000): 73-81. On the larger question of the decline of Egyptian fisheries, see RayBush and Amal Sabri, “Mining For Fish: Privatization of the ‘Commons’ Along Egypt’sNorthern Coastline,” Middle East Report 216 (Fall 2000): 20-23, 45.97 Daniel Hillel, Rivers of Eden: The Struggle For Water and the Quest For Peace in the MiddleEast (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1994).98 Hillel, Rivers of Eden.

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99 For a long view of Iraqi irrigation schemes, Willcocks, Sixty Years in the East and Hillel,Rivers of Eden.100 Waterbury, Hydropolitics.101 Paul Berthier, Les anciennes sucreries du Maroc et leurs reseaux hydrauliques, 2 vols.(Rabat: Imprimeries françaises et Marocaines, 1966); Will D. Swearingen, Moroccan Mirages:Agrarian Dreams and Deceptions 1912-1986 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987).102 Will D. Swearingen, “Is Drought Increasing in Northwest Africa? A Historical Analysis,” inWill D. Swearingen and Abdellatif Bencherifa, eds., The North African Environment at Risk(Boulder: Westview Press, 1996), 117-133.103 Swearingen, “Is Drought Increasing?” 127, notes that barley, the predominant native cereal,had a 30 percent lower soil/moisture requirement than wheat, ripened earlier and was harvestedearlier (and was therefore less vulnerable to hot summer conditions).104 Will D. Swearingen, Moroccan Mirages: Agrarian Dreams and Deceptions 1912-1986(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987).105 George Perkins Marsh, Man and Nature (New York: Charles Scribner, 1864; reprint ed.,Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1965).106 Theodore Woolsey and William Greeley, Studies in French Forestry (New York: John Wiley& Sons, Inc., 1920).107 Richard H. Grove, Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens and theOrigins of Environmentalism, 1600-1860 (Cambridge: White Horse Press, 1995); and S. RaviRajan, “Foresters and the Politics of Colonial Agroecology: The Case of Shifting Cultivation andSoil Erosion, 1920-1950,”Studies in History 14, no. 2 N.S. 1 (1998): 218-236.108 Diana Davis, “Environmentalism as Social Control? An Exploration of the Transformation ofPastoral Nomadic Societies,” The Arab World Geographer 3, no. 3 (2000): 182-198.109 Marc Reisner, Cadillac Desert: The American Weest and Its Disappearing Water (New York:Viking, 1986).110 Swearingen, Moroccan Mirages and “Is Drought Increasing in Northwest Africa?”111 Michael H. Glantz, ed., Drought Follows the Plow: Cultivating Marginal Areas (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 1994).112 Christensen, The Decline of Iranshahr, 249.113 Richard Manning, Against the Grain: How Agriculture Has Hijacked Civilization (New York:North Point Press, 2004) provides a particularly tonic polemic. Also David Pimentel, et al.,“Food Production and the Energy Crisis,” Science 182 (Nov. 1973): 443-449 and BarryCommoner, The Closing Circle (New York: Bantam, 1971).114 For recent surveys of the Middle East environment, World Resource Institute homepage(http://www.wri.org), and Worldwatch Institute homepage (http://www.worldwatch.org). Seealso the reports of RAED, the Arab Network of NGOs for Development which co-publishes theSustainable Mediterranean Newsletter with the Mediterranean Information Office(http://www.mio-ecsde.org).115 For the very long-term perspective, see John R. McNeill and William McNeill, The HumanWeb (New York: W. W. Norton, 2002); and David Christian, Maps of Time (Berkeley:University of California Press, 2003).116 The first recorded instance of the large-scale use of gunpowder weapons in the Mediterraneanoccurred in the twelfth century, when they were employed by the Almoravids against their

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Iberian Christian rivals. (Using this technology the Ottomans were able to lay siege to Viennatwice in the period from 1500 to 1800.) Hassan and Hill, Islamic Technology, 106-120.