The Political Ecology of Late Ottoman Kurdistan

with Zozan Pehlivan

hosted by Chris Gratien and Ayah Aboelela

| What do enviornmental features like plants, animals, landscapes, and climate have to do with the political transformation of the Ottoman Empire? Everything, according to our guest in this episode, Zozan Pehlivan, author of The Political Ecology of Violence: Peasants and Pastoralists in the Last Ottoman Century. As Prof. Pehlivan explains, environmental history can be a fascinating window onto how imperial and global developments reshaped local society. Focusing on the region of Kurdistan, Pehlivan explores the changing relationships between peasants and pastoralists under the influence of commercialization, Ottoman centralization, and climatic change. She argues that these forces interacted to shape a "political ecology of violence," reflected not only in the shocking anti-Armenian violence of the 1890s, but also in quotidian conflicts over land and livestock fueled by Ottoman policy.   

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What do enviornmental features like plants, animals, landscapes, and climate have to do with the political transformation of the Ottoman Empire? Everything, according to our guest in this episode, Zozan Pehlivan, author of The Political Ecology of Violence: Peasants and Pastoralists in the Last Ottoman Century. As Prof. Pehlivan explains, environmental history can be a fascinating window onto how imperial and global developments reshaped local society. Focusing on the region of Kurdistan, Pehlivan explores the changing relationships between peasants and pastoralists under the influence of commercialization, Ottoman centralization, and climatic change. She argues that these forces interacted to shape a "political ecology of violence," reflected not only in the shocking anti-Armenian violence of the 1890s, but also in quotidian conflicts over land and livestock fueled by Ottoman policy.

Contributor Bios

	Zozan Pehlivan is the Arsham & Charlotte Ohanessian Chair and Associate Professor of History at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. Her scholarship and teaching focus on global environmental history, animal history, Indigenous histories, the history of technology and medicine, and public health. Dr. Pehlivan’s first monograph, The Political Ecology of Violence: Peasants and Pastoralists in the Last Ottoman Century (Cambridge University Press, 2024), explores the interrelations among climate change, ecological disequilibrium, economic inequality, and Ottoman state policy in the emergence of intercommunal violence in late-nineteenth-century Ottoman Kurdistan and the Middle East. The book was a co-winner of the Ottoman Turkish Studies Association’s 2024 Book Award. Zozan Pehlivan’s research has received several distinguished honors, including the Harry Frank Guggenheim Distinguished Scholar Award (2020), the McKnight Land-Grant Professorship at the University of Minnesota (2021-2023), and a Mellon Fellowship at the Newberry Library in Chicago (2023-2024) and the Linda Hall Library in Kansas City (2025). Dr. Pehlivan is developing two book projects: Resettler Empires: How Ottomans, Americans, and Britons Conquered Grasslands and Empire of Immunity: Vaccination and Public Health in Ottoman Turkey. Resettler Empires examines how American, British, and Ottoman imperial policies mobilized environmental stress to facilitate the forced resettlement of Indigenous populations in the modern era, while Empire of Immunity traces the history of vaccination, vaccine technology, and public health in Ottoman Turkey from the late seventeenth century to the twenty-first century.
	Chris Gratien is Associate Professor of History at University of Virginia, where he teaches classes on global environmental history and the Middle East. His first book, The Unsettled Plain: An Environmental History of the Late Ottoman Frontier, explores the social and environmental transformation of the Adana region of Southern Turkey during the 19th and 20th century. His current project, provisionally titled The Book and the Sword: Civil War and Reconstruction in Late Ottoman Syria, offers a global microhistory of the Tanzimat period, centered on the unsolved murder of an American missionary in the Ottoman Empire.
	Ayah Aboelela is a PhD Candidate in World History at Northeastern University. Her dissertation explores the environmental history of Muslim pilgrimage in the Hijaz, Levant, and Egypt in the late Ottoman period, tracing interactions between pilgrims, urban and Bedouin locals, state officials, and spirituality. She is also Managing Editor at Digital Humanities Quarterly.

Credits

Episode No. 598
Release Date: 8 October 2026
Sound production by Chris Gratien
Bibliography and images courtesy of Zozan Pehlivan

Further Listening

	Metin Atmaca	395 12/29/18	Autonomy and Resistance in Ottoman Kurdistan
	Samuel Dolbee	548 5/31/23	Environment and Empire in the Ottoman Jazira
	Nilay Özok-Gündoğan	550 9/20/23	Privileges and Nobility in Ottoman Kurdistan
	Faisal Husain	504 6/27/21	The Environmental Origins of Ottoman Iraq
	Chris Gratien	523 3/11/22	An Environmental History of the Late Ottoman Frontier
	Bathsheba Demuth	439 12/6/19	An Environmental History of the Bering Strait

Images

“Pastoral Nomads in Kurdish Mountains, 1981, Turkey. Source: By Edith Maubec, Kurdish Digital Archive, Exeter University, EUL MS 483/1/1/1/4 Note: This image shows a man in the middle, with herds and women on the right and left sides.


