Description

Throughout the nineteenth century climatic and environmental disasters became a constant problem for the Ottoman Empire. Hundreds of documents attest to episodes of drought, crop failure, and locusts in the late nineteenth century. From Kurdistan to Iraq to Syria and Anatolia people and their animals starved. This paper examines the nature of the Ottoman government’s interventions to bring relief to areas of Kurdistan. The notion that officials in the region or Istanbul intervened in any meaningful way in such natural disasters contradicts the received wisdom about late Ottoman governance. At the time, foreign observers painted a picture of a negligent imperial state that did little or nothing to help populations suffering from drought and famine. Indeed, many scholars continue to argue that the Ottoman state either ignored deteriorating environmental and climatic conditions, earthquakes, and fires or did not deal with them in an effective fashion. This paper, based on a combination of Ottoman and British archival sources, challenges these assumptions.

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