3 - “What Will the End [of] This Be?”

Summary

In this chapter, I first document the great agrarian famine of 1879–80, followed by a detailed analysis of peasants’ livelihood circumstances in the countryside of Diyarbekir, Erzurum and Van, and the politics of food and water scarcity as it impacted agricultural production and the agrarian economy. Next, I turn to the appearance of new environmental disasters in the 1880s and 1890s. These crises exacerbated conflict between local powerbrokers and peasants, and radically transformed settlement patterns within Ottoman Kurdistan. The second major section of the chapter depicts how climatic factors and the periodicity of environmental change impacted pastoralists and it includes a discussion of how climatic fluctuations affect the physiology of herd animals. I conclude this section by examining pastoralist survival strategies, and how these contributed to the growth of intercommunal tension in Kurdistan in the last decades of the nineteenth century.