modern Middle East, with interests in agriculture, disease, and science. He teaches courses in the Department of History and as part of the Climate Studies major.
Dolbee applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Locusts of Power: Borders, Empire, and Environment in the Modern Middle East, and reported the following:
Page 99 [below left; click to enlarge] of my book details a number of disputes between nomadic pastoralist groups whose sheep and camels were where in 1898. Counting sheep may well have a soporific effect on some, but in this case, the place these disputes occurred—in the Ottoman Empire in a place that is today on the border between Turkey and Syria—and the way these disputes were articulated is quite meaningful with respect to the way people think of this region’s past. A conventional history of borders and space in southwest Asia typically presents the smooth and fluid space of the Ottoman Empire giving way to rigid and narrow post-Ottoman nation-Learn more about Locusts of Power at the Cambridge University Press website.states. A corollary is the idea that nomadic pastoralists simply wandered, and paid little heed to state institutions or demarcations of territory.
But the fights over sheep in 1898 contradict this point. Not only do they reveal how borders mattered within the Ottoman Empire before its end. They moreover demonstrate how nomadic pastoralists were quite aware of territorial demarcations. Their leaders explicitly invoked “our borders” in an effort to compel state officials to intercede on their behalf. State officials attempted to crack down on the movement of people into other districts, but they could not because the borders were so vast and pastoralists always had the excuse of needing to pasture their animals.
In capturing a dispute over movement on the political and ecological margins, the page showcases some of the key themes of the book, but also leaves some of the book’s key forces out, perhaps most notably locusts. While the swarming insects are absent from the page, they nevertheless helped shape the arid yet fertile region of the Jazira, in which it made quite a lot of sense to raise sheep and camels that could move in response to the seasonal verdure and ravenous locusts alike. The broader goal of the book is to explore the complicated ways moving people and moving insects became entangled as the region transformed from a site of nomadic settlement in the nineteenth century to the killing fields of the Armenian genocide during World War I to the most agriculturally productive lands of Syria in the late twentieth century.
--Marshal Zeringue
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