Chapter 1 focuses on locusts and the Arabic-speaking Shammar nomadic group between 1858 and 1890. It explains how locusts foiled Ottoman attempts to transform the Jazira into a cotton-growing heartland in the midst of the American Civil War. As locusts challenged the designs of certain humans, they also ensured that the Jazira landscape remained productive depending on how one moved within it. It was in part the landscape created by locusts that undermined Ottoman attempts to forcibly settle the Shammar during the 1860s, and made far more difficult the settlement of Chechen refugees at Ras al-Ayn this same period. And it was this same landscape of locusts that incubated a revolt in 1871, as the Shammar protested the formation of the special administrative district of Zor, created in an effort to match the desert with administrative borders with the help of the empire’s foremost reformers, Cevdet Pasha and Midhat Pasha. The revolt was crushed and ended with different branches of the Shammar attached to separate districts of the Jazira. But it did not end the power of locusts and mobility, and so people continued to imagine how to close the gap between Ottoman provinces and the environment it divided up.

Chapter 2 foregrounds locusts and the seminomadic Kurdish group known as the Millî between 1890 and 1908. In a shift from the policies of previous years, the Ottoman state created light cavalries known as the Hamidiye Brigades. Typically seen as co-opting Kurdish groups in defense against Russian invasion or Armenian rebellion, the Hamidiye also encompassed the Millî under the leadership of Ibrahim Pasha, who actually pushed south into the Jazira. The chapter traces how provincial borders became invoked alongside the environmental border of the desert in clashes between the Millî and the Shammar. All the while, locusts created conditions favorable to pastoralists. Locusts also forced people to move and, in other cases, offered a plausible justification for nomadic encroachment on the landholdings of urban notables. The chapter concludes with the death of Ibrahim Pasha, and the new political era it seemed to portend, even as locusts continued their work on the edge.