Resurrecting the Granary of Rome
| Author | : Diana K. Davis |
| Publisher | : Ohio University Press |
| Total Pages | : 321 |
| Release | : 2007-09-11 |
| Genre | : History |
| ISBN | : 0821417517 |
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Resurrecting The Granary Of Rome
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Nomad's Land
| Author | : Andrea E. Duffy |
| Publisher | : U of Nebraska Press |
| Total Pages | : 330 |
| Release | : 2019-12 |
| Genre | : History |
| ISBN | : 149621918X |
During the nineteenth century, the development and codification of forest science in France were closely linked to Provence’s time-honored tradition of mobile pastoralism, which formed a major part of the economy. At the beginning of the century, pastoralism also featured prominently in the economies and social traditions of North Africa and southwestern Anatolia until French forest agents implemented ideas and practices for forest management in these areas aimed largely at regulating and marginalizing Mediterranean mobile pastoral traditions. These practices changed not only landscapes but also the social order of these three Mediterranean societies and the nature of French colonial administration. In Nomad’s Land Andrea E. Duffy investigates the relationship between Mediterranean mobile pastoralism and nineteenth-century French forestry through case studies in Provence, French colonial Algeria, and Ottoman Anatolia. By restricting the use of shared spaces, foresters helped bring the populations of Provence and Algeria under the control of the state, and French scientific forestry became a medium for state initiatives to sedentarize mobile pastoral groups in Anatolia. Locals responded through petitions, arson, violence, compromise, and adaptation. Duffy shows that French efforts to promote scientific forestry both internally and abroad were intimately tied to empire building and paralleled the solidification of Western narratives condemning the pastoral tradition, leading to sometimes tragic outcomes for both the environment and pastoralists.
Environmental Imaginaries of the Middle East and North Africa
| Author | : Diana K. Davis |
| Publisher | : |
| Total Pages | : 308 |
| Release | : 2011-12-20 |
| Genre | : History |
| ISBN | : |
The landscapes of the Middle East have captured our imaginations throughout history. Images of endless golden dunes, camel caravans, isolated desert oases, and rivers lined with palm trees have often framed written and visual representations of the region. Embedded in these portrayals is the common belief that the environment, in most places, has been deforested and desertified by centuries of misuse. It is precisely such orientalist environmental imaginaries, increasingly undermined by contemporary ecological data, that the eleven authors in this volume question. This is the first volume to critically examine culturally constructed views of the environmental history of the Middle East and suggest that they have often benefitted elites at the expense of the ecologies and the peoples of the region. The contributors expose many of the questionable policies and practices born of these environmental imaginaries and related histories that have been utilized in the region since the colonial period. They further reveal how power, in the form of development programs, notions of nationalism, and hydrological maps, for instance, relates to environmental knowledge production.
The Lost Wolves of Japan
| Author | : Brett L. Walker |
| Publisher | : University of Washington Press |
| Total Pages | : 355 |
| Release | : 2009-11-23 |
| Genre | : Technology & Engineering |
| ISBN | : 0295989939 |
Many Japanese once revered the wolf as Oguchi no Magami, or Large-Mouthed Pure God, but as Japan began its modern transformation wolves lost their otherworldly status and became noxious animals that needed to be killed. By 1905 they had disappeared from the country. In this spirited and absorbing narrative, Brett Walker takes a deep look at the scientific, cultural, and environmental dimensions of wolf extinction in Japan and tracks changing attitudes toward nature through Japan's long history. Grain farmers once worshiped wolves at shrines and left food offerings near their dens, beseeching the elusive canine to protect their crops from the sharp hooves and voracious appetites of wild boars and deer. Talismans and charms adorned with images of wolves protected against fire, disease, and other calamities and brought fertility to agrarian communities and to couples hoping to have children. The Ainu people believed that they were born from the union of a wolflike creature and a goddess. In the eighteenth century, wolves were seen as rabid man-killers in many parts of Japan. Highly ritualized wolf hunts were instigated to cleanse the landscape of what many considered as demons. By the nineteenth century, however, the destruction of wolves had become decidedly unceremonious, as seen on the island of Hokkaido. Through poisoning, hired hunters, and a bounty system, one of the archipelago's largest carnivores was systematically erased. The story of wolf extinction exposes the underside of Japan's modernization. Certain wolf scientists still camp out in Japan to listen for any trace of the elusive canines. The quiet they experience reminds us of the profound silence that awaits all humanity when, as the Japanese priest Kenko taught almost seven centuries ago, we "look on fellow sentient creatures without feeling compassion."
