Samuel Dolbee
Biographic Data
| ID | 379936 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Samuel Dolbee |
| GIVEN NAMES | Samuel |
| FAMILY NAME | Dolbee |
| SIGNATURE | DOLBEE S |
| AFFILIATIONS | Vanderbilt University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-8415-4992 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 7 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 2 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 7 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2015 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 1 |
West of Eden: Race and the Ottoman Armenian roots of California agriculture
This article links the transnational environmental history of agriculture with the history of racial formation and immigration in the United States. Focusing on the San Joaquin Valley of California and its global connections, the account explains how the region’s nascent late-nineteenth-century bounty derived in part from both crops and people with origins in the Ottoman empire. Seeds for figs, grapes, and melons all made their way from the Ottom…
The Sick Vines of Europe: Raisins, Phylloxera, and the Politics of Place in the Late Ottoman Aegean
This article explores the path of the microscopic phylloxera insect as it made its way from the United States to the Eastern Mediterranean in the late nineteenth century. As the pest devastated vineyards in Western Europe it also catalyzed grape production in the western Ottoman Empire around Izmir, before this region, too, succumbed. One response to the outbreak was the first legal code controlling plant traffic across nations, and another was a…
Agriculture of the Uprooted: The Assyrian Settlement on the Khabur and the Agrarian Solution to Refugees
Locusts of Power: Borders, Empire, and Environment in the Modern Middle East
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 l…
Empire on the Edge
This article focuses on the environment and politics in the Ottoman Empire between 1864 and 1890. Specifically, it traces attempts in the region of the Jazira to match provincial borders with both the desert and the motion of people within it. These efforts culminated in the 1871 formation of the special administrative district of Zor (also known as Deir ez-Zor) and a revolt against the administrative arrangement by the Arabic-speaking nomadic gr…
The Desert at the End of Empire: An Environmental History of the Armenian Genocide
In the contentious historiography of the Armenian genocide, the desert has been acknowledged by almost everyone as the endpoint of the deportations of hundreds of thousands of Ottoman Armenian citizens in 1915 and the years that followed. Those who use the term 'genocide' suggest that this action was tantamount to a death sentence, while those who oppose the term claim that the desert exculpates the Ottoman state. This article unpacks the meaning…
Impossible Is Not Ottoman”: Menashe Meirovitch, ʿisa Al-ʿisa, and Imperial Citizenship in Palestine
This article explores a covert partnership between a prominent Zionist agronomist, Menashe Meirovitch, and the Christian Arab editor of the newspaper Filastin , ʿIsa al-ʿIsa, a founding father of Palestinian nationalism. Under the literary guise of an Arab Muslim peasant called Abu Ibrahim, the two men produced a series of Arabic-language columns in 1911–12 that exhibited imperial citizenship par excellence, demanding political and agrarian refor…
The Sick Vines of Europe: Raisins, Phylloxera, and the Politics of Place in the Late Ottoman Aegean
This article explores the path of the microscopic phylloxera insect as it made its way from the United States to the Eastern Mediterranean in the late nineteenth century. As the pest devastated vineyards in Western Europe it also catalyzed grape production in the western Ottoman Empire around Izmir, before this region, too, succumbed. One response to the outbreak was the first legal code controlling plant traffic across nations, and another was a…
Impossible Is Not Ottoman”: Menashe Meirovitch, ʿisa Al-ʿisa, and Imperial Citizenship in Palestine
This article explores a covert partnership between a prominent Zionist agronomist, Menashe Meirovitch, and the Christian Arab editor of the newspaper Filastin , ʿIsa al-ʿIsa, a founding father of Palestinian nationalism. Under the literary guise of an Arab Muslim peasant called Abu Ibrahim, the two men produced a series of Arabic-language columns in 1911–12 that exhibited imperial citizenship par excellence, demanding political and agrarian refor…
Impossible Is Not Ottoman”: Menashe Meirovitch, ʿisa Al-ʿisa, and Imperial Citizenship in Palestine
This article explores a covert partnership between a prominent Zionist agronomist, Menashe Meirovitch, and the Christian Arab editor of the newspaper Filastin , ʿIsa al-ʿIsa, a founding father of Palestinian nationalism. Under the literary guise of an Arab Muslim peasant called Abu Ibrahim, the two men produced a series of Arabic-language columns in 1911–12 that exhibited imperial citizenship par excellence, demanding political and agrarian refor…
The Desert at the End of Empire: An Environmental History of the Armenian Genocide
In the contentious historiography of the Armenian genocide, the desert has been acknowledged by almost everyone as the endpoint of the deportations of hundreds of thousands of Ottoman Armenian citizens in 1915 and the years that followed. Those who use the term 'genocide' suggest that this action was tantamount to a death sentence, while those who oppose the term claim that the desert exculpates the Ottoman state. This article unpacks the meaning…
Empire on the Edge
This article focuses on the environment and politics in the Ottoman Empire between 1864 and 1890. Specifically, it traces attempts in the region of the Jazira to match provincial borders with both the desert and the motion of people within it. These efforts culminated in the 1871 formation of the special administrative district of Zor (also known as Deir ez-Zor) and a revolt against the administrative arrangement by the Arabic-speaking nomadic gr…
Locusts of Power: Borders, Empire, and Environment in the Modern Middle East
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 l…
The Sick Vines of Europe: Raisins, Phylloxera, and the Politics of Place in the Late Ottoman Aegean
This article explores the path of the microscopic phylloxera insect as it made its way from the United States to the Eastern Mediterranean in the late nineteenth century. As the pest devastated vineyards in Western Europe it also catalyzed grape production in the western Ottoman Empire around Izmir, before this region, too, succumbed. One response to the outbreak was the first legal code controlling plant traffic across nations, and another was a…
Agriculture of the Uprooted: The Assyrian Settlement on the Khabur and the Agrarian Solution to Refugees
West of Eden: Race and the Ottoman Armenian roots of California agriculture
This article links the transnational environmental history of agriculture with the history of racial formation and immigration in the United States. Focusing on the San Joaquin Valley of California and its global connections, the account explains how the region’s nascent late-nineteenth-century bounty derived in part from both crops and people with origins in the Ottoman empire. Seeds for figs, grapes, and melons all made their way from the Ottom…
Ancient history (5 works) · Geography (5 works) · History (5 works) · Law (5 works) · Political science (5 works) · Archaeology (4 works) · Armenian (4 works) · Islamic Studies and History (4 works) · Politics (4 works) · Desert (philosophy) (3 works)