The Unsettled Plain: An Environmental History of the Late Ottoman Frontier Chris Gratien (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2022). Pp. 328. $28.00 paper. ISBN: 9781503631267

Abstract

munities inhabiting those lands as a necessary corollary of political and economic progress. Çiçek’s description of the tribe also posits an “undisputed legitimacy” for those bedouin leaders with the martial strength and community respect to attain the position of sheikh (19). Çiçek grants these individuals, who appear most frequently in imperial archives, a high level of agency: they, rather than their wider communities, are the “partners of the empire” in his account. This claim of elite legitimacy works alongside Çiçek’s reification of the socially constructed division between “pure nomads” who purportedly had no interest in agriculture and “sedentary” agropastoralist bedouin groups. This division between “pure” and “semi-sedentary” groups holds wide provenance among bedouin communities themselves and the anthropological literature associated with them, and many scholars have used it as an explanatory device rather than a social construct and object of analytical criticism. For example, when narrating the failure of an Ottoman project to settle Shammar communities in Mosul in the 1870s, Çiçek adopts the Ottoman official position that the Shammar refused to settle because they were “pure nomads.” This argument precludes further historical inquiry into the internal dynamics of Shammar communities and the political tensions surrounding the land distributions settlement entailed. Çiçek’s monograph is a crucial contribution to a growing body of scholarship on Ottoman political economy outside the empire’s cities and exclusively agricultural realms. His book gestures toward a future horizon of historical research on the political, economic, and social roles of the communities inhabiting the interior regions of the Arabic-speaking Ottoman world.