The Arid Lands
| Author | : Diana K. Davis |
| Publisher | : MIT Press |
| Total Pages | : 302 |
| Release | : 2016-03-25 |
| Genre | : Nature |
| ISBN | : 0262333546 |
An argument that the perception of arid lands as wastelands is politically motivated and that these landscapes are variable, biodiverse ecosystems, whose inhabitants must be empowered. Deserts are commonly imagined as barren, defiled, worthless places, wastelands in need of development. This understanding has fueled extensive anti-desertification efforts—a multimillion-dollar global campaign driven by perceptions of a looming crisis. In this book, Diana Davis argues that estimates of desertification have been significantly exaggerated and that deserts and drylands—which constitute about 41% of the earth's landmass—are actually resilient and biodiverse environments in which a great many indigenous people have long lived sustainably. Meanwhile, contemporary arid lands development programs and anti-desertification efforts have met with little success. As Davis explains, these environments are not governed by the equilibrium ecological dynamics that apply in most other regions. Davis shows that our notion of the arid lands as wastelands derives largely from politically motivated Anglo-European colonial assumptions that these regions had been laid waste by “traditional” uses of the land. Unfortunately, such assumptions still frequently inform policy. Drawing on political ecology and environmental history, Davis traces changes in our understanding of deserts, from the benign views of the classical era to Christian associations of the desert with sinful activities to later (neo)colonial assumptions of destruction. She further explains how our thinking about deserts is problematically related to our conceptions of forests and desiccation. Davis concludes that a new understanding of the arid lands as healthy, natural, but variable ecosystems that do not necessarily need improvement or development will facilitate a more sustainable future for the world's magnificent drylands.
Nomad's Land
| Author | : Andrea E. Duffy |
| Publisher | : U of Nebraska Press |
| Total Pages | : 416 |
| Release | : 2019-12-01 |
| Genre | : History |
| ISBN | : 1496219163 |
During the nineteenth century, the development and codification of forest science in France were closely linked to Provence's time-honored tradition of mobile pastoralism, which formed a major part of the economy. At the beginning of the century, pastoralism also featured prominently in the economies and social traditions of North Africa and southwestern Anatolia until French forest agents implemented ideas and practices for forest management in these areas aimed largely at regulating and marginalizing Mediterranean mobile pastoral traditions. These practices changed not only landscapes but also the social order of these three Mediterranean societies and the nature of French colonial administration. In Nomad's Land Andrea E. Duffy investigates the relationship between Mediterranean mobile pastoralism and nineteenth-century French forestry through case studies in Provence, French colonial Algeria, and Ottoman Anatolia. By restricting the use of shared spaces, foresters helped bring the populations of Provence and Algeria under the control of the state, and French scientific forestry became a medium for state initiatives to sedentarize mobile pastoral groups in Anatolia. Locals responded through petitions, arson, violence, compromise, and adaptation. Duffy shows that French efforts to promote scientific forestry both internally and abroad were intimately tied to empire building and paralleled the solidification of Western narratives condemning the pastoral tradition, leading to sometimes tragic outcomes for both the environment and pastoralists.
Environmental Problems of the Greeks and Romans
| Author | : J. Donald Hughes |
| Publisher | : JHU Press |
| Total Pages | : 321 |
| Release | : 2014-02-15 |
| Genre | : History |
| ISBN | : 1421412128 |
How did ancient societies change the environment and how do their actions continue to affect us today? In this dramatically revised and expanded second edition of the work entitled Pan’s Travail, J. Donald Hughes examines the environmental history of the classical period and argues that the decline of ancient civilizations resulted in part from their exploitation of the natural world. Focusing on Greece and Rome, as well as areas subject to their influences, Hughes offers a detailed look at the impact of humans and their technologies on the ecology of the Mediterranean basin. Evidence of deforestation in ancient Greece, the remains of Roman aqueducts and mines, and paintings on centuries-old pottery that depict agricultural activities document ancient actions that resulted in detrimental consequences to the environment. Hughes compares the ancient world's environmental problems to other persistent social problems and discusses attitudes toward nature expressed in Greek and Latin literature. In addition to extensive revisions based on the latest research, this new edition includes photographs from Hughes's worldwide excursions, a new chapter on warfare and the environment, and an updated bibliography.
