FSP3/FSP5 : Samuel Dolbee: Buchvorstellung: Locusts of Power: Borders, Empire, and Environment in the Modern Middle East

November 28 | 10:00

Samuel Dolbee (Vanderbilt University, Tennessee)

Kommentar : Nazan Maksudyan (CMB)

Abstract: 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.

Bio: Samuel Dolbee is an assistant professor in the History Department at Vanderbilt University, and an environmental historian of the Ottoman Empire and the modern Middle East. His book Locusts of Power was published in 2023 by Cambridge University Press, and received the 2024 Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association Book Award. His articles have appeared in American Historical Review, Past & Present, and International Journal of Middle East Studies. His current project, tentatively entitled “Ottoman Roots: Agriculture and Displacement at the End of Empire”, is an environmental history of trees, fruits, and refugees at the end of the Ottoman Empire and in its aftermath. Portions of it will appear in early 2025 in Comparative Studies in Society and History and Environmental History.

Contact

Nazan Maksudyan
maksudyan  ( at )  cmb.hu-berlin.de

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