Chris Gratien returns several times in his excellent new book, The Unsettled Plain, to the refrain “the mountains are ours,” a line of poetry from 19th-century Cilicia, in what is now Çukurova in southern Turkey. Gratien uses this phrase to frame what he describes as “a battle over two competing visions of the future: one in which the people who lived on the land and knew it intimately should define their relationship with that land, and another in which that relationship should be subservient to the needs of the state and the desires of those with the money or power to influence it” (p. 228). While tracing the many changes that affected Çukurova between the mid-19th and mid-20th centuries, from settlement programs to the boom and bust of cash-crop agriculture to public health interventions and infrastructure construction, the author emphasizes the persistence of this opposition in the politics and daily life of the region.
One of Cilicia's defining features was a spatial division between mountains and plains that was temporal as well as seasonal. At the outset of this history, residents of Cilicia, across occupations and communal boundaries, moved seasonally to the yayla, or summer mountain retreat. This practice, which Gratien calls the “most important aspect of the ecology of Ottoman Cilicia” (p. 35), protected people from malaria and played a central role in the herding economy. The author, accordingly, argues that the yayla shaped the social and political dynamics of the region up to the time of the Tanzimat reform movement. As such, it was crucial to Ottoman and post-Ottoman programs of reform. Reformers like Cevdet Pasha, who saw the mountains as barriers to progress, tried to settle both mobile and refugee populations in the fertile plains. Eventually forced to admit that regional public health depended on seasonal movement, Ottoman officials made agreements with different groups codifying their right to seasonal movement, but also restricting it. Perhaps most crucially, officials forbade many pastoralists from bringing their animals to the yayla, decoupling the economic and public health functions of the summer refuge. The association of the yayla primarily with health deepened over the next century, ultimately leading to the gentrification of the mountains, romanticization of historical pastoral lifestyles as a repository of national character, and linkage of bourgeois vacation culture to older patterns of seasonal movement through poetry and song.
The seasonality of pre-Tanzimat life in Cilicia was incompatible with what Gratien calls the “new temporality of state-driven progress” (p. 118). The Unsettled Plain shows how the idea that Cilicia could be a “second Egypt” shaped the emergence of a new ecological regime in the plains based in cotton cultivation. Sometimes it seems like every place in the Middle East has been described as “another Egypt,” but Cilicia came closer than many others, with the growth of the cotton industry leading to the emergence of large landholdings that depended heavily on seasonal migrant labor. Although cotton was displaced during World War I by an “ecology of total war” (p. 140), the imaginary of Cilicia as a “second Egypt” proved resilient, and was deployed by the French toward explicitly colonial ends following the war (p. 165). During the early years of the Turkish republic, Çukurova became an important “laboratory” for the new nation–state (p. 179), as science emerged as the dominant way of knowing and ordering the environment, and as the region's continued dependence on migrant labor made it a key site for the elaboration of national language politics. By the 1950s, the economic and demographic weight of the region had swung almost entirely toward the plains, with intense antimosquito, antimalaria campaigns focused on making the lowlands habitable, at least for workers, all year round.
In addition to showing how reform programs transformed the meanings and experience of space and time in late and post-Ottoman Cilicia, The Unsettled Plain is a history of intercommunal relations. It joins a growing number of recent works that situate the Armenian genocide and earlier episodes of intercommunal violence in material histories of the late Ottoman world. Gratien argues that the settlement campaigns in the mountains changed the dynamics of “intercommunality,” doing away with existing forms of symbiosis between pastoralist and settled communities. Although many of the land conflicts that resulted from the “unhappy” terms of settlement broke out between Muslims, economic disputes could become confessionalized (p. 129). And while communal boundaries were not new, they attained “new relevance and severity” in the same way that malaria, an old disease, took on new forms in response to changing patterns of settlement and cultivation (p. 135). After World War I, the French repatriated Armenians, who had been expelled during the genocide, to Cilicia, with the aim of replacing an agricultural population decimated by war while also demonstrating that the region had a Christian majority. When Turkish nationalist forces won what had by then become a national struggle between Christians and Muslims, many Armenians were deported for a second time to Syria and Lebanon. In situating this history within its material context, The Unsettled Plain makes a valuable contribution to both genocide studies and to a late Ottoman historiography that has often omitted or isolated the history of Armenian Ottomans.
