Alan Mikhail

An explosive global history that redefines the historical origins of the modern world through the life of Sultan Selim I and his Ottoman Empire.

The Untold Story of Sultan Selim, His Ottoman Empire, and the Making of the Modern World

God's Shadow

The Ottoman Sultan Who Shaped the Modern World

The early modern Middle East was a crucial zone of connection between Europe and the Mediterranean world, on the one hand, and South Asia, the Indian Ocean, and sub-Saharan Africa, on the other. Accordingly, global trade, climate, and disease both affected and were affected by what was happening in the Middle East s many environments. The trans-territorial and trans-temporal character of environmental history helps shed new light on the history of the region, and Alan Mikhail s latest tackles major topics in environmental history: natural resource management, climate, human and animal labor, water control, disease, and the politics of nature. It also reveals how one of the world s most important religious traditions, Islam, has related to the natural world. This is a model book that sets the course for Middle East environmental history."

The Ottoman Empire, Egypt, and Environmental History

Under Osman's Tree

Making environmental history accessible to scholars of the Middle East and the history of the region accessible to environmental historians, Water on Sand opens up new fields of scholarly inquiry.

Environmental Histories of the Middle East and North Africa

Water on Sand

In one of the first ever environmental histories of the Ottoman Empire, Alan Mikhail examines relations between the empire and its most lucrative province of Egypt. Based on both the local records of various towns and villages in rural Egypt and the imperial orders of the Ottoman state, this book charts how changes in the control of natural resources fundamentally altered the nature of Ottoman imperial sovereignty in Egypt and throughout the empire. In revealing how Egyptian peasants were able to use their knowledge and experience of local environments to force the hand of the imperial state, Nature and Empire in Ottoman Egypt tells a story of the connections of empire stretching from canals in the Egyptian countryside to the palace in Istanbul, from the forests of Anatolia to the shores of the Red Sea, and from a plague flea's bite to the fortunes of one of the most powerful states of the early modern world.

An Environmental History

Nature and Empire in Ottoman Egypt

Animals in Ottoman Egypt examines the multiple changing relationships between humans and animals in a place that affords perhaps the longest documentary record of the human-animal relationship. Egypt was home to the world's first zoo (circa 2500 BCE), one of the oldest religions to incorporateanimal forms, and perhaps the first domesticated dogs. During the crucial centuries of Ottoman rule in Egypt between 1517 and 1882, the changing relationships between humans and animals were central to the transformation of Egypt from an early modern society fully ensconced in an Ottoman imperialsystem of rule to a nineteenth-century centralizing state. Egypt in this period transitioned from being an early modern world characterized primarily by intense human-animal interactions to being one in which this relationship was no longer the basis of commercial and social life. The results ofthis transition were a fundamental reordering of political, economic, social, and ecological power. This book thus seeks to explain one of the most important historical transitions of the last 500 years through the story of changes to one of the most historically significant of human relationships -those with other animals.This history also makes evident how what happened to animals in Ottoman Egypt would eventually happen to certain kinds of humans. Just as livestock, dogs, and elephants were stripped of their constructive social and economic functions in the early nineteenth century, so too were Egyptian peasants,the uneducated, the disabled, the poor, the sick, the criminal, and the itinerant cut out of the productive social and economic realms of Egypt later in the century. As their animal counterparts were confined in veterinary holding pens and the zoo, these humans would be subjected to similarnineteenth-century projects of enclosure - the prison, asylum, conscription camp, hospital, and school. As the social became more strictly, vigorously, and narrowly defined, fewer living human and nonhuman beings were given access to it and its borders came to be more intensely defended throughviolence, coercion, and discipline. Thus, Ottoman Egypt's transition to modernity was a wrenching and painful experience for most animals and humans alike. The story of what happened to the animal in Ottoman Egypt is also the story of what happened to the human - a story of the animal in all ofus.

The Animal in Ottoman Egypt

Osman, the founder of the Ottoman Empire, had a dream in which a tree sprouted from his navel. As the tree grew, its shade covered the earth; as Osman’s empire grew, it, too, covered the earth. This is the most widely accepted foundation myth of the longest-lasting empire in the history of Islam, and offers a telling clue to its unique legacy. Underlying every aspect of the Ottoman Empire’s epic history—from its founding around 1300 to its end in the twentieth century—is its successful management of natural resources. Under Osman’s Tree analyzes this rich environmental history to understand the most remarkable qualities of the Ottoman Empire—its longevity, politics, economy, and society. The early modern Middle East was the world’s most crucial zone of connection and interaction. Accordingly, the Ottoman Empire’s many varied environments affected and were affected by global trade, climate, and disease. From down in the mud of Egypt’s canals to up in the treetops of Anatolia, Alan Mikhail tackles major aspects of the Middle East’s environmental history: natural resource management, climate, human and animal labor, energy, water control, disease, and politics. He also points to some of the ways in which the region’s dominant religious tradition, Islam, has understood and related to the natural world. Marrying environmental and Ottoman history, Under Osman’s Tree offers a bold new interpretation of the past five hundred years of Middle Eastern history.

Das Osmanische Reich war um 1500 das mächtigste Reich der Welt, dessen Herrschaftsgebiet sich unter Sultan Selim nahezu verdreifachte. Alan Mikhail betrachtet in seinem meisterhaft erzählten Buch den Beginn der Neuzeit konsequent von diesem Reich und diesem Herrscher aus. Auf der Grundlage bisher vernachlässigter Quellen zeichnet er so ein ganz neues Bild von dieser Schlüsselepoche: Ohne die Osmanen hätten die Europäer nicht Amerika erobert, hätte es keine Reformation gegeben und keine Moderne. Selim I. "der Gestrenge" (1470 – 1520), osmanischer Sultan und Kalif aller Gläubigen, lebte in einer Welt im Umbruch. Mit der Eroberung Amerikas durch die Spanier begann nach landläufiger Meinung der "Aufstieg des Westens", mit der Reformation wurden mittelalterliche Denkweisen überwunden. Doch die eigentlich treibende Kraft dieser Veränderungen wurde bisher ausgeblendet: Erst das Vordringen des Osmanischen Reiches nach Westen zwang die Europäer ihrerseits weiter nach Westen in eine Neue Welt, wo sie ihren alten Kreuzzug gegen den Islam fortsetzten. Nicht zufällig kam es in Europa zur Glaubensspaltung, als Sultan Selim den sunnitischen Islam reformierte und sich der Graben zwischen Sunniten und Schiiten vertiefte. Alan Mikhail zeigt auf faszinierende Weise, wie sehr die Geschichte Europas und Amerikas mit der der islamischen Welt verflochten ist. Ob wir es wollen oder nicht, die Welt, in der wir leben, ist eine sehr osmanische. Und diese Geschichte kann uns nur Sultan Selim erzählen.

Alan Mikhail

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