Lecture | Leiden Yemeni Studies Lecture Series
War, Governance, and the Environment in Ottoman Yemen, 1870-1924: Revisiting the History of the Late Ottoman Frontier
- Thomas Kuehn (Simon Fraser University)
- Date
- Monday 27 January 2025
- Time
- Serie
- Leiden Yemeni Studies Lecture Series
- Address
- Online via Zoom (register below)
This talk analyses the role that concepts of “nature” played in the context of Ottoman imperial governance in the Province of Yemen from its establishment in the early 1870s to the end of Ottoman rule in the aftermath of World War I. Thomas Kuehn argues that Ottoman bureaucrats and military officers considered knowledge of Yemen’s natural environment critical for the purpose of disempowering local opponents and of turning the local people into loyal and productive subjects. Historians have demonstrated that the Ottoman frontier experience in parts of Anatolia, geographical Syria, and Hijaz was marked by politics of land reclamation, settlement schemes, and efforts to minimise the influence of local elites and the empire’s British rivals through technopolitical interventions, such as railways, telegraphs, and modern water supply systems. By contrast, Kuehn shows that in Yemen environmental management continued to revolve around the military because the latter remained the Ottomans’ most crucial tool to collect revenue and to retain control of this province.
Whereas in Hijaz and Egypt, the Ottoman and Ottoman Egyptian states of the long nineteenth century tended to dismiss the knowledge of local actors in favor of new, centralising forms of environmental management, policy makers in Yemen and Istanbul mobilised the environmental knowledge of Yemeni Ottoman elites to solidify the Ottoman state presence in this strategically vital part of Southwest Arabia.
Registration
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Register for this lectureThe Leiden Yemeni Studies Lecture Series is supported by the Horizon-2020 Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions project EMStaD YEMEN.
An overview of all events in this series can be found on the series page.
About the speaker
Thomas Kuehn is an Associate Professor in the Department of History at Simon Fraser University. His first book titled Empire, Islam, and Politics of Difference. Ottoman Rule in Yemen, 1849-1919 was published by Brill in 2011. His recent publications include “Nobody is leaving! Ottoman officials, their families, and the struggle over Ottoman imperial sovereignty in Yemen after the Mudros Armistice”, Contemporary Levant 9 (2024): 155–168 and “Managing the hazards of Yemen’s nature: Military violence, governance, and the environment in Ottoman Southwest Arabia, 1872–1914”, Arab Studies Journal XXXII (2024): 38–72. He is completing a monograph titled Ottoman Yemen. A Connected History, 1830-1924.
About the discussant
Michael Christopher Low is Assistant Professor of History and Director of the Middle East Center at the University of Utah. Low is author of Imperial Mecca: Ottoman Arabia and the Indian Ocean Hajj (Columbia University Press, 2020). In 2021, Imperial Mecca received the Middle East Studies Association’s Albert Hourani Book Award. Imperial Mecca has since been translated into Arabic and Turkish. Low is also co-editor of The Subjects of Ottoman International Law (Indiana University Press, 2020). Low is currently working on a new book, Saltwater Kingdoms: Fossil-Fueled Water and Climate Change in Arabia, under contract with University of California Press.