Nature and Empire in Ottoman Egypt

Alan Mikhail is Assistant Professor in the Department of History at Yale University. His articles have appeared in journals such as the International Journal of Middle East Studies, the Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, the Bulletin of the History of Medicine, Akhbar al-Adab and Wijhat Nazar.

• Introduction: an empire by nature; 1. Watering the Earth; 2. The food chain; 3. The framework of empire; 4. In working order; 5. From nature to disease; 6. Another Nile; Conclusion: the imagination and reality of public works; Appendix: citations for cases enumerated in Tables 1 through 4.

Review of the hardback: 'This book adds an important new dimension to the historiography of Ottoman Egypt. The author makes very intelligent use of Ottoman administrative documents and Muslim court records from a variety of Egyptian locales in order to situate this critical region within the new cutting-edge scholarship on the role of the environment and natural resource management in history.' Jane Hathaway, Ohio State University and author of The Arab Lands under Ottoman Rule, 1516–1800