The story of the Middle Eastern environment addresses three main avenues of research in the field of environmental history. First, there is the simple fact that understanding the full histories of global environmental phenomena, from climate change to soil erosion, means comprehending the Middle Eastern component of the histories of these processes in Eurasia and North Africa. Second, because robust state systems have existed in the region for multiple millennia, various areas of the MENA enjoy a documentary record far longer than that of most other parts of the world, the chief exception perhaps being China. This record contains much information about environmental change and the relationships between humans and nature that reveals the effects of longer-term environmental processes and manipulation. Finally, the MENA is home to various religious, ethnic, and linguistic traditions. Foremost among these in the last millennium and a half are the cultures of Islam. For those seeking to understand how the people of one of the world’s largest religious traditions thought about, dealt with, and otherwise related to the natural world, the MENA offers much material.
Just as global movements of trade were deeply intertwined with what was happening in the MENA, so too large-scale trends in climate, disease, and crop diffusion impacted and were impacted by the histories of the MENA’s many environments.
one of the results of the rise and spread of Islam in the seventh and eighth centuries was the diffusion of new kinds of crops and agricultural technologies across Eurasia. In what one scholar has termed the “Islamic green revolution,” the unity provided by the new religion brought disparate parts of the world together for the first time into a unified ecological contact zone.16
In the medieval period, it was most likely through the Middle East that plague moved westward to the Mediterranean basin.17
In another medieval example of environmental exchange, knowledge of irrigation technologies and waterworks was transferred from the Muslim world to Spain and Italy.18
In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, coffee grown in the soils of Yemen, using techniques borrowed from East Africa, soon filled cups in Istanbul, Vienna, and Isfahan.19
Trans-Saharan caravan networks ensured a steady circulation of animals, salt, paper, disease, and human slaves between the Middle East, North Africa, and West Africa.20
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Since the early twentieth century, the extraction, refinement, and distribution of Middle Eastern oil clearly have been of enormous global environmental and geopolitical significance.22
The histories of various parts of the MENA were also profoundly shaped by different instances of global climate change.
Whether the Little Ice Age in the early modern period that greatly reduced agricultural yields in the Ottoman Empire,
Icelandic volcano eruptions at the end of the eighteenth century that affected Nile flood levels,
El Niño-induced famines at the end of the nineteenth century in Anatolia and Iran,
today’s warnings of global warming,
the MENA has clearly been profoundly impacted by these instances of climatic alteration, and studying these cases offers a deeper understanding of the global history of climate change.23
Therefore, to understand the history of these crops, diseases, commodities, weather patterns, and technologies means necessarily understanding the Middle Eastern components of their global histories.24
the three timescales famously identified by Fernand Braudel: events (singular moments in history that alone perhaps say little about anything larger), conjunctures (the unique interweaving and coalescing of various phenomena, historical actors, and political and economic forces to bring forward a never-before-experienced historical epoch), and the longue durée (broad historical trends that over centuries create discourses and practices that shape the worldview of large groups of people).27
The presence of such a long and detailed record of human interaction with the environment in the MENA also affords environmental historians the opportunity to offer new perspectives on some long-debated issues in the field of environmental history.
Karl A. Wittfogel’s thesis of Oriental despotism, which states that highly complex and coordinated systems of irrigation lead to authoritarian forms of government because only a central power can oversee and coordinate such a diffuse network of actors, interests, and limited resources. Several of his examples of the emergence of such despotic forms of authoritarian government come from the Middle East—Mesopotamia and the Nile Valley.