Co-sponsored by the Center for European Studies, as part of the Middle East Studies interdisciplinary annual conference “Climate Change and the Environment in the Middle East and North Africa.”
*This event is part of an annual conference. Please find the detailed conference program here.
Violence towards Armenians in the late Ottoman Empire has been understood by scholars as a clash between Muslims and Christians, perpetuated by Kurdish pastoral nomads against agrarian Armenians. This talk complicates this claim, arguing that it was the struggle to access natural resources in times of environmental stress that underpinned these episodes of violence. Utilizing rich Ottoman and British archival documentary sources, climate, and veterinary science, and ethnographic studies, I propose an alternative explanation of the roots of inter-communal violence in the late Ottoman Empire, challenging existing understandings of the violent breakdown of centuries of interdependency between agrarian and herding communities. By considering the impacts of recurrent late nineteenth-century global climate fluctuations on Ottoman policy-making this talk contributes to ongoing efforts to connect environmental history to the political history of the Middle East and beyond.
Zozan Pehlivan is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities and a Mellon Fellow at the Newberry Library, Chicago. She is an environmental historian with a focus on the relationship between environmental stress and the rise of inter-communal violence in the Middle East. Her innovative, interdisciplinary research has received numerous awards, including recognition from the Institute of Historical Research (2011), American Society for Environmental History (2018), and the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association (2021).