Alan Mikhail. Under Osman’s Tree

Alan Mikhail’s Under Osman’s Tree: The Ottoman Empire, Egypt, and Environmental History is a work of synthesis, and one of the first in Middle East environmental history since the field began to achieve prominence in the last decade. Drawing primarily on research from his earlier monographs on Ottoman Egypt, Mikhail here makes a broad, methodological case for environmental history as a way of understanding the early modern Middle East. By following the connected motion of water, soil, wood, crops, ungulates, and disease, Mikhail argues, we can understand the quotidian function of empire in ways that improve upon conventional narratives in Ottoman political and social history. Specifically, Under Osman’s Tree seeks to characterize the Ottoman approach to resource management, to revise our understanding of the relationship between the Ottoman provinces, and to reinterpret the transformation of land and labor in Egypt in the eighteenth century. I will comment on each of these dimensions of the book in turn.

Ancient history · Economic history · Empire · Environmental history · Ottoman empire · Political science · Tree (set theory) · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Mathematics · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies