Elizabeth R. Williams is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Massachusetts Lowell.

• Introduction1. Provincial Legibility and Ecologies of Extraction: Agrarian Networks and the Making of Late Ottoman Rural State Space2. "Agriculture from a Book": "Scientific" Agriculture in the Ottoman Eastern Mediterranean3. The Trials and Tribulations of Tractors: From Ottoman Provinces to French Mandate States4. The Politics of Agricultural Expertise and Education: Exerting Rural Influence Under the French Mandate5. Of Mice, Sunn Bugs, Drought, and Taxation: The Pests of Mandate Rural Administration and the Crisis of the 1930sEpilogue

"Transgressing temporal divides and diving into the central but hitherto neglected spaces of the countryside, Elizabeth Williams takes us on a fascinating adventure through technology, infrastructure, and policy. States of Cultivation offers a new lens not simply on the Eastern Mediterranean, but on land itself as the site where politics and ecology are intimately bound."—Sherene Seikaly, University of California, Santa Barbara "Focusing on the development of agronomic expertise, Elizabeth Williams places agrarian transformation at the heart of historical scholarship. States of Cultivation boasts a flowing narrative magnificently documented, a strong yet unforced argument, and a respect for the voices of the region that spoke and wrote on the making of life in agriculture."—Martha Mundy, London School of Economics "States of Cultivation is an essential history of the agricultural technologies that swept the globe in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, trailing promises to remake the countryside for the benefit of nations and empires. Required reading for those of us who seek to understand the origins and perversities of the twentieth-century romance with 'development.'"—Courtney Fullilove, Wesleyan University "Elizabeth R. Williams's States of Cultivation: Imperial Transition and Scientific Agriculture in the Eastern Mediterranean is a deeply researched first monograph that ambitiously stakes out a wider territory than the title conveys.... Arguably, Williams's book is as much a history of administration and finance as it is a history of science and technology. It is at its strongest when it makes the interlinkages between each of those domains explicit, in both the Ottoman and French cases."—Kearby Matthew Chess, H-Sci-Med-Tech "Williams elegantly reconstructs the tale of scientific agriculture as a history of imperial transition. States of Cultivation is an essential book for those interested in global histories of science, technology, agriculture, the environment, and the histories of the transition from the Ottoman to post-Ottoman worlds in the Middle East."—Önder Eren Akgül, Technology and Culture