The History and Politics of the Bedouin
| Author | : Seraje Assi |
| Publisher | : Routledge |
| Total Pages | : 357 |
| Release | : 2018-04-27 |
| Genre | : Social Science |
| ISBN | : 1351257862 |
This book examines contending visions on nomadism in modern Palestine, with a special focus on the British Mandate period. Extending from the late Ottoman period to the founding of the State of Israel, it highlights both ruptures and continuities with the Ottoman past and the Israeli present, to prove that nomadism was not invented by the British or the Zionists, but is the shared legacy of Ottoman, British, Zionist, Palestinian, and most recently, Israeli attitudes to the Bedouin of Palestine. Drawing on primary sources in Arabic and Hebrew, the book shows how native conceptions of nomadism have been reconstructed by colonial and national elites into new legal taxonomies rooted in modern European theories and praxis. By undertaking a comparative approach, it maintains that the introduction of these taxonomies transformed not only native Palestinian perceptions of nomadism, but perceptions that characterized early Zionist literature. The book breaks away from the Arab/Jewish duality by offering a comparative and relational study of the main forces operating under the Mandate: British colonialism, Labor Zionism, and Arab nationalism. Special attention is paid to the British side, which covers the first three chapters. Each chapter represents a formative stage of British colonial enterprise in Palestine, extending from the late Ottoman down to the postwar and the Mandate periods. A major theme is the nexus of race and ethnography reshaping British perceptions of the Bedouin of Palestine before and during the early phases of the Mandate, and the ways these perceptions guided the administrative division of the country along newly demarcated racial boundaries. Using an interdisciplinary approach that combines new findings in the fields of history, ethnic studies, postcolonial theory, and environmental studies, this book contributes to understandings of the Israel/ Palestine conflict, and current trends of displacement in the Middle East.
Desert Edens
| Author | : Philipp Lehmann |
| Publisher | : Princeton University Press |
| Total Pages | : 256 |
| Release | : 2024-12-17 |
| Genre | : Business & Economics |
| ISBN | : 0691239347 |
How technological advances and colonial fears inspired utopian geoengineering projects during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries From the 1870s to the mid-twentieth century, European explorers, climatologists, colonial officials, and planners were avidly interested in large-scale projects that might actively alter the climate. Uncovering this history, Desert Edens looks at how arid environments and an increasing anxiety about climate in the colonial world shaped this upsurge in ideas about climate engineering. From notions about the transformation of deserts into forests to Nazi plans to influence the climates of war-torn areas, Philipp Lehmann puts the early climate change debate in its environmental, intellectual, and political context, and considers the ways this legacy reverberates in the present climate crisis. Lehmann examines some of the most ambitious climate-engineering projects to emerge in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Confronted with the Sahara in the 1870s, the French developed concepts for a flooding project that would lead to the creation of a man-made Sahara Sea. In the 1920s, German architect Herman Sörgel proposed damming the Mediterranean in order to geoengineer an Afro-European continent called “Atlantropa,” which would fit the needs of European settlers. Nazi designs were formulated to counteract the desertification of Eastern Europe and Central Asia. Despite ideological and technical differences, these projects all incorporated and developed climate change theories and vocabulary. They also combined expressions of an extreme environmental pessimism with a powerful technological optimism that continue to shape the contemporary moment. Focusing on the intellectual roots, intended effects, and impact of early measures to modify the climate, Desert Edens investigates how the technological imagination can be inspired by pressing fears about the environment and civilization.
The Making of a Mediterranean Emirate
| Author | : Ramzi Rouighi |
| Publisher | : University of Pennsylvania Press |
| Total Pages | : 246 |
| Release | : 2011-04-15 |
| Genre | : History |
| ISBN | : 081220462X |
The thirteenth century marks a turning point in the history of the western Mediterranean. The armies of Castile and Aragon won significant and decisive victories over Muslims in Iberia and took over a number of important cities including Cordoba, Seville, Jaen, and Murcia. Chased out of their native cities, a large number of Andalusis migrated to Ifrīqiyā in northern Africa. There, a newly founded Hafsid dynasty (1229-1574) welcomed members of the Andalusi elite and showered them with honors and high positions at court. While historians have tended to conceive of Ifrīqiyā as a region ruled by the Hafsids, Ramzi Rouighi argues in The Making of a Mediterranean Emirate that the Andalusis who joined the Hafsid court supported economic arrangements and political relationships that effectively prevented regional integration from taking place during this period. Rouighi examines an array of documentary, literary, and legal sources to argue that Ifrīqiyā was integrated neither politically nor economically and that, consequently, it was not a region in a meaningful sense. Through a close reading of narrative sources, especially historical chronicles, Rouighi further argues that the emergence in the late fourteenth century of the political ideology of Emirism accounts for the representation of the rule of the Hafsid dynasty over cities as its rule over the whole of Ifrīqiyā. Setting the activities of Andalusis such as the celebrated historian Ibn Khaldūn (1332-1406) in relation to specific political, economic, and intellectual developments in Ifrīqiyā, The Making of a Mediterranean Emirate proposes a counter to the dynastic-centric view of the period that pervades medieval sources and continues to inform most modern generalizations about the Maghrib and the Mediterranean.
