Locusts of Power
Borders, Empire, and Environment in the Modern Middle East

New environmental history of borders and empire in the Middle East that centers locusts and people in motion from c1858–1939.

Samuel Dolbee (Author)

9781009200318, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 25 May 2023

336 pages
23.5 x 15.8 x 2.5 cm, 0.65 kg

'A model for the integration of ecological and spatial themes with questions of nineteenth- and twentieth-century population movements, borders, and state making. Any of the chapters would be an excellent addition to syllabi on the late Ottoman Empire and interwar period, and the first chapter is a particularly strong illustration of how pastoralism as a socio-ecology interacted with broader economic and political currents of the mid-nineteenth century.' Ethan Mefford, H-Net: Humanities and Social Science Online

In this highly original environmental history, Samuel Dolbee sheds new light on borders and state formation by following locusts and revealing how they shaped both the environment and people's imaginations from the late Ottoman Empire to the Second World War. Drawing on a wide range of archival research in multiple languages, Dolbee details environmental, political, and spatial transformations in the region's history by tracing the movements of locusts and their intimate relationship to people in motion, including Arab and Kurdish nomads, Armenian deportees, and Assyrian refugees, as well as states of the region. With locusts and moving people at center stage, surprising continuities and ruptures appear in the Jazira, the borderlands of today's Iraq, Syria, and Turkey. Transcending approaches focused on the collapse of the Ottoman Empire or the creation of nation states, Dolbee provides a new perspective on the modern Middle East grounded in environmental change, state violence, and popular resistance.

Introduction
1. Sultans of the open lands (1858–1890)
2. 'Savage swarms' (1890–1908)
3. 'Weren't we a lot like those creatures?' (1908–1918)
4. 'Like swarms of locusts' (1918–1939)
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index.

Subject Areas: Colonialism & imperialism [HBTQ], Historical geography [HBTP], Social & cultural history [HBTB], Modern history to 20th century: c 1700 to c 1900 [HBLL], Asian history [HBJF], European history [HBJD]