“Nomadic Women in Encampment” Source: Photograph by Mehmet Ercan, Diyarbakır Kültür ve Tabiat Varlıklarını Koruma Derneği Kent Arşivi, Undated.


Agricultural Map of Ottoman Kurdistan Source: The National Archives, London, UK, Foreign Office 195/2283, 1908, From W. B. Heard to W. R. O’Connor, “Report on Agriculture in Kurdistan.”

Further Reading

Akçam, Taner. The Young Turks’ Crime against Humanity: The Armenian Genocide and Ethnic Cleansing in the Ottoman Empire. Princeton University Press, 2012.

Altintaş, Toygun. “Crisis and (Dis)Order: Armenian Revolutionaries and the Hamidian Regime in the Ottoman Empire, 1887-1896.” Ph.D., The University of Chicago, 2016. https://www.proquest.com/docview/2161231707/abstract/BFC041654A7649DAPQ/1.

Bahadır Çelebi. “Osmanlı Devleti’nin Merkezileşmesinde Telgrafın Rolü: 1855-1909.” Ph.D., Istanbul Üniversitesi, 2020.

Cora, Yaşar Tolga. “Transforming Erzurum/Karin: The Social and Economic History of a Multi-Ethnic Ottoman City in the Nineteenth Century.” Ph.D., The University of Chicago, 2016.

Der Matossian, Bedross. The Horrors of Adana: Revolution and Violence in the Early Twentieth Century. Stanford University Press, 2022.

Derderian, Dzovinar. “Nation-Making and the Language of Colonialism: Voices from Ottoman Van in Armenian Print Media and Handwritten Petitions (1820s to 1870s).” Ph.D., University of Michigan, 2019.

Erler, Mehmet Yavuz. Osmanlı Devleti’nde Kuraklık ve Kıtlık Olayları, 1800-1880. Libra, 2010.

Ertem, Özge. “Eating the Last Seed: Famine, Empire, Survival and Order in Ottoman Anatolia in the Late 19th Century.” Ph.D., European University Institute, 2012.

Gratien, Chris. The Unsettled Plain: An Environmental History of the Late Ottoman Frontier. Stanford University Press, 2022.

Makdisi, Ussama. The Culture of Sectarianism: Community, History, and Violence in Nineteenth-Century Ottoman Lebanon. University of California Press, 2000.

Matossian, Bedross Der. “The Ottoman Massacres of Armenians, 1894–1896 and 1909.” In Cambridge World History of Genocide, II, edited by Ned Backhawk, Ben Kiernan, Benjamin Madley, and Rebe Taylor. Cambridge University Press, 2023.

McNeill, John Robert. The Mountains of the Mediterranean World: An Environmental History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. 

McNeill, John Robert. Something New Under the Sun: An Environmental History of the Twentieth-Century World. New York: W.W. Norton & Co, 2000.

Nacar, Can and Yonca Köksal Özyaşar (eds), Animals on the Move: Tracing Livestock In The Ottoman Empire from Farm to Table to Waste. Koç University Press, 2025

Pehlivan, Zozan. “Abandoned Villages in Diyarbekir Province at the End of the ‘Little Ice Age’, 1800-1850.” In The Ottoman East in the Nineteenth Century: Societies, Identities and Politics, edited by Ali Sipahi, Yasar Tolga Cora, and Dzovinar Derderian. I. B. Tauris, 2016.

Pehlivan, Zozan. “El Niño and the Nomads: Global Climate, Local Environment, and the Crisis of the Pastoralism in Late Ottoman Kurdistan.” Journal of Economic and Social History of the Orient 63, no. 3 (2020): 316–56.

Perdue, Peter C. China Marches West: The Qing Conquest of Central Eurasia. Harvard University Press, 2010. 

Polatel, Mehmet. “The Complete Ruin of a District: The Sasun Massacre of 1894.” In The Ottoman East in the Nineteenth Century, edited by Yaşar Tolga Cora, Dzovinar Derderian, and Ali Sipahi. I. B. Tauris, 2016.

Scott, James. Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States. Yale University Press, 2017

Üngür, Uğur Ümit, and Mehmet Polatel. Confiscation and Destruction: The Young Turk Seizure of Armenian Property. Bloomsbury, 2011.

White, Sam. The Climate of Rebellion in the Early Modern Ottoman Empire. Cambridge University Press, 2011.