Gratien's work is unusual not only in telling Armenian histories as part of a broader late Ottoman history but also in spanning both the Ottoman and post-Ottoman periods. It joins a growing number of works that acknowledge that, although World War I was certainly a major rupture in the history of the modern Middle East, there were important continuitites between the prewar and postwar periods. Gratien's substantial exploration of the 20th century—two of his five chapters focus on post-Ottoman Turkey—may surprise readers who note the book's subtitle: “an environmental history of the late Ottoman frontier.” Gratien's framing of this history as “late Ottoman” is intertwined with his notion of frontier, which he describes more as a process than a specific spatiality. Gratien outlines three senses in which Cilicia was a late Ottoman frontier: it was a “frontier of the state,” where new forms of state presence were asserted or reasserted; it was an “ecological frontier,” characterized by novel plants, animals, and modes of agrarian production; and it was a “settlement frontier” (p. 14). The author draws comparisons with the settlement frontiers of other 19th-century empires, albeit noting the uniqueness of the Ottoman Empire in having to fit its settlement frontiers into a contracting imperial territory.
At first, I was suspicious of the description of Cilicia as a frontier. It often seems as if scholars have described every part of the Ottoman Empire, with the possible exception of Istanbul, as a frontier, borderland, or edge. What does it mean to call Çukurova, which would more commonly be situated in the Ottoman “heartland,” a frontier? But, ultimately, I appreciated Gratien's distinction between the space of political borderlands and the frontier as process. Rather than assuming that certain kinds of political spatiality automatically produce particular forms of governance or sociality, he examines changing understandings and uses of land and space on their own terms. Still, although I was convinced that we can usefully understand the late Ottoman experience of Cilicia in terms of a frontier, the breadth of this definition of frontier left me doubtful. Was there anywhere, or at least anywhere in the late Ottoman Empire, which did not experience changing forms of state presence, settlement, and ecological practices? What, in other words, was not the frontier? And, if everywhere is the frontier, is it still an analytically useful concept? In some ways, the late-Ottoman-ness of this history, even into the 1950s, is easier to understand. Gratien shows that the late-Ottoman dynamics of Cilicia continued to assert themselves into the mid-20th century. Not only did the Turkish state continue to pursue aims and strategies similar to those of their Ottoman predecessors, but the “fundamental political concerns” of the population remained similar (p. 224). Çukurova continued to be a frontier in all three senses. And because of that, we can also understand the “late Ottoman” in the book's subtitle less as a strict temporal definition and more as a set of processes, attitudes, and phenomena.
The Unsettled Plain offers a model for writing environmental history, especially for anyone looking to write histories with rural and ordinary people at their center. Gratien brings together an impressively wide range of evidence, including folklore as well as archival sources in multiple languages, to highlight rural people and places, and the relationships between them. He says that his work does not intend to rewrite the broad strokes of late Ottoman history, but rather to shift our focus to a set of actors more often overlooked by scholars. This is a refreshing approach, especially given how often we are encouraged, not least by funding agencies, to frame scholarly work as revolutionary or surprising. Nonetheless, telling this as an environmental history, and centering ordinary rural people and places, does require us to think in new ways, including about the connections between malaria and intercommunal life. The Unsettled Plain will be of interest to Ottomanists, historians of the modern Middle East and Turkey, and environmental historians more generally. It is well-written, clear, and also should be accessible to undergraduates. I hope others will follow Gratien's lead in attending carefully to ordinary people in the countryside in writing histories of the Ottoman and post-Ottoman Middle East.
