An Environmental History of the Late Ottoman Frontier

| How did ordinary Ottoman subjects experience the momentous changes that made our modern world? This episode explores that question through the history of the Çukurova region of southern Turkey. As our guest Chris Gratien has argued in a new book entitled The Unsettled Plain: An Environmental History of the Late Ottoman Frontier, Çukurova can be studied as a microcosm of social and environmental change in the late Ottoman Empire. In our conversation, we explore how the approaches of environmental history can offer a fresh perspective on the political history of the Tanzimat period, and we discuss how the history of malaria -- an ancient disease -- sheds light on a modern experience of displacement and dispossession for rural communities in the Ottoman Empire and beyond.